We like to get nervous. You’ve seen it: two people facing each other, redness on the face, sweat on the forehead, a little saliva on the lips. Yes, I am talking about politics. Yes, we like to get nervous. It’s fine. But when our rhetoric or our debate descends to vulgarity, personal attacks, yelling, abuse or violence with language, we have lost something important. Vulgarity and abusive language are obvious signs of weak and lazy thinking. But more importantly, there is a fundamental immorality in extreme speech. That rhetorical immorality disparages those who have suffered and are suffering actual abuse; and extreme speech robs our world of a crucial level of meaning.

Ideology and politics as entertainment

Ideology has become entertainment. Cable news, radio talk shows, shooter, bloggers – they all have inherent entertainment value. Of course, the successful ones also have substance: something to say, ideas, arguments. But many times the style becomes the message. It is not about ideas; it’s about the insults. Maybe that’s good for online magazines like Ideology Forum on some level; but it is also worrying.

Increasing the volume and temperature of your rhetoric can be great for ratings and ad revenue. There is a wide range of people who have become famous and rich by skillfully exploiting extreme rhetoric. Extremity brings visibility and attracts viewers. Of course, you better be careful not to go from noticeable to noticeable, a change Don Imus made almost overnight. But even that line, once crossed, can become a cross to carry and advertise. “My enemies are after me.” “Those censors are attacking my first amendment rights.”

We participate in a gradual synthesis of news, politics and entertainment. We are participating. In this more democratic media age, we participate by watching, listening, and reading (and paying) extreme speakers. We participate by joining the debate on the Internet and using increasingly extreme rhetoric. But our speech has consequences.

I love politics. I love politics because it matters: for politics, for government, for law, for freedom. I love it for the ideas and the debate. I love it because of the human dramas that constantly unfold in democracy. I love politics and ideology for many reasons, and among them is the exhilarating experience of politics as a sport. We support our parties, our favorite politicians. We continue the horse race. We stay up on election night waiting for the results of the last round of the US Government Championship Series – many are even betting on the outcome, in more ways than one. This is just another sports analogy for life. We follow politics as a sport. I suppose that ideally politics would not descend to sport, but it does.

Perhaps the most important negative consequence of treating politics, ideas, and ideology as sport is that we confuse the means of politics with the ends. Elections and campaigns should be a means to the end of governance. After the elections, good governance should be possible on the basis of a principled debate and compromise on the issues. Instead, the election becomes the permanent end and we sacrifice principles and governance in favor of attacking personalities and politicians. It is not about governance or laws; it’s about winning and losing. And there is always another choice in a couple of years.

The permanent campaign and politics as sport exacerbate the use of extreme speech. It doesn’t matter what you say, as long as you destroy your opponent. Even long after the campaign, we continue to brutally attack each other because governance and engagement are no longer the goal. The objective is to win the next round, the next championship. Our politicians are guilty of this; activists and lobbyists are guilty of this; we are all guilty of this.

Extreme speech weakness

Public debate and rhetorical combat are a long-revered tradition. It is alive and well. Ideology Forum exists to provide a space for the practice of open ideological debate. Don’t misunderstand the purpose of this article – I don’t think we should all get along and compromise our principles for the sake of peace and quiet. People have passionate ideals and causes for good reason. At a basic level, loud and angry rhetoric is better than the silence of apathy.

But there are a variety of weaknesses exposed by high volume, personal attacks, and vulgarity. Mainly, they are not communicative. Yelling and name calling don’t convey meaning. They are just attacks. Vulgarity shows a lack of thought and meaning, an inability to articulate ideas, and basic intellectual laziness. Vulgar attacks only communicate anger, frustration, (bad) judgment, and (self) contempt. They seek to degrade rather than compromise. Such attacks and rhetoric are an admission that you have lost the debate, or that you lack the skills or the will to win rhetorically.

There have been times in our past when name calling was witty. Abraham Lincoln was not above insulting his opponents: “He can compress as many words as possible into the smallest Ides of any man he knows.” Winston Churchill and Oscar Wilde also had a knack for wit and insult that did not degrade the listener simply by listening. But today, too often we resort to calling our opponents ‘Nazi baby killers’ and then we move on as if we had just completed an argument.

