Choosing the Terrain

Republican...personalities, for a lack of a better word, have gotten extremely good at setting the parameters of the debate before their opponents (i.e. us) even show up. By the time the debate begins, we are already at a huge disadvantage--we spend the whole time just trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Unbeknownst to their opponents, they have decided to play a decidedly different game than the traditional form of debate that their opponents (i.e. us) think they are getting into. Instead of debating facts, they are debating opinion. Instead of constructing arguments out of logic, they construct them with emotion. Emotion, being more primal than logic, catchs their opponents (i.e. us) wide open and unprotected, cutting us off at the knees. It is the debate equivalent of bringing a baseball bat to a chess match.

Think about how the media has been reduced to a tawdry he said/she said pseudo-parity. Facts are no longer the focus of the story: what is important is how everyone feels about it. And if they are shouting their opinion louder than we are, they win. Nowadays liberal or conservative isn't about what your beliefs happen to be; all that matters is whether or not you like Bush. And if you don't like Bush, then any facts you may have don't matter, because facts only matter as a way to express and defend one's opinion. The very idea of opinions deduced from fact is anathema. Any attempts to break this narrative are met with the metaphorical baseball bat to the head.

And here's the REALLY shitty part: we can't bring to bear any baseball bat of our own. One of, perhaps THE fundamental tenet of our political beliefs is the importance and primacy of fact. Once we match dirty trick with dirty trick, we have already lost. Remember, we are the reality-based community. If we give that up, how are we different than them? We will have become Eastasia to their Oceania. This isn't a fair fight; and it wasn't designed to ever be one.

If we ever want to get America back, we need to disarm the right-wing. They can only wield that bat because the audience, AMerica, has been carefully conditioned to think that bats are okay in a chess game. It is a carefully maintained illusion, and we need to break it. Instead of sitting there and moving our chess pieces about as they smack us around, we need to call them on it. We need to start asking, "What the hell is a baseball bat doing in a chess game?" "What does my personal opinion of Dick Cheney have to do with the fact, the fact that he shot a man in the face?" Remember, the true battleground here is in the minds of the viewers: they can smack us around all they want, but if the American people stop thinking that that is fair, they will lose.