Why I believe the left needs to do a better job of engaging with conservative arguments, and introducing my own attempt at a definitive handbook for doing that. Back before starting Current Affairs , when I was a freelancer, I once pitched an editor on a long review of the works of conservative economist Thomas Sowell. Who pays attention to him?
I thought then, and I think now, that this attitude was crazy. Millions of people watch videos of Thomas Sowell on YouTube. He has written nearly 50 books, many of which have thousands of glowing reviews on Amazon.
His bestselling Basic Economics has gone through five editions and been published in half a dozen languages. The right, they thought, was so self-evidently wrong, so transparently propagandistic, that it was a waste of time to engage closely with any of their arguments. In fact, to do so risked legitimizing them. There was even, among some on the left, a reluctance to engage in any kind of public debate with conservatives, on the theory that agreeing to debate someone viewed as a bigot was akin to agreeing to debate the reality of the Holocaust with a Nazi sympathizer.
Best to simply ignore them and get on with your own work. I never agreed with that, and one reason I never agreed with it was that I have a certain amount of respect for the craft of right-wing propaganda. You have to prove it. I think the right succeeds politically in part because they take seriously the task of packaging their views in accessible and easily-digestible talking points.
They are masterfully done, even though they are evil. Within a very short space of time, they give people all the rhetorical ammunition they need to argue with leftists in their lives sprinkled with phony statistics. Donate now to change that! Well, we need to be the ones doing the destroying. I know there are plenty of people for whom the irrationality of these men is not news. Both Shapiro and Peterson have ducked attempts by others to set up one-on-one debates with me.
