Here's the title of Howard Rich's post at American Spectator.
Barack Obama: Socialist or Nouveau Fascist?
Rich argues that Socialism isn't quite right about Obama's policies, as he does let many who have done well keep their spoils. So it's fascism. But the fascism label, Rich concedes, "isn't perfect". That's why he calls it Nouveau Fascism. You see… when the term doesn't work, just call it a new version of that!
I think it's worthwhile to keep track of the ways the sides in a debate try to paint the character of the other. Sometimes, it is simple observations about what kind of person would hold such and such a view, other times, it's about what kind of person would be blind to evidence of such and such degrees of obviousness. Often, it's mere rhetorical window-dressing, and often enough, it's direct ad hominem. I've been keen on the recent presidential character-painting. Romney's a robot (a very funny meme) or vulture-capitalist, Obama's either a socialist-totalitarian or a decent but unqualified doofus. These all seem fine to me, at least in the sense that they're at least capable of being put in the service of evaluating the character of the person who's to be the President of the United States and the Commander in Chief. Who occupies the office matters, so character evaluation is relevant.
One line of argument that I don't see the point of, though, is what I've come to call the ad rockstarium argument against Barack Obama. Mark Steyn at National Review Online runs it in his recent "Our Celebrity President." Here's the basics from Steyn:
Last week, the republic’s citizen-president passed among his fellow Americans. Where? Cleveland? Dubuque? Presque Isle, Maine? No, Beverly Hills. These days, it’s pretty much always Beverly Hills or Manhattan, because that’s where the money is. That’s the Green Zone, and you losers are outside it.
As I can gather, here's how the argument runs:
1) The President goes to fundraisers in California and New York, not Middle America.
2) You live in Middle America
So: The president isn't interest in you or your money. Well… maybe your money. How much you got?
Steyn goes on:
It’s true that moneyed celebrities in, say, Pocatello or Tuscaloosa have not been able to tempt the president to hold a lavish fundraiser in Idaho or Alabama, but he does fly over them once in a while.
That's right! He went to the 'fly-over' line. OK, so if I'm right that some evaluations of character are relevant, does this one count as one? I don't think so, as the issue isn't whether Obama is popular and adored but whether he's the kind of person who can be trusted with policy decisions. I think the best that this line of evaluation can do is say that Obama is a rockstar, and rockstars do things differently from you… I'll be trying to keep up with more of the rockstarium argument as the campaign goes on. Any help on seeing how the line is relevant? Is it a form of upside down ad populum: he's not like us, so he's wrong?
Democracies are fragile, and one of the worries about them is that the seeds for their overthrow are sewn and grown inside. That's a thought as old as Plato (see Republic IX's son of the democratic man, the eventual tyrant), but it's the Romans who lived it fully and provided us with a model for it: Julius Caesar. Invocations of Caesar haunt American democracy, and one point of interest is that John Wilkes Booth invoked Brutus in the aftermath of his assassination of Lincoln. The dangers of an imperial presidency has been a longstanding worry.
Kevin Williamson's essay in National Review Online has the same analogy at its core: Obama as Caesar. Now, we've seen this trope before with the Obamacare concerns and with the general teaparty invocations of the blood of tyrants nourishing the tree of liberty. But I think Williamson's point shouldn't be lumped with these. His, I think, seems considerably more reasonable. First, Williamson's concern is with the fact that Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen that was targeted for assassination. Sure, under conditions of combat, we don't need to arrest and mirandize our opponents, but those we know are citizens and not in the midst of a shootout deserve some legal concern. Yes, he was an al-Qaeda leader and planner. Still a citizen. Second, the Bush administration cleared the ground for both treating al-Qaeda operatives as combatants and as dialing back protections for citizens suspected of being in league with them. This yielded the following:
Running with the ball we passed him, Obama and his administration now insist on the president’s right not only to order the assassination of U.S. citizens, but to do so in secret, without oversight from Congress, the public, or anybody else. Barack Obama today claims powers that would have made Julius Caesar blush.
