The gang at Crooked Timber sink their teeth into the same Randy Barnett column ("Left Living a Lie?") that I did, and it is beautiful. (Randy Barnett has an update here, which is hard to summarize; I think he wants to maintain a reputation as a reasonable righty without actually admitting that he was wrong about anything.)

- Kieran Healy:

Eugene (Volokh) attacks a Slate column which argues that conservatives in general — Ann Coulter, right-wing intellectuals, the White House, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all — are a monolithic unit differentiated only by their willingness to say what they really believe... Eugene is properly outraged that someone would be so stupid or spiteful as to lump responsible conservatives like him in with Ann Coulter. He persuasively argues that when someone does this “it’s hard to give much credit to the rest of his moral — or logical — judgment.” Too true, Eugene. You should send Randy an email with a link to your blog or something — he’d really benefit from reading it.

(Demolishing lame essays that ask "Why is the Left Old and Busted While The Right is Fresh New Hotness?" are a Kieran specialty. He's got two my favorite blog-related quotes here:

Daniel says his story is “developing”. I will stay tuned for further installments, which I imagine will include such pressing questions as, “Why are Conservatives More Fun than Liberals?”, “Why does the Left Score Lower on IQ Tests than the Right?”, and “When did the Left Stop Beating its Wife?”

and here:

Coming up soon, a study that attempts to explain why so many of the closets I open are full of my clothes.)

- Henry Farrell:

Big Dumb Generalizations like Barnett’s have two dead give-aways. First of all, they talk in grand terms about the Left (or the Right) as if it were some sort of groupthink monolith, where all speak for one, and one speaks for all. This rhetorical trick allows them to take some fringe notion advanced by an Indymedia crackpot as incontrovertible evidence that everyone to the left of Barry Goldwater is living on Pluto. Second, as Kieran makes clear, their tendentious generalizations are usually reversible so that it’s trivially easy to swap around the “good” Right and the “bad” Left. For example, a leftie could just as easily write an agitprop article about how “the Right” was living in a dream world in which the administration hadn’t made false claims about Iraq’s nukes and al Qaeda links, Bush had won a majority of the popular vote, John Lott had real figures to prove that more guns equal less violence, &c &c.

The point isn’t that rightwingers do this more than leftwingers; the blame falls pretty evenly on both sides. Nor is it that myths shouldn’t be deflated. It’s that tendentious generalizations about either “the Left” or “the Right” as collectivities of the brainwashed, labouring under false consciousness, are themselves harmful mythologies. They’re precisely a means to avoid confronting the arguments of the other side, so that you don’t have to acknowledge that your intellectual antagonists may sometimes have good points.

Henry and I are on a similar wavelength. For what it's worth, here's an email that I sent to Randy Barnett:

Mr. Barnett,

I just posted something about your essay, "Left Living a Lie?" on my blog. I personally am on the liberal side of the spectrum, and as you might imagine, I didn't think much of it.

http://www.tedbarlow.blogspot.com/2003_07_20_tedbarlow_archive.html#105906774936366921

I'm sure that you could imagine a similar essay written by, say, Eric Alterman. Alterman might start with the premise that conservatives live in a socially constructed world. He might list some beliefs that he attributes to conservatives but personally believes are incorrect.

For example, he might write, "Bill Clinton's administration was more corrupt than Ronald Reagan's administration. Ronald Reagan proved that supply-side economics work; after he cut taxes, revenues doubled. The Bush administration doesn't need to explain how CIA analyst Valerie Plame had her cover blown by senior administration officials. We should be spending billions on missile defense as an anti-terrorist strategy. Joe McCarthy was a decent and effective anti-Communist."

You might agree with some of these propositions, and think some are very unfair. But the point is not to be fair, or even accurate; the point is to show a cartoon version of conservatism that liberals could feel superior to. Alterman wouldn't bother to argue with these supposed conservative propostions; he'd just assert that they are lies. He could go on to speculate about how conservatives are deluded liars, just as you did. It wouldn't be especially illuminating, and I can't imagine that it would change your beliefs in the slightest. But I'm sure that he'd get a lot of appreciative emails from liberals who love to have their beliefs affirmed.

Ann Coulter's success shows that there's a market for writers who show contempt for their political opponents. But they do very little to advance and elevate political discourse. I wish that you would aim a little higher.

Sincerely,

Ted Barlow

You may have heard of Paul Kelly Tripplehorn Jr., the newly-famous ex-aide to Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. He was fired for emailing an obnoxious, poorly spelled, expletive-laden rant to his ex-girlfriend.

