I’m not trying to pick on Kevin Drum but I really think he’s off base on how he’s examining this refugee issue. At the root of the problem is something I identified in my prior piece on this issue. Kevin is identifying the liberal response as “mockery” when it would be more appropriate to call it “shame.”
This shouldn’t be something that causes semantic difficulty. Think about the difference between mocking your child (e.g., because he’s done badly in school or because he’s said something foolish or because he didn’t perform well in sports) and shaming your child for not doing his best. Presumably, you shame someone you care about because you believe they are capable of doing better. You mock someone because you don’t care about them at all, or because you’re cruel or sadistic.
When it comes to bravery and cowardice, you mock someone because you’ve given up on them and you just want to use them as an example of failure that others should avoid. You shame someone because you want to appeal to something within them that you hope they can summon. A good drill sergeant will do a lot more shaming than mocking, and for good reason.
The second problem with how Drum is looking at this is that he’s thinking about the wrong audience. The shaming isn’t directed at ordinary citizens who are afraid, but at political leaders who are stoking fear and failing to help people have courage. Ordinary citizens don’t get to pass laws or withhold appropriations or credibly threaten to disobey federal immigration and refugee policy. I don’t care if Tom, Dick, Harry or Jane is scared, defiant or indifferent, but I do care that Republicans all over this country are behaving as if they’re petrified and intentionally raising the anxiety level of the people who trust them.
There is a political component to this, though, and it is a lot easier to pretend that you’re acting tough by talking about closing mosques and turning away refugees than it is to explain why the risks are not so great and well worth taking. The appropriate response to this is still to point out that it isn’t tough to cower in fear. It’s actually tough to tolerate a little fear in the interest of doing the right and wise thing.
So, on the first point, the people we’re trying to persuade are really officeholders, not the public at large. And, on the second point, insofar as we’re trying to fight back a little on the public opinion front, the best argument is that the real tough guys are the ones who aren’t chicken littles who act like the sky is falling.
If some people are a little insulted that you’re impugning their intestinal fortitude, that’s just the price we have to pay. I don’t understand, honestly, why Drum is so obsessed with this component of the argument.
