Muzzled (11 page)

Fueling and feeding on the frenzy was the Tea Party, which gained power during the midterm campaigns as a vehicle for expressing anger at health-care reform and tax increases.

The Tea Party is in part inspired by the Tea Party of 1773, where colonists dumped a shipment of British tea in the Boston Harbor to protest the high taxes on it. Speakers at today’s Tea Party rallies invoke this spirit and quip that “TEA” is an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already.” They claim taxes are too high and Obama has raised them even higher. It is a movement based on a tax protest and purports to be about tax increases. But its advocates ignore the facts in favor of fiery attacks. The reality is that Obama actually lowered taxes for 95 percent of Americans in his first two years. The vast majority of people attending these Tea Party rallies received a tax cut during this
time. The much-criticized Obama stimulus package consisted primarily of tax cuts for middle-class Americans. This is a sheer, provable, knowable fact. I don’t like to pay taxes. Nobody likes to pay taxes. With an enterprise as large as the U.S. government, there will always be waste, fraud, and abuse. It should be investigated, mitigated, and eliminated where possible. But as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society. Our visceral disgust at the idea of taxation does not entitle us to misrepresent the truth about Obama’s tax policy. If one group of Americans is entering the conversation from a false premise, how can we have a constructive dialogue that results in a fairer tax system that can pay for government services?

The Tea Party movement enjoyed considerable success in 2010. Its candidates mounted strong conservative challenges to establishment candidates in Republican primaries and prevailed in many cases. On the senatorial level, Sharron Angle bested Sue Lowden in Nevada. Ken Buck prevailed over Jane Norton in Colorado. Joe Miller defeated incumbent Republican senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska. Charlie Crist, a popular Republican governor, fell to Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio in Florida. And last but certainly not least, former governor and longtime Republican congressman Mike Castle lost to Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. All of these vanquished Republicans were seen as insufficiently conservative by the Tea Party. They had said or done something in their career that made them suspect. They were too willing to compromise with the other side. Yet with the exception of Rubio, all of these Tea Party–backed candidates lost in the general election to their Democratic opponents (apart from Miller, who in fact lost to
Murkowski as she triumphed in a write-in campaign). Even John McCain, two years earlier the Republican nominee for the presidency, who had built a career on being a maverick, a voice of moderation and independence in the Senate, was forced to abandon his claim to maverick status and toe the conservative party line after being challenged in his Arizona primary by conservative J. D. Hayworth.

The Tea Party is a fitting representation of our era of no-debate, politically correct politics, where each political side has its own media, and opposing views are almost never given a fair hearing. Conservatives listen only to conservatives, and liberals listen only to liberals. People are spared the inconvenience of facts that don’t fit their beliefs and the unpleasantness of seriously considering a point of view other than their own. The ideological media bubbles offer both comfort and protection for the people within them.

With the political and media mainstream holding to their politically correct stands, honest debate loses. The liberal base is safe in its self-righteousness, and the conservative base is safe in its self-righteousness. And the middle has been reduced to the size of a pin.

Some see the current state of political polarization in this country as a threat: “It induces alignment along multiple lines of potential conflict and organizes individuals and groups around exclusive identities, thus crystallizing interests into opposite factions,” wrote professors Delia Baldassarri and Andrew Gelman in assessing the state of American politics.

Others see it as a sign of a mature democracy: “The 20th century figures we associate with moderation, compromise, and appeals to the center should perhaps be viewed as manifestations
of an earlier, less mature stage of American democratic development,” argues law professor Richard Pildes. “Conversely, the hyperpolarization of the last generation should be understood as the steady-state of American democracy, the manifestation of a more mature American democracy, and hence likely to be enduring.”

But polarization has changed American politics dramatically by creating a narrow band of political platforms catering to a hyperpolarized electorate.
MoveOn.org
, DailyKos, and the Huffington Post have carved out liberal niches on the Left, catering to a small but vocal number of ultraliberal voters. On the Right, sites such as Red State and the Drudge Report give attention to fringe movements—like the birthers—which gain legitimacy (and notoriety) in this polarized media landscape that is hungry for extreme stories.