A good deal of the work on this blog is devoted to picking out fallacious forms of these kind of arguments. This time, I think it's appropriate. Even if you think the President's decision was right, you must admit that it is a considerable extension of his power to trump the Fifth Amendment's requirement of due process.
Dear Readers–been off for a bit, usual excuses.
Writing for the New York Times, Peter Baker alleges that "Obama fills in the GOP's blanks." Ok, that's the title of the article, but I didn't find anything in the article that made that same decisiive point. It's an interesting one, because it alleges Obama is a serial hollow manner:
WASHINGTON — In speech after speech lately, President Obama has vowed to oppose a Republican proposal “to cut education by 20 percent,” a reduction that would “eliminate 200,000 children from Head Start programs” and “reduce financial aid for eight million college students.”
Except that strictly speaking, the Republicans have made no such proposal. The expansive but vague Pledge to America produced by House Republicans does promise deep cuts in domestic spending, but it gives no further detail about which programs would be slashed. So Mr. Obama has filled in his own details as if they were in the Republican plan.
Let's say it's the case that there exists no Republican plan to cut spending on education by 20 percent. Obama's attacking that claim would amount to a hollow man–attacking an argument no one actually makes.
Not every employment of the hollow man scheme is fallacious, however. I think this is a good example of a non-fallacious use. Let's say for the sake of argument that there exists a non specific plan to cut domestic spending (which includes education among other things) "deeply." In the absence of detail, the critic of this plan is forced to "extrapolate" or as I would say, "infer" which programs would receive cuts (and how much).
So the critic–Obama in this case–infers. His move is a fair one, as it asks for clarification of something admittedly vague. In a direct dialogical exchange, this would be a perfect opportunity for the Republicans to clarify their position. Near the bottom of the article, the author finds that they do:
That means, the White House said, that the $100 billion cut would amount to a 20 percent reduction in domestic programs, so it is fair to extrapolate the effects on education, Head Start, college aid and other programs. Republicans said they could choose to cut more deeply in some programs while sparing others, so education would not necessarily be cut 20 percent. At the same time, they do not rule it out.
So his hollow man, which admittedly is an argument made by no one, turns out not to be illegitimate. The counter move–logically at least–ought to be a claim that they will not cut education by 20 percent, or that the programs in question will remain in place. But they havent' (in this article) done that. They can't even deny that Obama is wrong. This seems like a perfect use of the hollow man.
In case you haven't seen the exchange yesterday between President Obama and the entire House Republican Caucus, do yourself a favor, and watch the whole thing (or read it). An excerpt:
Now, you may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker and Tom — and certainly you don't agree with Tom Daschle on much . . .
(LAUGHTER)
. . . but that's not a radical bunch. But if you were to listen to the debate, and, frankly, how some of you went after this bill, you'd think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot.
(LAUGHTER)
No, I mean, that's how you guys — that's how you guys presented it.
(APPLAUSE)
And so I'm thinking to myself, "Well, how is it that a plan that is pretty centrist . . . "
(LAUGHTER)
No, look, I mean, I'm just saying — I know you guys disagree, but if you look at the facts of this bill, most independent observers would say this is actually what many Republicans — it — it's similar to what many Republicans proposed to Bill Clinton when he was doing his debate on health care.
So all I'm saying is we've got to close the gap a little bit between the rhetoric and the reality.
I'm not suggesting that we're going to agree on everything, whether it's on health care or energy or what have you, but if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don't have a lot of room to negotiate with me.
I mean, the fact of the matter is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party. You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you've been telling your constituents is, "This guy's doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America."
And I — I would just say that we have to think about tone.
It's not just on your side, by the way. It's — it's on our side as well. This is part of what's happened in our politics, where we demonize the other side so much that when it comes to actually getting things done, it becomes tough to do.
Mrs. NonSequitur, a lawyer, observed that at moments it felt like lawyer Obama was attempting to get an unreasonable client to see that a settlement of their case cannot in principle mean they get one-hundred percent.