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September 15, 2002

Lapse of faith I’m struck by a comment by Demosthenes, who quotes a comment posted to MaxSpeak:
I’ve brought this up a few times in the blogosphere recently but no one seems to get it’s relevance - a picture is worth 1000 words - wish I still had a copy! In this case it’s an old Fred Wright cartoon of cops billyclubbing pickets carrying signs reading “anti-communist union”, with the police saying “we don’t care what kind of Communist you are.”
Demosthenes comments:
No matter how nice a moderate liberal plays, he’s never going to win winger friends by bashing leftists. They’ll just smile, and nod, and either wait for you to join them completely (like Kaus) or tar you as a member of the “loony left” the nanosecond you diverge from them.
I respect a lot of individuals who are well to the right of me, and I have plenty of opinions that depart from left/liberal orthodoxy (such as it it is) but I’m beginning to suspect that, on balance, Demosthenes nails it. [10:30 PM]
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Comments on Lapse of faith:

Andrea Harris ::: (view all by) ::: September 16, 2002, 12:50 PM:

Well, who wants to be friends with Winger anyway? Let's leave trashy late-Eighties metal bands in the dustbin of history where they belong. "She's only seventeen..."

rufus ::: (view all by) ::: September 17, 2002, 06:08 AM:

Demosthenes point assumes that the purpose of "bashing" certain leftists is to court right wingers.

Does anyone actually do that?

To take Gitlin and Barube's recent "left-bashing" articles as an example, I can only assume they are aimed at a) other leftists, in the interest of promoting a debate within the ranks and b) centrist-ish/moderate people who don't already have hardened views on everything.

Courting the right wingers is like going to a Southern Baptist church with the Communist Manifesto. It's just a losing proposition, and I'm pretty sure that everyone knows that.

Perhaps I'm wrong.