In tracing the historical development of Rick Santorum's "dangerous cult of first principles," religion scholar Molly Worthen has written for the NY Times one of the finest journalistic essays I have read in some time.
Santorum’s positions are perfectly logical if you accept his founding presuppositions — but, in his view, those presuppositions are not open to question. The genius of this emphasis on foundational assumptions is that if you can dismiss your opponent’s first principles, if you can accuse him of denying humanity’s "natural purpose," you can claim to win the debate without ever considering the content of his argument.
This tactic destroys the possibility for real political dialogue, since one need only engage with those who share one’s own presuppositions.
And Santorum, of course, is scarcely alone on the right in this comfortable conceit. For it is the above train of thought, or style of thinking, that has progressively radicalized the radical right to its present condition of chronic intolerance and, to its mind, of doctrinal infallibility.
Hence Sen. Jim DeMint, yesterday, at CPAC: "[C]ompromise works well in this world when you have shared goals. We don't have shared goals with the Democrats." Hence Mitch McConnell's reductionist politics of one transcendent, eliminationist objective and that one objective only. Hence eight GOP presidential candidates raising their hands in ideological affirmation of any compromise on taxes, no matter how favorable to their side, as unacceptably wicked. Hence a GOP House whose strategic "presuppositions" of Obamian diabolism are almost laughably presuppose-able.
The practical effect of all this, it seems to me, is that the radical right has willfully, even enthusiastically placed itself outside of America's pluralistic arena. It is now the right as the true Other, so to speak; it is the right as the fifth columnist, the fellow traveler, the podium-pounding dogmatist before an essentially pragmatic electorate, the awkward revolutionary among a decidedly unrevolutionary people, the hyper-uberconservative within a marginally, at best, center-right nation.
In sum and in short, by unveiling themselves as unserious players in a profoundly serious game, radical rightists should no longer be taken seriously; thus my suggestion yesterday that Sen. DeMint's wish be wholeheartedly granted -- that, in 2013, all centrist and center-left attempts at compromise with whatever remains of the radical right's congressional power structure be terminated.
Students of Herbert Marcuse's political philosophy will perhaps recognize in this suggestion a variation on his mid-1960s "Critique of Pure Tolerance," which argued, to put it economically, that far too many lunatics were permitted by the modern media an outsized voice. To give you just a taste of Marcuse Unbound, he wrote, for example, of "The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda." Fox News, anyone? A GOP news conference? CNN's or MSNBC's hosting of, and serious engagement with, the lunatic ravings of, say, a Joe Walsh? (And Marcuse thought the lunatics of his era were off the wall. One can easily see what four or five additional decades of the media's "systematic moronization" of an already dumbed-down electorate have wrought.)
Oh my, I seem to going all New-Leftie here, and I don't mean to. Because my point, my argument, is essentially a mainstream one: Next year, any compromise with, and any tolerance of, the radical right should be mercifully euthanized.