Me.

Y'know. This is a good point.

This is a pretty intense crystallization of an issue that American and European leftists have been troubled by for a long time, that some of the constituencies most afflicted by or excluded from capitalist economies are also the most reactionary and in some cases, the most inclined to have strongly felt racial biases.

It’s schadenfreudey fun to read the ongoing psychotic meltdowns at various far-right sites like the Corner, I agree. But there’s little need to take the really bad-faith conservatives seriously now. For the last eight years, we’ve had to take them somewhat seriously because they had access to political power. You had to listen to the hack complaints about academia from endlessly manipulative writers because it was perfectly plausible that whatever axe they were grinding was going to end up as a priority agenda item coming out of Margaret Spelling’s office or get incorporated into legislation by right-wing state legislators. You had to listen to and reply to even the most laughably incoherent, goalpost-moving, anti-reality-based neoconservative writer talking about Iraq or terrorism because there was an even-money chance that you were hearing actual sentiments going back and forth between Dick Cheney’s office and the Pentagon. You had to answer back to Jonah Goldberg not just because making that answer was arguably our responsibility as academics, but also because left alone, some of the aggressively bad-faith caricatures he and others served up had a reasonable chance to gain even further strength through incorporation into federal policy.

There are plenty of thoughtful, good-faith conservatives who need to be taken seriously. And the actual conservatism of many communities and constituencies (in Appalachia and elsewhere) remains, as always, a social fact that it would be perilous to ignore or dismiss.

But I think we can all make things just ever so slightly better, make the air less poisonous, by pushing to the margins of our consciousness the crazy, bad, gutter-dwelling, two-faced, tendentious high-school debator kinds of voices out there in the public sphere, including and especially in blogs. Let them stew in their own juices, without the dignity of a reply, now that their pipelines to people with real political power have been significantly cut.

Hilzoy adds:

Until last Tuesday, I felt I had to take arguments made at, say, The Corner somewhat seriously. They were, after all, arguments that were likely to be taken seriously by people in charge of our government, and by some voters. Starting now, though, that changes. I will write about those arguments if they seem to be gaining broader currency, and I can imagine writing a thoughtful post on, say, what's gone wrong with the conservative movement in which I might quote them. I will also keep reading them, just because I think it's a good idea to know what other people are saying. But I will not feel any general need to point out when they are wrong. They have no more power. Some of them have gone so far over the edge that they have lost any credibility they might ever have had. I wish them well, but I will not comment on them unless I see some particular reason to do so. I now have the luxury of debating only thoughtful, sane conservatives who argue in good faith, and I intend to enjoy it.

This is something I must keep in mind. I don't know how well I'll do, but now that certain views are not directing public policy to the same degree they used to, attempting to fight them is not the same crusade against institutionalized irrationality and anti-intellectualism.

The danger in this is obviously that progressives might become complacent. This election has taught us that there is nothing so absurd that you can write it off as too small to be a threat (flag pins what-now?).

I guess the compromise would be to merely drop in on the irrational doomsayers, conspiracy theorists, and wannabe-prognosticators crying out against the godless liberal Illuminati out to destroy families with tyrannical European ideas. Drop in on them. Remind myself they exist outside of The Onion. Then go back to the land of reason. Progressives can't take too much of a break, but it's important to remember that there are other tasks to complete and battles to fight.

We can't waste time arguing reason with the irrational, presenting evidence to anti-academics, or preaching civil rights to values voters who only value people "like them." They're not going to be convinced. We speak different languages. Reason can't fight faith, evidence can't fight anti-intellectualism, and civil rights don't always matter to those who've got them. Accept it.

So let's spend our time where it'll do some good. We've got a new President-Elect who needs to be held accountable to his stated intentions. We've got a Democratic majority in the legislature that needs to grow a pair and hopefully will, now that the balance of power has changed. And we've got more and more people who are realizing that "us" and "them" were not who they seemed at first blush.

So let's do something. Let the wingnuts throw temper tantrums because the grownups are talking to each other instead of giving them attention. Consider this their time-out.

Edit 1:Added as an afterthought: link to a transcript in case I start rambling about random crap and people want to know what the heck I'm talking about.

