The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (19 page)

Or at least that used to be the way Americans acted. Alas, the “positive liberty” doctrines introduced by the progressives diluted the ornery reaction of the American people to government intrusion. Still, to their credit, there remains a streak of antistatism even in our statists when it comes to (some) civil liberties. But when it comes to economic affairs, vast
numbers of Americans have lost the ability to see small intrusions as down payments on much bigger ones to come. The Americans Edmund Burke spoke of would take one look at ObamaCare and see death panels lining up on the horizon like so many hostile Indians. Now even to raise the
concern
that such things are
possible
amounts to right-wing paranoia.

Ultimately slippery slope arguments are a mixed bag. They are useful as a way to reinforce good dogma, but they are also used to reinforce bad dogma. Similarly, they can scare us away from bad policies and good ones alike. There are good slippery slope arguments and bad ones for good ends and bad ends.

Whatever or wherever the source of slippery slope arguments, they all share the same weaknesses. For starters, they rest on bad reasoning, asserting that one thing will cause another thing that will cause another thing in a straightforward and foreseeable way like dominos falling in a straight line. Unfortunately, not even dominos are as reliable as you might think. Imagine you have lined up fifty dominos pretty well, but not perfectly. So let’s say that if the domino at the front of the line falls it has a 95 percent chance of knocking over the one next to it. Presumably that means a whole lot of dominos will fall over when you knock over the first one. Then again, maybe they won’t. Remember, there’s a 5 percent chance that no more dominos will fall, and a 4.75 percent chance that only one more domino will fall. As more dominos fall the probabilities stack up that
this
domino will be the last one to fall. Statistically, there’s a 92.3 percent chance that fifty or fewer dominos will fall, and on average you should expect no more than twenty dominos to topple.

Now assuming you’re not drunk or wearing mittens, you can likely arrange dominos so that they have a higher probability of toppling their neighbor than 95 percent. But humans are a lot more complicated than dominos, and complex societies are a lot more complicated than any single human. The notion that you can predict that action A will cause a chain of events to proceed in a straight alphabetical line until you get to Z is highly unlikely.

But wait a second, aren’t there a million good examples of slippery slope arguments being validated? Yes, and no. As Eugene Volokh illustrates in “The Mechanism
of the Slippery Slope,”
²
antismoking activists routinely say they simply want to make one simple reform and that’s it. He cites two press clippings, seven years apart:

Similarly, in the 1990s antismoking activists insisted they weren’t setting a dangerous precedent, and they’d never go after, say, junk food. Today they’re all going after junk food. Slippery slope vindicated, right?

Not really.

The problem with the slippery slope cliché is not that it doesn’t describe a real problem; it’s that it describes a real problem
poorly
.
Of course
precedents matter. But slippery slope metaphors can be pernicious because they discount, even remove, the dynamism of human agency. They even remove the dynamism of amphibian agency.

To wit: Consider the boiling frog we always hear so much about from politicians and activists. As the saying goes, If you put a frog in tepid water and slowly turn up the heat, it will stay in the pot until it’s poached. But if you throw the frog into a boiling pot, it will leap out. The lesson is usually that crises that creep up on us incrementally are more pernicious than ones that are recognizable all at once. Now, the metaphorical principle may or may not be true. One can certainly think of cases where it is and where it isn’t.

But as for the poor boiled frogs, we know this is in fact not true. Professor Doug Melton, of the Harvard University Biology Department, told
Fast Company
, which investigated the parable of the boiled frog, “If you put a frog in boiling water, it won’t jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot—they don’t sit still for you.” After conducting a series of tests in which frogs leaped from the water once it got uncomfortable, J. Debra Hofman, research associate at MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research and coauthor of “Implementing Radical Change: Gradual Versus Rapid Pace,” explained, “There are certain cases where gradual change is almost preferred.” More to the point, she added, “The change myth assumes a very narrow view of people. If frogs can do it, people definitely can.”

That’s right. When a domino hits another domino, there’s no chance that there will be a domino backlash where the dominos band together to fight back against the scourge of domino toppling. Yes, the falling of the first domino increases the odds that the next one will fall, just as legalizing gay marriage does make legalizing polygamy more likely. But the similarity ends there, not least because humans aren’t dominos, and we cannot compute the probabilities of human actions nearly as easily. If the government funds Catholic schools, then opponents of funding of religious schools will say it’s a slippery slope, and we’ll have to fund all religious schools, including jihadist madrasas and Satanic academies. But that’s not true. Rather, if we give money to Catholic schools then some people will
say
we have to give money to jihadists and Satanists, because fairness and consistency requires that we do so. These people will fall into four general groups: jihadists, Satanists, lawyers, and idiots. And it is the duty of all good men to marshal the energy and will to tell jihadists, Satanists, lawyers, and idiots: “No.”

Consider civil liberties, the foremost breeding ground of slippery slope arguments. There have been countless moments in American history when civil libertarians, on both the right and the left, have insisted that we must not do something to avoid careening down the slippery slope. Now if the slippery slope were the phenomenon they claim, America today should be a police state. But it hasn’t worked out that way.

