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i cant think of a more naive claim than "my viewpoint is grounded in reality."
what does that mean?
it seems to me of a piece with something that i see quite alot from conservative comrades--the use of claims/categories in totally superficial ways that functions to (a) exclude certain questions by (b) claiming that conservative ideology has resolved them in advance. if you push at these claims conceptually, you find that they really mean nothing--but if you link them to the way in which the various straw men of the Other get constructed--you know, the "liberal" the "leftist" the "socialist" you get a better idea of how this little machine works.
"liberal" (lefist, socialist, terrorist, dissenter, bad person) is an empty category. its contents are projections. these projections are often little more than inversions of qualities that conservatives apparently find to be aesthetically appealing--so if you want to define yourself as manly, you do so by positing wimpy liberals; if you want to define yourself as a "realist" you do so by positing abstracted liberals; if you want to be a "patriot" you can posit "anti-american" liberals--it goes on and one, one great heap of tedious repetitions.
what is strange about this is that all these claims/projections are about the persona who speaks rather than about the content of the arguments.
it is as if the content of the arguments follows necessarily from the identity assumed by the speaker.
so you can claim that you "speak from reality" without having the faintest idea what that entails as a claim because what matters is not that you have thought particularly about the claim, but because you, as conservative, are not liberal, and liberals, by definition, do not speak "from reality" so in conservativeland q.e.d.
from within this, you can explain some of the more curious features of ace's posts above, for example: that he can simultaneously claim that "liberal arguments are grounded in emotion" and relay instance after instance wherein it is obvious that his positions are grounded in emotions follows from the definition of the identity of a conservative speaker, and not from the content of what that speakers may say. so for ace (or his functional equivalent) to claim to "speak from reality" is axoimatic--it is redundant---it is like saying conservative twice.
i wonder sometimes how general this is---there is a variety within the folk here who post conservative positions, not all do exactly what ace is wont to--but i nonetheless wonder the extent to which more attention is devoted to defining the position from which a conservative speaks than to what a conservative might argue, as if definitions and logic take care of themselves once you have the positioning work done.
if this is true, then it would follow that one explanation for the talking-past-each-other that characterizes much of the "heat" in heate debates comes from there being different assumptions about the game of thinking the political itself--one that is about identity and that functions through projection, another that transfers questions of identity onto the arguments themselves.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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