Edit 2: This reply got so long that I'm dividing it up under headers just to ensure myself that it's organized coherently. Don't mind me, I'll just be over here failing to repress my anal retentiveness....

Point the First: Palin's Job

I think Palin did a good job of bolstering her own image after the disastrous interviews with Katie Couric, but she didn't do too much for McCain. McCain's big sticking point right now (with people scared sh*tless about the economy) is to make Obama seem risky, and she didn't help her ticket on that one. She was too busy saving her own backside and her own credibility. But, despite not helping her ticket with its main task, she did salvage some of her credibility, and that'll be good for improving the morale of Republicans.

I think that was her real job here, not earning any new converts. She needed to remind McCain's supporters why, at first blush, they liked her so much.

Point the Second: Biden's Job

Biden wasn't perfectly on topic with each question (which saddened me as a debater myself), but I felt he did better about sticking to issues than Palin did. He brought it around to concrete and specific references to the Constitution and various bills. However, judging by the meter at the bottom of the screen from CNN's undecided voter focus group, they didn't like him talking about the specifics of people's voting records. Biden didn't do a good job of convincing people they should care about which bills are what, and I was hoping that he'd be able to hammer that in much better than he did.

What Biden did hammer in, in my view at least, was Obama's stance that McCain is no maverick these days--even if he undeniably once was. He didn't accomplish the specific task I was hoping to see (which was convincing "values voters" that economic viability and our international reputation are tied to "values," too), but he did his ticket more good by emphasizing McCain's lock-step with Bush than Palin did by recovering her own tattered credibility.

Point the Third: What's a VP do, anyway?

I think it shouldn't be forgotten that Biden and Palin aren't campaigning for POTUS. But! Their stances on what a VP is and should do were very very good to see. This was really the most interesting and instructive part for me tonight.

I think Ifill did a good job of asking them what they expected their roles to be, and that Biden was able to offer much more concrete answers there than Palin (who at least managed to prove this time that she at least read a junior civics text before she came). A big area where they differed was Dick Cheney.

Palin doesn't quite seem to understand (or willfully ignores, like Dick Cheney) which branch the VP is actually in. His role as president pro-tem of the Senate notwithstanding, Cheney's willingness to use that as an excuse to avoid Executive oversight (while theoretically retaining the ability to invoke Executive privilege in case the legislature gets too nosey) is disturbing to me. I think Biden did a better job here of tying the VP's role back to what it says in the Constitution, however... the focus group didn't really want to hear about the Constitution.

Point the Fourth: Who won?

Not sure how to feel about that, but part of a debater's job is making people care about the evidence. For all that I think Biden is a better debater by the standards I was trained in, he did not do a particularly good job of getting the focus group to care about what how he supported his statements. By all technical standards and rules of how debate should happen, he outperformed Palin (but I think everyone expected this). What I should have expected (but didn't) was that he would be so ineffective at reaching the focus group by referencing facts.

So yeah. Palin did her job and helped herself. Biden helped his ticket. It's up to personal preference whether viewers felt the VP candidates were here to help themselves or help their respective campaigns, and I'm predicting how people prioritize those two goals will probably influence whom they felt won the debate.

Someone on my friends list posted a list of sorry refutations and sloppy debate moves he's had to deal with when arguing politics with people, and it occurred to me that I've got some things that annoy me as well. This isn't really a direct response to his entry, since I feel safe assuming he's been in plenty of awful debates that had nothing to do with me, and I've been in plenty of awful ones that didn't involve him. So let me head off that, "you're being a passive aggressive whore" comment if I can, just in case anybody worried.

Most of these come from the perspective of a liberal who frequently debates with conservatives, but rest assured. Liberals are people, and people are likely to come to irrational conclusions that are counter to their own self-interests and all logic on this earth just because their "gut impulse" is to decide one way, facts or organization be damned.

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I've ranted enough though, for now, and all without really giving you anything to comment with if you're so inclined. So I'll end with a question. What pisses you guys off in a debate? I am opening this up to public ranting. Go, my beauties! Post comments and tell me what kinds of bad debaters make you growl.