“I will tell you ladies and gentlemen, I detest and despise everything the left stands for,” Tea Party Nation CEO Judson Phillips said at a Saturday rally in Wisconsin in support of one of the six Republican state senators facing a recall election Tuesday. “How anybody can endorse and embrace an ideology that has killed a billion people in the last century is beyond me.”
Many of us who are conservative have real concerns about modern-day liberalism. But the notion liberalism is responsible for killing a billion people in the 20th century is grossly irresponsible and ludicrous. I assume Phillips is saying American liberalism is synonymous with Nazism and Communism, that it is the animating ideology of Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, the Khmer Rouge, the Hutu militia, and countless other 20th century genocidal killers and movements.
This is not simply an ignorant statement (how he arrives at the figure of a billion people is impossible to know; as a reference point World War II, the deadliest military conflict in history, took the lives of somewhere around 70 million); it’s quite an unhelpful one. The Tea Party, after all, is being routinely slandered these days, compared to terrorists and suicide bombers. The proper response isn’t to lash out at these voices by comparing them to the most malevolent ideologies of the last century or comparing Wisconsin liberals to Nazi storm troopers; it is to make the case for limited government in a calm, reasonable and precise manner.
To be fair to the Tea Party movement, Phillips is a highly controversial figure within it. This story, for example, reports, “People who once worked with Phillips call him a brazen and bungling opportunist.” See here: and here. The temptation might be to dismiss Phillips as a crank, which he is, and therefore ignore his vituperative comments. But because of his association with the Tea Party, there will be an effort to link him to it in the hopes of discrediting the entire movement. Which is why I think it would be not just right but wise for responsible Tea Party figures, who have themselves been on the receiving end of slander, to speak out against Phillips. As William F. Buckley taught us many decades ago, a political movement has to police its own ranks, and from time to time to make it clear who doesn’t speak for it.
Beyond that, it would be nice if we had a Stupid Historical Analogy Moratorium in America, with people on all sides of the debate resisting the temptation to compare one’s opponents to Nazis and to al-Qaeda, to Hitler and bin Laden. The nation is growing weary, I suspect, of rhetorical excesses and ad hominem attacks, which are themselves the product of rage, desperation and extremely lazy thinking.