Tripplehorn's e-mail, titled "you suck," featured such literary gems as: "I was planning on ruining your career by making phone calls to all of my parents [sic] friends and have you blackballed from the workplace as well as every prestigous [sic] law school in the country, but then (lucky for you) I decided not to do that because you are a sad sad person and I will just let your life self destruct right before my eyes. . . . I am sorry, I don't care how big of [a] sadistic [expletive] crush you have on me but people like me simple [sic] don't date people like you."

His new fanpage, Paul Kelly Tripplehorn, Jr. is Better Than You!!!!!!, is a one-stop Paul Kelly Tripplehorn, Jr. wonderland. It's got the "you suck" email in its entirety, a Top Ten list, a guestbook, links...

Just a few points. (I swear, I can quit any time...):

- If I could wipe one meme out of lefty blogs and media, it would be this: "The mission that killed Saddam's sons was a failure because it killed them instead of capturing them." In a perfect world, we would have captured these guys alive, and it would have been a major intelligence coup, and I would be living large off of the $30 million reward I got from the Nigerian heir who just emailed me.

In the real world, we're losing one or more soldiers in Iraq every day. One of the most important ways of keeping the body count down is to avoid unnecessary risks. If a group of our soldiers are surrounding a house with Saddam's sons inside, they couldn't confidently know how many people are inside, what arms they have, if the place is booby-trapped, etc. I see no reason to assume that they'd let themselves be captured.

Invading a house full of armed killers and trying to take them alive is insanely dangerous. The commanders made the choice to reduce the threat to their troops by killing the enemy, and I see no reason to second-guess them.

- This essay, "Left Living a Lie?" by Randy Barnett, is one of the most useless things I've read in weeks.

It's about how the left has "socially constructed" a reality. Mr. Barnett can tell this because, unlike the right, the left believes things that he doesn't agree with. Barnett has prepared a long string of statements that he's sure represent the thinking of the 100-150 million Americans who represent the "left". Some are fair, some are strawmen, some are fringe positions, and some are just nuts. (I know a lot of people on the left, and I don't know a single one who thinks "the 'homeless' problem immediately vanished when Clinton took office". I don't know anyone who thinks Cuba is a better place than the U.S. I don't know anyone who thinks Alger Hiss was innocent. Etc., etc., etc.)

He doesn't deign to argue with these positions. Instead, his argument proceeds from the proposition that "Given that these positions are all lies, what does it say about the people who believe them?" Left-wing positions, you see, are not honest differences of opinion, and they're not matters of interpretation. They're lies. (Ironically, he writes this whole essay in defense of the truthfulness of Bush's State of the Union speech. After some frantic parsing from the President's defenders about what the word "lie" means, it seems that Mr. Barnett has an answer: A lie is what a liberal says.)

With unblemished confidence in his premises, Mr. Barnett logically comes to the conclusion that we're all insane, and wonders about the toll that living these lies must have on us lefties.

How can intelligent people sustain these false beliefs seemingly indefinitely? This must take some toll on them inside. But what exactly is the price they pay internally or emotionally for living in an artificially constructed reality? Perhaps it is actually easier, rather than more difficult, to live in a world of facts that reinforce one’s predilections.

In my experience, people who hate liberals should avoid writing essays about "what liberals think"; likewise with conservatives. They always say more about the person writing them than the intended target. At their best, they are spectacularly unconvincing. (I can't imagine that Mr. Barnett would be enlightened by a list of "conservative beliefs" prepared by, say, Hesiod.) At their worst (see above), they're Coulterish exercises in self-deception.

If you want to argue with cartoons, stay home and yell at SpongeBob.

- Dwight Merideth has two sterling posts (here and here) about the conservative belief that can control the deficit without raising taxes if we just cut out frivolous spending on pork-barrel projects. It can't be done. Pork-barrel spending absolutely should be cut. But the deficit is larger than the sum of all non-military discretionary spending. If the federal government did nothing but fund the military, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt, we'd still be in deficit. (That's obviously assuming that all discretionary spending has no effect on revenues, which is a little silly.)

- Roy Edroso's alicublog is often unfair, but always hilarious. Check it out.

- Mark Kleiman is the place to go for updates about the Valerie Plame case. (If you're conservative and have never heard of Valerie Plame, don't worry. In your socially constructed world, nothing happened.)

- Sidenote: Greg Beato has a brilliant little post:

Parting is such sweet sorrow that Andrew Sullivan can't bear to do it. Today he publishes a letter from a reader who imagines how the NY Times would have played the deaths of Qusay and Uday were the dreaded Howell Raines still at the helm...

When, I ask, will we finally be free from the bias inflicted by make-believe liberal elites?

And Sven has a brilliant follow-up comment:

That's funny, because I just finished reading the imaginary Times story about the emerging Valerie Plame scandal.