With the arguable exception of the Civil War (and, of course, the institution of slavery), the lowest point in American civil liberties wasn’t during
the Bush years, or the Nixon years. It was during the administration of Woodrow Wilson—who oversaw the censoring of scores of publications, the incarceration of political prisoners, the imposition of loyalty oaths, dissemination of sweeping propaganda, and the wholesale and often bloody intimidation of dissenters. At any time during this period one could have raised the specter of the slippery slope—and many decent people did. But guess what happened next? The country swung back to normal. The American people threw out the progressive Democrats responsible for the bedlam and voted in Republicans who ran on the platform of a “return to normalcy.” It fell to the Republican president Warren Harding to show clemency to the political prisoners held by the Wilson administration.

This raises one of the most underappreciated dynamics of the American political system, and of democracy generally. Regular elections are circuit breakers. They stop—or at least can stop—the acceleration of slippery slope impulses. A change in party power often—though perhaps not often enough—halts the transmission of error. Totalitarian systems have no such circuit breakers—no checks and balances—and, hence, good intentions more easily snowball into evil results.

It is those areas of American life most immunized from democracy and partisanship that are most susceptible to slippery slope problems precisely because they are not democratically accountable. Bureaucracy is a superconductor of bad ideas. No democratic or market-based system would ever shut down lemonade stands; the circuit breaker would kick in long before the cops made some six-year-old girl cry.

It is when the circuit breakers are turned off or bypassed—for instance, during a war—that slippery slope problems flourish.

Fast-forward to World War II, when FDR put one hundred thousand Japanese Americans in camps on the West Coast. Surely some decent person looked at that scandal and said, “Good lord, this is putting us on the slippery slope to tyranny,” or words to that effect. But it didn’t. Internment was wrong on the merits, but it did not open the floodgates to far worse. Fast-forward again to the early 1950s. Whatever your view of the McCarthy era, it certainly didn’t put us on the slippery slope to something worse. Why?
Because the American people didn’t want to go someplace worse
. At various times over the last seventy years, Congress, the courts, and the
American people have collectively flipped the circuit breaker. For all of the anti–Patriot Act hysteria under George W. Bush (which, remarkably, subsided with the election of Barack Obama, who successfully won its reauthorization and expanded its use), it has not put us on anything like the slippery slope we were told it would. Is there room for abuse? Sure. Should the law be repealed? Someday, yes. But to date most of the objections to it are hypothetical, because the actual use of it—catching terrorists—is both popular and legitimate in the eyes of the American people.

So long as one remembers that the slippery slope isn’t a
thing
but a metaphor, it’s not so bad. It’s when people believe that it describes an actual phenomenon, a mechanism of historical progression, that the slippery slope becomes an invitation to surrender. If you take it as a given that losing an inch means you’ve already lost the mile, then you will give up after losing the inch. That is precisely what the other side wants you to do: give up prematurely. If you go through life thinking the slippery slope is real, you will make it real. If you go through life a happy warrior, believing every good fight is worth having because it is good, and every defeat is temporary, you might have other problems, but you won’t have the problem of premature capitulation.

Edmund Burke is often quoted as saying words to the effect of “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” My friend—and Burke scholar—Yuval Levin says there’s no record of Burke having ever said it. What comes closest is Burke’s observation in
Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents
: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Regardless, Burke was right. All that is necessary for slippery slope arguments to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

10

DISSENT

D
issent
is the highest form of patriotism.”

Like an artificially designed molecule, there’s something about the phrase that allows it to slip through mental defenses and implant itself deep within the liberal mind. During the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, this was a banner slogan of American liberalism.

“This is not the first time in American history when patriotism has been distorted to deflect criticism and mislead the nation,” proclaimed Senator John Kerry while running to replace the “divisive” President Bush. Kerry continued, “No wonder Thomas Jefferson himself said: ‘Dissent is the greatest form of patriotism.’”

“It is not unpatriotic to tell the truth to the American people about the war in Iraq. In this grave moment of our country,” asserted Ted Kennedy, the man who rendered Kerry the junior senator from Massachusetts for nearly three decades, ”to use the words of Thomas Jefferson, ‘Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.’”

“We need to stop slicing this country in half, and saying those who support this act or this politician are ‘good’ Americans, and the rest are not,” thundered Mitch Albom of the
Detroit Free Press
. “Sometimes ‘dissent is the highest form of patriotism.’ I didn’t make that up. Thomas Jefferson did.”
¹

All this might prove more convincing if Jefferson had actually said it—which he didn’t.

As Mark Steyn has had great fun pointing out: Thomas Jefferson never said “dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” at least according to the good people at the Jefferson Library. That fact gives a certain added buffoonish poignancy to this headline from the
Capital Times
of Madison, Wisconsin: Thomas Jefferson got it right: “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” And teaching children how to be thoughtful and effective dissenters is the highest form of education.”
²

Steyn traces the fakery back to a 1991 quote from Nadine Strossen, who at the time was head of the ACLU, an organization with a vested interest in putting the Founders’ imprimatur on relentless knee-jerk complaining. Others have erroneously credited Howard Zinn. The oldest reference I can find in major newspapers is a 1969 line from then New York mayor John Lindsay, who was congratulating anti-Vietnam protesters at Columbia University for their patriotism. (He was booed after he left the stage, and Paul Boutelle—a cab driver and Socialist Workers Party mayoral candidate known after 1979 as Kwame Montsho Ajamu Somburu—vilified him in absentia. The crowd loved that.) But the oldest source anywhere is apparently, of all things, a book called
The Use of Force in International Affairs
.
³