The Authenticity Fallacy

Jonah Goldberg has a brilliantly perceptive article on Cindy Sheehan and “moral authority” at National Review Online. Goldberg notes an aspect of left-wing rhetoric these days:

Obsessed with “authenticity” and the evil of hypocrisy — as they see it — they think the message and the messenger are inextricably linked. Two plus two is four only if the right person says so. We hear this logic most often from adherents of identity politics, who give more weight to the statements of women, blacks, Jews, and others for the sole reason that they were uttered by people born female, black, Jewish or whatever. People who grew up poor are supposed to have a more “authentic” perspective on economic policy than people who didn’t, and so on.

Goldberg hits on a crucial point – that the left is based on the politics of identity. Modern leftism’s obsession over the tripartite axis of Race, Gender, and Class inevitably leads in that direction. The concept of group rights is based on the elevation of the group above the individual. The very basis of leftist thought is grounded in identity politics – certain classes of people should be treated differently than others based not on what they’ve done, but who they are. This philosophical idée fixé shows up throughout left-wing political thought: affirmative action, economic redistributionism, foreign affairs.

Cindy Sheehan isn’t being held up as the anti-war movement’s newest poster child (and next sacrificial lamb) because she’s saying anything unique. The same cheap “no blood for oil” arguments and thinly-veiled anti-Semitic slurs about “Zionists” can be found everywhere in the left wing of the blogosphere. If Cindy Sheehan were just another deranged denizen of Democratic Underground no one would care.

But the fact that the memory of her son (a legitimate war hero who sacrificed himself in an effort to save members of his unit) can be used to make her into a martyr figure makes her valuable to the left. It’s a deeply cynical ploy – Specialist Casey Sheehan can’t defend himself or state what his opinion would be, and the left can use a mother’s grief like a rhetorical bludgeon – which is exactly what they have done in this case.

There’s a major problem with that beyond the ghoulishness of using a fallen soldier’s mother as little more than a political prop – it’s that these arguments inevitably lead to totalitarian ends. Freedom can’t exist when the truth is subsumed by a political agenda – and Jeff Goldstein does an excellent job of nothing that the last thing that Sheehan and her crowd really want is the truth:

In short, the last thing the Cindyphiles want are answers, because answers foreclose the debate and attenuate the emotional force Cindy Sheehan, as a grieving Mom, brings to bear on war supporters. Or, put another way, the “answers” they want to hear rightwingers give, from the President on down, are answers that many in the anti-war crowd have already reached—a rather unreasonable demand, given that it is precisely our refusal to answer in those ways that defines our political position, but a demand that nevertheless proves valuable (from the anti-war perspective) for its ability to extend the controversy.

This entire affair is emblematic of why modern leftism is such a dangerous and corrosive ideology. Whenever you have a philosophy that places the group above the individual and subsumes the truth to ideology, you have a recipe for disaster. And while all groups do that to a certain extent, the political left combines this with a shocking affinity for thugs like Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, or Hugo Chavez. Groups like International ANSWER are explicitly Stalinist. “Pro-Palestinian” groups peddle anti-Semitic lies and provide support to groups like Hamas and Hizb’Allah. “Moderate” Muslim groups too often are either tied to terrorism or far too willing to provide it with rhetorical cover.

And the entire movement is based on the idea that the US is worse than the head-lopping theocratic paramilitary terrorists who are murdering dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians every day.

Meanwhile, the left continues to peddle the idea that Iraq is an endless quagmire, while those who are actually there in the front lines paint a picture that contradicts that notion. But the metanarrative has already been written, and the media is less concerned with reporting the facts than shaping their reporting to match their preconceived notions.

The left exists in its own echo chamber in which groups like MoveOn.org and others assume that they’re part of some brave mass movement that will overthrow the object of the hatred any day now. The truth is that the left can’t appeal outside their own narrow borders not because they haven’t “framed” their arguments correctly or that they’re not shouting loud enough, or that they’re not using enough profanity and juvenile insults. It’s that the quality of their ideas is poor. If the US left Iraq tomorrow, what would follow besides misery and oppression for the people of Iraq? When the Iraqi people were left to the cruel devices of the fanatics, where will be the sympathy for the suffering of the Iraqi people? If Bush deliberately “lied” to the American people about weapons in Iraq, why in the world wouldn’t he not have had some planted to vindicate his arguments?

“Authenticity” is no match for wisdom, and no substitute for experience. The cheap symbolism of Cindy Sheehan isn’t a sign of moral authority, it’s a ghoulish reminder that there’s an ideology in this country that places their own partisan agenda above everything else.