By David Harsanyi
Monday, June 27, 2016
One my favorite panicky post-Brexit talking points comes
from liberals who feel the need to warn Americans about the hazards of
emotional appeals in a democracy. It goes something like this:
Brexit will be a good case study
for Americans on what happens to your economy when you let policy be dictated
by paranoia and fear.
-Judd Legum 1:41 PM 24 Jun 2016
Yes, because the Left never
uses emotional blackmail or stokes cultural anxiety to dictate policy. Because
the only conceivable reasons Brits might vote to regain sovereignty and free
themselves from a stifling bureaucratic superstate run out of Brussels are
paranoia and fear. For years now, the only reason one can have for disagreeing
with the Left is either irrationality or bigotry.
It’s understandable that the American Left wants to link
the Brexit movement to Trumpism, but it’s a facile comparison. While propelled
by similar economic instincts, the libertarian-ish populism of Boris Johnson,
Nigel Farage, and Daniel Hannan is ideologically coherent in a way the
anti-“elitist” populism of Donald Trump, Mike Huckabee, and Ben Carson will
never be.
But even if we conceded that the two movements are
identical, you don’t have standing to complain about paranoia and fear when
it’s dominated your political message for years. You don’t have to look further
than #Remain proponents whose apocalyptic rhetoric warned that every aspect of
contemporary British life was in mortal danger should #Leave win. David Cameron
claimed that exiting the European Union (EU) could
spur World War III.
You want policy dictated on paranoia and fear? Last week,
while Republicans were making a case for the Fifth and Second Amendments,
Democrats were accusing their fellow Americans of selling weapons to ISIS. As far as I could tell, not one politician
at the congressional sit-in acknowledged that the GOP was offering a good-faith
argument. Instead, Democrats — and I mean every one of them — accused the GOP
of being bought by the omnipotent National Rifle Association. While gun
violence has precipitously dropped over most of our lifetimes — nearly twice as
many people die
on bikes every year than they do by “assault
weapons;” gun homicides are at a 50-year low,
etc. — Democrats would have you believe America is living “The Purge.”
This goes on every day. Conservatives want to take away
your right to vote. They want to ban birth control. Ban mammograms. Control
your bodies. Social conservatives are the reason an Islamic terrorist
slaughters 49 gay Americans. The ones who claim they care about religious
freedom — people who have served and hired gay Americans for years but don’t
want to participate in a same-sex wedding — are accused of trying to institute
a new Jim Crow. Democrats regularly liken social conservatives to the Klan
because they want sex-specific bathrooms for their kids.
If Joe Biden doesn’t like Paul Ryan’s budget — a budget
that would have increased spending to its highest levels ever, incidentally —
he warns an African-American audience that Republicans are “going to put y’all
back in chains.” Why wouldn’t he? There is no blowback for demagoguery. For decades
now, if a conservative mentions entitlement it means they want to push an
elderly woman off a cliff. If Obamacare is replaced, thousands of Americans
will die in the streets. If we don’t sign onto the Democrats’ economic agenda,
we’ll plunge into another depression. If we don’t pass a car bailout, we won’t
have cars anymore. If we shut down the non-essential parts of the federal
government for a few days to haggle over a budget, we are putting American
lives at risk.
If we don’t sign a deal helping the Islamists in Iran
build a nuclear program, it means another war is imminent. If we say “radical
Islam,” we’re creating terrorists.
And, of course, if we don’t pass something to stop global
warming this very second, our children will live in subaquatic dystopia. With
this, environmentalists have stumbled upon the perfect, open-ended
scare-mongering racket. Naturally, you can’t disprove the future. You can only
continually debunk long-forgotten predictions of the past. Not that it stops
anyone from coming up with new terrifying forecasts. There is not a single
crisis on earth — from terrorism to recessions to prostitution to every weather
event — that some liberal hasn’t blamed on climate change.
Now, inherent in phrases like “paranoia and fear,” which
we hear all the time in some form or another, are a host of assumptions about
the world that are meant to circumvent debate. Many Europeans, for example, are
legitimately disturbed by the massive, unregulated importation of people from
lawless terror states, who not only often struggle to assimilate but bring with
them many illiberal ideas. Now, one could argue these fears are unwarranted
because of A, B, and C. Instead, so much coverage and punditry works from the
assumption that the confused bigots who voted to leave the EU made some huge
mistake driven by narrow-minded apprehensions about the world around them.
This is how every debate plays out stateside, as well. No
one is innocent when it comes to manipulating voters with emotion. And no one
includes a lot of Democrats. For
those who see government as the font of all well-being, every political issue
is transformed into a great moral crusade that allows scare tactics as
justifiable. Unless, that is, liberals really believe all their accusations —
which would make them paranoid.
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