Republican Transcendental Nonsense of “Terror” in 2008

-- By AdamGold? - 12 Feb 2008

Connection between Judicial and Political Nonsense

Cohen argues that useless words, words that cannot pay up in the currency of fact or actual experience, should be eradicated because they do not offer any concrete guidance for understanding the judicial system. It should come as no surprise, then, that the legal community uses such terms, such as “due process” or “constructive,” in ways which cannot be substantiated directly by real life facts. This is the case because the courts are the vehicles which interpret laws created and enforced by a class of people who are the most egregious abusers of nonsensical language: politicians. Thus, if the source of law is rampantly using transcendental nonsense, why should the courts be any different?

• This was a bad premise that set up a category error at the heart of your argument. Politics, as Arnold says, uses nonsense as its ordinary form of communication, for practical reasons subject to scientific investigation and validation. To say that lawyers working to make justice on behalf of organizations headed by politicians (that is to say, all effective and sustainable organizations) should use nonsense to make law because the politicians use nonsense to cover the process of making policy is like saying that the cooks should make crappy food or the scientists make inaccurate science for the same reason. Nonsense is necessary to politics, but not to cooking, conducting science, or making justice. Because you elide that distinction, your argument goes wrong from this point on.

Terror and the Republican Candidates for 2008

In the run up to the Republican National Convention in 2008, the word “terror” has been abstractly used by Republican nominees during speeches, debates and campaign commercials. However, no such occasion of its use deserves more scrutiny than Mitt Romney’s bow out speech on February 7th, 2008 in which he stated he must suspend his campaign because he, “Simply cannot let (his) campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.” It would not be correct to say that terrorists represent some aloof Goldstein-like threat as in "1984". There are real people in the world who are motivated to destroy the US with violence and threats to intimidate or coerce for political ends. The central issue thus becomes: does Romney’s statement, though intuitively insane, have a real-life factual basis? I will examine three possible logical underpinnings of this statement to decide.

• This sets up the wild goose chase. Romney's statement, as you conclude, is nonsense. Anything said getting out of a campaign is nonsense, because its purpose is a fundamental modification of the creed that holds the organization together. The nonsense may be used to disassemble the organization, or to merge it into another, but because it is a creed it will be nonsense, and because it is a creed changing quickly, its nonsense will be apparent. This has nothing to do with logic. Proving it isn't logical is like proving that the pungent isn't more ugly than the tardy. The right questions to ask about Mr. Romney's speech, as with any act of persuasion, are: what was he trying to achieve, and did what he said help him to achieve it? Neither of these questions is in any way answered by anything the rest of this essay says.

I. If a Democrat is elected in 2008, the Terrorists will win.

Republican candidates largely confuse battling terrorism with battling terrorism through means established under the Bush administration. Clinton and Obama represent different approaches to the status quo, including emphasizing soft power and replacing wire taps with stronger social spending to help subvert unrest by increasing education and social welfare. Rather than point to specific policies beyond “stay the course” to counter these different approaches, Republican candidates seem to counter the Democrats’ calls for new policies with the erroneous stereotype that the Republican Party is a stronger wartime party. However, the history of American wars in the 20th century dictates otherwise. Both WWI and WWII were fought successfully under Democrats. The Korean War was fought relatively unsuccessfully under a Democrat until a Republican was elected, not because he was a Republican, but because he was a war hero and ostensibly knew more about how to handle a nation’s military. The Vietnam War was fought equally poorly under both parties’ leadership. The first Gulf War was fought successfully under Republican leadership while the second Gulf War was, arguably, fought unsuccessfully under Republican leadership. Thus, there is no real life correlation with the Republicans as a strong wartime party or by correlation, the democrats as a weak war time party

• When you found yourself making this argument, you should have been able to detect that you were arguing against a straw man. Real arguments engage common understandings but arrive at different conclusions--there is something important to be said on both sides. (In this case, one might, for example, have a real argument over how the Republican Party managed to wrest from the Democrats the mantle of "strong on defense and good at winning wars.") When, in any persuasive writing, you construct the imagined argument counter to your own, you fail the test of basic integrity if the argument you construct is unreal in this sense. Here you have set up some baseless arguments which will be attributed to "Republicans" or Romney, over which you will triumph without actual engagement, and those triumphs will add up to proof that Romney was talking nonsense. But the arguments in which you win are won against men of straw, and your conclusion is correct not because your battles proved it, but for reasons unrelated to your proof about which we knew at starting: It was wrong to be trying to "prove" a politician's nonsensicality in the first place.

II. Terror is unrelated and external to US Policies

The Republicans want another 4 years to continue to protect the country from external enemies motivated to kill us because they hate our goodness. However, basic analysis would instruct the Republicans that the very policies they pronounce as vital for national safety are those that are most hazardous to national safety. In the wake of 9/11, Bin Laden explained that the US presence in Saudi Arabia, and the Middle East generally, as well as oppressive economic imperialism were motivating factors for bringing down the Towers. It has been 8 years and the US has only increased its global military presence, especially in Iraq. Further, the US still fully embraces the Davos agenda which continues to neglect third world debt forgiveness, currency flight, unemployment, and other dire economic issues around the world that had originally angered Bin laden. In TV debates Republican candidates continually diminish the importance of reevaluating policies in favor of isolating the US from consequential global repercussions of domestic policies. Thus, it does not follow that the Republicans can continue the same “successful” policies to defend the US from an external threat through 2012.

III. Reublican Party Leadership is More Important than Individual Leadership

Romney’s statement logically presumes that having a Republican in the White House, even his despised rival John McCain? , would be a better choice than Clinton or Obama. This is premised on the flawed idea that the Republican Party has some sort of power greater than the individuals who comprise it.

In the US system, the party does not dominate politics at the executive level to the extent that parties in parliamentary systems do, despite what the framers may or may not have intended. The US did not persevere during WWII because a Democrat was in office; it persevered, as Arnold Porter would agree, because FDR was a skilled leader. Similarly, the extenuating circumstances in Iraq right now surely cannot be blamed for poor Republican leadership. Rather, it can and should be blamed on poor strategic planning by the top executives.

The most important aspect for an entity in crisis is great leadership at the top. For example, many analysts attribute JPMorgan’s relative success at piloting through the recent sub prime meltdown to the strong leadership of CEO Jamie Dimon as compared to the weak leadership of Charles Prince of Citigroup or James Cayne of Bear Sterns who were unable to prevent major losses or losing their jobs. Romney would have been able to base his statement in real life facts if he referenced Clinton’s vote to invade Iraq to demonstrate her poor judgment or Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience to demonstrate how he would be in over his head in an international crisis. However, his failure to acknowledge the importance of individual leadership, either in reference to the poor skills of Clinton or Obama or the strong skills of McCain? or Huckabee, demonstrates his use of meaningless nonsense in issuing his statement.

In conclusion, Romney is speaking nonsense.

• It was your responsibility to find, on editing your outline and considering the logical relation of the parts to one another, the basic flaw in the design. You should also, when you got into the execution of the design and found yourself disembowelling men of straw rather than confronting real arguments, have reconsidered the overall approach that put you in the pit against unreal opposition. Either by editing top-down at the outline phase or bottom-up in the process of drafting, you should have seen the problems. I think that correcting them would probably have modified the paper fundamentally: you were doing the equivalent of hammering at a wrench's job by employing Cohen in an Arnold situation, it seems to me.