The Horowitz Fallacy
By Can someone explain to me how Dennis Miller can stay on the air with these ratings? Wait, let me guess. Anyway, I suppose his Daily Show appearance was a futile attempt to save this Quinn-level train wreck. The thing is, as the appearance showed he is more talented than Colin Quinn; sandwiched in between a painfully unfunny show segment and painfully unfunny political rants were some amusing riffs from a potentially agreeable (if second-rate at best) comedian.
What makes him wholly unwatchable in his current state, though, is what one might call the “Horowitz Fallacy,” something that is common in the blogopshere. Matt Welch explains:
How bizarre and distasteful is it, that the same people who — unlike almost all of my liberal friends — actually *did* believe in Marxism and apologize for dictators, are the most vocal in their blanket condemnations of people who never did any such thing? If I had ever been a Trotskyite, I’d spend one hell of a long time dwelling privately on my own character defects and terrible judgment, instead of immediately joining some other troupe & screeching out the same old insults to an appreciative (and forgetful) new audience.
And I’m not just talking about Horowitz here, or of people who made, in the paraphrased words of Martha Gellhorn “that dreary and predictable late-life journey from left to right.” I’m talking about pacifists who became warhawks, Weekly Standard socialites who became Brentwood socialists, Castro apologists who became Iran liberators, college potheads who became parental drug-warriors, right-wing bagmen who became left-wing “truth-tellers,” earnest Naderites who became earnest Wolfowitzians. People who confuse their own team-changing with some kind of “new politics” that they can’t stop yammering about.
These people, in one direction or another (and frequently both) have made grave errors of judgment in the past. And yet many apparently believe that the best way of paying penance is not to quietly look inward, but to noisily accuse most anyone on the chunk of spectrum they just vacated of being anti-American, objectively pro-whateverist, and worse. Well, excuse me for ignoring morality lessons from former Fellow Travelers.
This gets it right. It’s obvious in a transparent demagogue like Horowitz, but it’s also what makes the Dennis Millers and Roger L. Simonses of the world so intensely irritating. (As Praktike notes, Michael Totten’s self-pitying journey from simple-minded Naderite to simple-minded “hawk” is the archetypal example.) I can respect (and benefit from reading and engaging with) principled conservatives and libertarians. But I have nothing but contempt for people who believed a lot of indefensible things when they were leftists becoming right-wingers–with, of course, desperate pleas that they’re still pro-gay rights and pro-choice even though they place no weight on them in political deliberations–and then projecting their old beliefs on something called “the left” and trying to beat the strawman constructed from their ex-selves to death. This is a branch of political discourse that has nothing useful to contribute.