Via Atrios…  I’m going to be like a damn broken record for the next couple of years telling people that their gay and lesbian neighbors have been seeing all this for decades already.  I just know it …

I used to have an idea of what a "good faith debate" was; that was in 1999. My general feeling now is that a liberal who says "fuck" a lot is one who got mugged by a conservative who pretended to be interested in a "good faith debate."

Now you know why this blog contains a lot of cursing.

I am going to insist here upon the grouchy perspective: I do not believe that there is any such thing as a "conservative intellectual," never mind one who is "thoughtful" or "sane." I contend that "conservatism" in its 21st century incarnation is nothing more or less than a particularly ill-conceived social formation based upon pernicious doxa. Or to be blunt, it is stupid identity politics. Sound unfair? Well then. To be a conservative nowadays and not be Cast Forth from the Tribe, you need to believe:

1. Anthropogenic climate change is a Lie.
2. The "Main Stream Media" has a partisan bias in favor of Democrats.
3. The invasion of Iraq was based on an honest appraisal of the evidence.
4. Torture is acceptable, and also, we do not torture.

I could go on, but these will do to make the point. To be a conservative in the 21st century American sense, you need to believe things that are not true, and you need to tie yourself into knots to pretend otherwise.

You could go on?  Oh…get me started…  How about:

1. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.
2. The average homosexual relationship only lasts a few days.
3. The average homosexual has thousands of sexual partners in a lifetime.
4. Homosexuality is a mental illness.  The APA only removed it from the list of mental illnesses because of protests by militant homosexuals.
5. Homosexuals have more money then everyone else.
6. Gay Liberation caused AIDS.
7. The Nazis were all homosexuals.
8. So were the communists.
9. No society that tolerated homosexuality ever lasted very long.  Homosexuality caused the fall of Rome.
10. No society has ever allowed same sex marriage.
11. Same sex marriage will cause heterosexuals to stop getting married.
12. If same sex marriage is legalized, churches will be forced to marry homosexuals.
13. If same sex marriage is legalized, people will be jailed for speaking out against homosexuality.
14. If same sex marriage is legalized, the human race will die out.
15. If same sex marriage is legalized, homosexuals will be allowed to recruit children in kindergarten.
16. All homosexuals are pedophiles.
17. Homosexuality is the result of being molested as a child.  All homosexuals were once molested.
18. Homosexuality is the result of poor parenting.
19. Male homosexuality is the result of failure to bond with the father.
20. Lesbianism is the result of failure to bond with the father.
21. Poor Fathering is the cause of all homosexuality.
22. No…wait…it’s overbearing mothers.
23. No…it’s godlessness…

…and so on.  Get me started.  And here’s the thing…It doesn’t matter that none of this is true.  The point is, this is their Belief.  Beliefs don’t have to be true.  Accepting the Belief identifies you as being part of their tribe.  That’s what’s important.  Not that the Belief is true, but that you are either in the tribe, or an outsider.  To put it into gang terminology, these are their colors.  Wearing them identifies you as a member of the gang.

This is why rational discussion with these people is impossible.  It’s not about what is true and what isn’t.  It’s about defending the tribe against outsiders.  We in the reality based community are always wrong, because we are outsiders.  Their colors have to be stronger then our colors, because the most important thing on earth isn’t what is true and what is not…the most important thing on earth is defending the tribe against outsiders.

But when true and false stop being your guide to right and wrong, then you just walk eyes wide open into a pit.  Why did the bottom fall out of the economy all of a sudden?  Why did the splendid little war in Iraq that was only supposed to take a few days drag on and on and on and kill thousands?  Facts, as it so happens, matter more then Belief after all.  And came election day 2008, a lot of people were looking at their 401k quarterly reports, and seeing possibly for the first time, what kind of world you get when people think Belief is more important then facts, and decided it was time to kick the bums out.  Facts matter.

So while I quite respect Hilzoy, I think she is dangerously mistaking the nature of movement conservatism. To go back a bit to the Tim Burke post she cites:

But I think we can all make things just ever so slightly better, make the air less poisonous, by pushing to the margins of our consciousness the crazy, bad, gutter-dwelling, two-faced, tendentious high-school debator kinds of voices out there in the public sphere, including and especially in blogs. Let them stew in their own juices, without the dignity of a reply, now that their pipelines to people with real political power have been significantly cut.

Tempting, but absolutely wrong. In the 1990s this was a fashionable attitude towards the crazy anti-Clintonoids — against whom the best and the brightest on the left failed to mobilize. This failure occurred because Clinton was, well, not really very far to the left, so why defend him? But it was also because it was assumed that Clinton could take care of himself. Which he could. But what happened underneath…? Well, the foundations were laid for the Bush administration, that’s what. The media in particular had their own institutional biases manipulated, with almost no pushback from liberals, who should have known better, but let themselves by and large get rolled. Where did the 21st century wingnuts come from? The 1990s. The case rests. And then throws up.

It seems to me that there is a powerful, but foolish, desire on the part of certain liberals, especially academic liberals, to want to engage in a nice, friendly, open debate with "conservatives." This is an error. You will always lose a game you do not realize you are playing.

Bingo.  They are not about debating anything…they’re on a mission from God.  They’re fighting a culture war where right and wrong are measured in terms of what is good for the party.  It’s way past time to call this for what it is, and fight it for what it is.  Assuming good faith only allows the other side to keep pretending they’re something they aren’t.  What we are up against are theocrats and other sorts of totalitarians who think the "radical individualism" of the American Dream must be defeated by any means necessary.  We can all just stop pretending now, that the divisiveness of the past few decades is about two different visions of America…one liberal, one conservative.  It isn’t.  We are fighting an enemy as old as the first tyrants, and just as bereft of scruples.  At rock bottom, these people are thieves, who want to steal everything precious from our lives, not so much to fatten their own, as to make sure we never feel the joy of life more then they ever could.