Saturday, February 11, 2012

A CLASSIFICATION OF REACTIONARY RHETORIC

I just finished a great book - The rhetoric of reaction : perversity, futility, jeopardy by Albert O. Hirschman - that condenses the main rhetorical devices of conservatives since 1790 into 3 main categories:

Perversity - arguing that the action proposed by liberals will in fact have exactly the opposite of the intended effect. Edmund Burke's remarks on the French Revolution are the best known examples of this tactic but there were many others, including Adam Muller in Germany in 1819:
The history of the French Revolution constitutes a proof, administered continuously over thirty years, that man, acting by himself and without religion, is unable to break any chains that oppress him without sinking in the process into still deeper slavery.(op. cit, p. 14)
Over 160 years later, Charles Murry in his book Losing Ground (1984)  re-used the perversity argument:
We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty and inadvertently built a trap.
Futility - the proposed reform will at best make only superficial changes.

Jeopardy - the proposed reform will endanger other social goods. Today, we have conservatives like Mark Levin claiming that food stamps reduce liberty.

On page 135, Hirschman provides a nice chart that nicely summarizes his book-



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