Just to follow up on John Cornyn’s madness for a moment, I think it’s interesting to see the way in which the traditional, almost stereotypical, philosophies about how the left and right look at wrong-doing have almost completely reversed.
For the better part of my lifetime, the right looked at evil in stark and absolute terms: people sometimes committed horrible acts and it is society’s obligation is to punish those people to the fullest extent possible. The right was outraged when the left tried to explain why bad people did bad things — they saw it was justifying and rationalizing evil.
The left, under this dynamic, would point to poverty, under-funded schools, poor job opportunities in inner-cities, economic pressure and uncertainties, and a punitive criminal justice system, all of which strained families and contributed to a violent society. The right wouldn’t hear of it — when criminals and terrorists do wrong, there’s no point in searching for namby-pamby root causes. The appropriate response was to get tough, fight back, and lay down the law. Period.
But let’s pause to notice that’s not the conservative line anymore. We should, today’s conservatives tell us, look for these root causes and understand why bad people do bad things. Maniacs are committing violence against judges? Well, says Senator Cornyn, maybe that’s because “judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public.” Never mind the fact that Cornyn’s argument doesn’t make any sense — those who threaten judges are almost always disturbed individuals seeking revenge, not citizens frustrated by the “politicization” of the judiciary — had a liberal tried to explain away violent crime like this in years past, the right would have gone apoplectic. Domestic terrorists don’t need rationalizations, they need punishment.
And yet now rationalizations are exactly what we find the conservatives offering. It’s not just domestic terrorism. Conservatives look at the Middle East and find terrorist breeding grounds because, in their eyes, there’s not enough democracy. Under Bush’s vision, Arabs turn to terrorism because they live in societies that lack outlets for political change. Indeed, it’s Cornyn’s argument on an international scale — Middle Eastern governments are “unaccountable to the public,” which leads to frustration that “builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence.”
To help prevent terrorism, conservatives say, we have to understand what makes people upset enough to commit terrorist acts. To hear the right tell it, we now desperately need to identify root causes and examine socio-political conditions and their effect on personal behavior.
Right-wingers who once believed in a no-nonsense, kick-ass-and-take-names attitude when it comes to those who commit evil acts suddenly sound like Ivy League sociology majors. Funny how times change, isn’t it?