If there is a bright spot in the spectrum of voices, it might be people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who—though certainly leftward in orientation—effectively criticize politicians across the spectrum, the partisan machinery, and the media with powerful satire. But as Jon Stewart himself seems to acknowledge regularly, they are not a
replacement
for vigorous and honest debate but a
check
on the impulses that lead us away from clearing our way through the political fog. Stewart once abandoned his satire to tell the hosts of CNN’s
Crossfire
that as a serious news program on a channel people turn to for actual news, “You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.… When you have people on for just knee-jerk, reactionary talk … oh, it’s so painful to watch.… You know, because we need what you do.… This is such a great opportunity you have here to actually get politicians
off of their marketing and strategy.” Stewart said the CNN show was “not honest” in advertising itself as a place for serious debate when it actually contented itself with engaging in “partisan hackery.”

Political correctness has grown so thick that, like an untended garden, it is now less about the flowers than it is about the weeds. Too much of American politics has become an exercise in institutional madness, hampering the nation’s ability to solve urgent problems. More and more, Americans are turning to voices such as Jon Stewart, a court jester of sorts, in the hope of finding any glimmer of light—the truth—through all the mudslinging and haze. If comedy and entertainment are all we expect of our national dialogue, clearly we’re abdicating our responsibility as citizens, relying on Jon Stewart to shoulder the burden of breaking routine and snapping us to attention when it’s necessary. That’s a lot to put on a comedian. But it appears to be just what happened with the Ground Zero rescue workers bill (which ultimately passed, in large part, it would seem, thanks to Stewart’s call to action).

In sum, the business of political polarization is booming, at the expense of meaningful discussion and debate on a wide swath of issues of critical importance to the United States. And so far
we
are providing little incentive to the forces of polarization to moderate themselves. I think it starts with demanding real and honest debate on the biggest issues before us. We don’t need to suffer talking points and epithets anymore.

I
S IT POSSIBLE to talk about Muslims and terrorism without being called a bigot?

The United States is at war with a “far-reaching network of violence and hatred,” President Obama said at the start of his 2009 inaugural address. He did not name the people trying to destroy the nation as Muslim terrorists. Later he said America’s spirit cannot be broken by unnamed people “who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents.” His lone direct message to the Muslim world was limited to “We seek a new way forward” based on mutual respect. The president’s delicate approach to Muslim terrorism continued during a visit to India in 2010 when a student asked the president his opinion of jihad. President Obama is renowned for using exact language in service of mature dialogue. But in response to that question he suddenly jumped into a sea of fawning deference, ambiguity, and amorphous thoughts—in other words, political correctness. “Well, the phrase ‘jihad’ has a lot of meanings within Islam,” he said, “and is subject to a lot of different interpretations. But I will
say that, first, Islam is one of the world’s great religions. And [among the] more than a billion people who practice Islam, the overwhelming majority view their obligations to their religion as ones that reaffirm peace and justice and fairness and tolerance.” Later he managed to mention that violence against civilians is wrong.

The president trod carefully to avoid offending Muslims. But no matter how fast he talked, the heavy weight of political correctness dragged his words down, drowning any clear message. But there is a message about Muslim terrorism that every thoughtful, aware person in the world, including Muslims, should be free to boldly speak without fear of offending anyone. That simple, clear message is that it is wrong for Muslims to kill others in the name of their religion. And to people outside the Muslim world the term “jihad” has become familiar as the war cry of Muslim terrorists killing people in the name of their religion. With the world living in fear of Muslim terrorism, the president might have challenged Muslims to speak out against extreme, violent jihadists acting in the name of God. But instead of delivering the bottom line in direct, plain language, the president got bogged down, pulled into depths of politically correct speech that left his audience stuck and with no clear direction. On the path of straight speaking, the president might have said Muslim terrorists are the ones who corrupt the term “jihad” to justify murdering people. They are guilty of creating a link between Islam and murderous violence. Then the president might have explained why it is an act not of bigotry but of rationality to directly ask if Islamic commands for a faithful life can be reconciled with respect for individual rights guaranteed in a nation living under civil law such as the U.S. Constitution. The president’s politically
correct divergence from the hard truth did not comfort Muslims. It did not reassure Jews or Christians. And it did not spur moderate Muslims to speak out against Muslim extremism. It just left the issue on the table.

