For quite a long time now a conservative mode of American politics has been to find a despised other who can be despised to draw attention away from issues of economic well-being. Yet there is a peculiar resistance to naming this. John Holbo deals here with one particular dodge:
John Holbo: The Steelwool Scrub–A Fallacy: "It IS unfair to strawman a position by conflating it with its least thoughtful, most irrational, animus-afflicted exponents. Yet descriptively–sociologically–it’s absurd to steelman a socio-cultural order-or-group by conflating its practices and norms with unrepresentative, intellectual outliers. If you think the reason trans people struggle for respect, recognition, rights is that they are surrounded by well-meaning, rationally-convicted neo-Thomists, you’re nuts.... Spinning actually-existing bigotry as, ideally, the better angel of some natural law argument, is just a weird way to excuse what’s right there in front of you...
...But isn’t it awfully mean, ad hominem and unfair if thoughtful Christian philosophers and theologians, Thomistic would-be anthropologists, get lumped in with bog-standard bigots? Rod Dreher thinks so. Damon Linker thinks so, too....
But now we come to the tell. Who should Ryan T. Anderson-types be indignant with, by rights, for unfairly trashing his reputation? Well, that would obviously be, first and foremost, the bigots he is consistently mistaken for. You have a society in which certain forms of bigotry are endemic. You have, by hypothesis, a few rare eccentrics who exhibit outwardly similar attitudes, allegedly on a completely alternate, inwardly entirely bigotry-free basis of rather outré philosophical argument. These eccentrics should fully expect to be mistaken for the bigots. How not? Therefore, they should rail first against the bigots whose bigotry is not merely dragging down their reputations but surely serves as the single greatest obstacles to the spread of their allegedly good teachings....
Within the ecosystem of Christian cultural politics and belief, the role of someone like Ryan T. Anderson is not to scourge conservative Christians for having something in the neighborhood of right attitudes, but only as a culturally bigoted, hence surely spiritually poisonous inheritance of animus. Rather, his role is to apologize for bad attitudes as defensible and righteous–to ensure no one can call bigotry ‘bigotry’, by inserting himself in the line of fire as a model, steel-reinforced unbigot. This is, to shift metaphors once more, belief laundering. Not money laundering, but the same principle....
The fact that someone can come up with an ingenious philosophical defense of a view that most people, who hold something like that view, hold for plain old bigoted reasons, is not a good reason to treat those who are, actually, bigoted, as if they are, instead, ingenious philosophers–just of a closet sort. One steelman can’t scrub away the sins of a community of non-steelmen. Doesn’t work that way. So it seems to me...
#noted
