Extremity Matters

Commentators I like – and to whom I link – often say that ideology matters. That’s true, but only to a point, as I argued here and here. Political frames – like any others – are not only about kind, but also degree. Size also matters. Extremity matters.

Another data point to this effect is the op-ed in today’s NY Times by Thomas Schweich. Like Comey, Goldsmith, Whitman, O’Neill and Powell, he was, it seems, nobody’s idea of a leftie. Nonetheless, he ran afoul of – or, more accurately, struggled with – the children’s crusaders of the Right who were the acolytes of the “hard” wing of the Bush Administration – the Cheneys, Yoos, Addingtons, et al. Schweich’s problem wasn’t his party affiliation, but his possession of expertise. Like millions of good, card-carrying Commies in Cambodia or China in a previous era, he was suspect precisely because he actually knew something.

America’s government in the last eight years became infested by a homegrown equivalent of the Khmer Rouge or the Red Guards. In a goofy stew that was equal parts ignorance and ideology, they ginned up their own sort of Cultural Revolution, sending down – or, at this comparatively early stage, simply freezing out – even the former revolutionaries (Reagan variety). You helped overthrow Chiang in 1949? That was then, this is now. Now, you wear glasses.