The more the president and other leaders twist their words to avoid the hard truth about terrorism and its ties to Muslims, the more fear and suspicion are left to fester. Politically correct attempts to avoid that harsh reality open the door to fear, stereotypes, and outbreaks of pent-up anger that lead to anti-Muslim bigotry. This is precisely the conversation I was having with Bill O’Reilly when I admitted to getting nervous when I see people in Muslim garb on airplanes.

As with much of politically correct speech, Obama’s intentions are good; they are noble. The president did not want to paint an entire religion with a broad brush. As the leader of the United States he does not want to shred the Constitution and establish a police state or place Muslims in internment camps. While we don’t want that, we cannot delude ourselves into pretending that those impulses—from fear—don’t exist. We can decide they are the wrong impulses to act on without being told not to express them. It is censorship to discourage talk about the fact that terrorism in the world today is coming largely from Muslim countries and the people embracing it claim to be serving their Muslim faith by engaging in what they call jihad. It does not make you a bigot to recognize that the major terrorist threat in our time to stable governments and civil societies around the globe is rooted in Islam. It does not make us bigots if we dare to speak the truth: Islamic extremism is a grave threat to U.S. national security. The president must be clear in addressing the challenge of how
Americans can effectively resist this threat without condemning an entire religion.

President Obama’s administration came into office bent on changing the language around the Muslim terror threat. As a matter of policy the president and his top staff wanted to encourage a new, less belligerent way of talking about Muslims and terrorism. No more of Vice President Cheney’s declaring that he wants Osama bin Laden’s “head on a platter.” No more of President Bush boasting of seeking al Qaeda terrorists “dead or alive” and challenging America’s enemies in the Middle East to send more combatants to Iraq with the taunt “Bring them on.” President Obama wanted to clear the air of right-wing condemnation, a brand of political correctness that labels any critic as unpatriotic for raising doubts about the need for U.S. forces in Iraq or the Patriot Act’s erosion of civil liberties. It was time to end Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer’s edict that when it came to terrorism and Bush administration war policies, people had to watch what they talked about.

Again, the intentions are noble. But this approach has resulted in a lack of honest, rational conversation about the genuine threat of Islamic terrorism. It is an invitation to mock well-intentioned people for falling victim to the blurry thinking that comes with political correctness. This is the brilliant and evil heart of terrorism. It creates blinding fear to the point that smart, normally articulate people fail to have the honest discussions necessary to craft rational responses to contain terrorists.

In discussing her first testimony to Congress with Germany’s
Der Spiegel
, Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano
said she did not want to use the word “terrorism.” Napolitano explained that she preferred to refer to 9/11 and subsequent attacks as “man-caused disasters.” The reason, she explained, is that “we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.” The impact was not to lessen fear but to indicate her approval of politically correct restraints on anyone who wanted to talk about Muslim terrorism. Her mandates resulted in derision from administration critics. Fox talk-show host Sean Hannity pointed out that Napolitano’s approach undermined confidence in the new administration’s determination to keep the United States safe: “Madam Secretary,” Hannity said, “if you can’t even call it by its name, how exactly do you plan to protect us against it? Shying away from the word ‘terrorism’ in an effort to be politically correct is cowardly, not courageous.” The Homeland Security secretary’s sterilized language also had the effect of making it hard for anyone trying to clearly identify and understand a fierce and implacable enemy, a foe with no ties to other countries, a “nonstate” actor, in government parlance, who is willing to crash airplanes into buildings, plant bombs, and carry out assassinations. The one thing clear about this enemy’s motivation to terrorize and kill Westerners is that they are acting in the name of Islam.