By: Richard T. Hill
The Tea Parties phenomenon began with the Ron Paul Campaign For Liberty movement. It was a grass roots as is it gets, with the help of the internet and social networking sites. The Paul Campaign is characterized by a diverse convergence of ideologies under the umbrella of what they believe to be the most important and endangered national treasure, Freedom. Since the 2008 primaries, we have seen the continued resistance to spiraling debt, creeping taxation and government control in the form of Tea Parties. The media did their best to ignore these and the entire Ron Paul movement before the general election. Once Obama won, however, these folks are now the new hitlers. Anyone who dares believe the country would fare better with less debt, taxation and government meddling is now a "tea bagger". And anyone who opposes the Obama administration's plans is a racist. In logic, this is called an Ad Hominem fallacy.
An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. For example:
Bill: "I believe that abortion is morally wrong."
Dave: "Of course you would say that, you're a priest."
Bill: "What about the arguments I gave to support my position?"
Dave: "Those don't count. Like I said, you're a priest, so you have to say that abortion is wrong. You are just a lackey to the Pope, so I can't believe what you say."
Stuffing your fingers in your ears does not mean you win the argument. When Bush and his supporters tried this while he took a crap on the Constitution, all the while calling opponents "traitors" and "unpatriotic", it was still a fallacy. That's the cool thing about logic is that it applies to both sides of an argument, or at least it is supposed to apply unless you're watching Bill O'Rielly or Rachel Maddow.
A great side dish to Ad Hominem is Reductio Ad Absurdum. It is a logical rebuttal that takes a proposition to its logical extremes and examines the veracity of the conclusions the proposition implies in those extremes. Reductio ad absurdum is a mode of argumentation that seeks to establish a contention by deriving an absurdity from its denial, thus arguing that a thesis must be accepted because its rejection would be untenable. "If there were no government regulations, corporations would stuff us into trains and cart us off to labor camps!" This is a favorite of Limbaugh and Glen Beck, two so-called conservatives who did their best to torpedo the Liberty movement.
It's cousin is the "Straw Man". To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position. For example:
Person A: We should liberalize the laws on beer.
Person B: No, any society with unrestricted access to intoxicants loses its work ethic and goes only for immediate gratification.
Granted, will there be a small percentage of people who show up at these protests with signs misspelled? Sure. Will there be people who oppose "socialist health care" but are Medicare recipients? Sure. It's called an IQ bell curve because it has two ends. Are there some people attending who voted against Obama because he's black? Yes. Is that any different from those people who voted for him BECAUSE he is black? No, by definition, it is still racist. Some Bubba's with a Confederate flag on their pickup who have ethnic pride because of their European descent and some Black Panthers wielding billy clubs on election day who advocate ethnocentric education of African-American children are both racist. They are racist by the fact alone of viewing life through a lens of ethnicity. But rarely is the distinction made between having love for your own race and having hatred of others'.
So, in closing, it is just too easy to fall into name calling and logical fallacy rather than actually engage the ideas of an argument. I leave you with the wise words of Sly and The Family Stone.
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