There are such a wide variety of common examples of extreme speech weakness that they hardly need to be rehearsed. Then I won’t.

The immorality of extreme speech

But extreme speech is more than weak; It does more than degrade the speaker, the object, and the listener. Extreme discourse, particularly extreme analogies and extreme relativism, actually belittles those who have suffered and are suffering actual abuse; and extreme speech robs our world of a crucial level of meaning. Extreme analogies and extreme relativism are actually fundamentally immoral.

Extreme analogies are a kind of insidious rhetoric that has become practically ubiquitous. The fool’s gold standard of extreme analogies is to call your opponent Hitler. Godwin’s rule of Nazi analogies states that “the longer a discussion takes place on the Internet and the more people involved, the likelihood that someone will be compared to Hitler or the Nazis will get close to one.” In other words, if enough people talk long enough on the Internet, surely someone will start yelling, “Nazi!” These attacks are everywhere. It happens to call to call people ‘communists’. But to claim that your opponents are moving towards fascism and genocide, what an argument! – is so common that we don’t even flinch. This is just another cheap way to yell at your opponent, without involving his ideas or arguments.

But there is something deeply wrong with constantly yelling at Hitler at opponents; and it goes much deeper than immature language. It’s actually immoral to constantly call all your little Eichmann opponents. What about people who have really suffered from the things you pretend to hate so much? Do you hate fascism? Do you hate the abuse of human rights? Hate undemocratic activities? Do you hate genocide and systematic rape and torture? Then take them seriously. Don’t accuse political opponents of such terrible crimes unless they actually commit them. If they commit human rights crimes, be specific. Such accusations should mean something; they should have power; they must work to alleviate the suffering of the abused.

Conversely and perversely, the vulgarity of calling the entire world Nazis actually belittles the suffering of people who have died and continue to die at the hands of despots. If all the people you disagree with are Nazis, being a Nazi is silly; it’s stupid; Has no sense. But it is not and cannot be meaningless. Too many people have starved or worked to death or gassed in concentration camps, killed with machetes, burned alive in churches, or tortured to death in hidden places. Too many people have been raped, tortured and murdered around the world during the 20th and 21st centuries to degrade their lives and deaths by calling their opponent a Nazi in a political debate. We must preserve the meaning and power of speech.

The immorality of extreme relativism is a very similar abuse of the meaning and power of speech. False claims of moral equivalence are deeply immoral. Happily asserting that all morality is relative undermines the position of people who suffer actual abuse of their human rights. In fact, morals and culture may differ depending on the circumstances. But this should not and cannot prevent us from identifying the abuse and condemning it. People know when their human rights are being violated and they do not need “Western” ideals or morals to tell them they have been abused. Similarly, we must be able to distinguish between different forms of abuse, because if all abuses are equivalent, then they are even more trivial.

Unfortunately, examples of false moral equivalence and amoral relativism are terribly common. How often have you read or heard arguments that falsely equated the morality of government surveillance in a democratic state with extrajudicial executions in authoritarian states? When we affirm the moral equivalence of completely different acts, we rob our world of a basic level of meaning.

If we really care about freedom, democracy and human rights, then we must be willing to condemn abuses wherever they occur; and we must be willing to judge, compare and condemn the most terrible abuses more vigorously. If we refuse to condemn any abuse, we ignore some victims in favor of others. If we are unwilling to assess and acknowledge major abuse, we look down on the victims of the worst abuse. If we equate moderate abuses (or heaven forbid non-abuses) with genocide, we directly attack the meaning of language and basic morals.

Extreme analogies and false moral equivalence are deeply immoral forms of expression.

Personal, vulgar, and abusive attacks are weak tools that we don’t need. Extreme analogies and false moral equivalence do far more harm to those who really suffer than we can do to our opponent’s argument. People will be convinced by the power of our ideas, the reality of our experience, and the intelligence and clarity of our rhetoric. We don’t need an extreme speech.