Zombie rhetoric: A facet of the fact

Marion Davies in King Vidor's Show People (1928).

Speaking of Ross Douthat and the rhetorical strategy of "I'm not saying—just saying", here's cand. doc. Fredrik De Boer, literally a student of rhetoric, with an elegant variation: "I don't say it, I've never in my life said it, but some of my friends say it, and evidence shows that they are right":

I’m regularly accused of believing things that I’ve never said and don’t believe. That’s largely a facet of the fact that, on the internet today, arguing with people is really a matter of misrepresenting what they’re saying and then attacking the misrepresentation. One of the most constant of these is that I say “both parties are the same.” I’ve never said that. Ever. In my life. But over time, the claims of friends who do say that have been vindicated over and over again.

By that I mean something very simple: my communist friends who really do say that the two parties are the same make predictions about politics. My Democrat friends do the same. Looking back at the times when the two groups have clashed, the commies have been right literally 100% of the time.

Followed by "It's slander to call me a Naderite, since I only became a Naderite after he stopped running for president":

I get accused of being a “Naderite,” though in fact I voted for Gore in the first election I was old enough to vote in. (I’ve come to regret that decision over time.)

Do his communist friends, incidentally, know that he refers to them in public prose as "commies"? (Here, too, in an attack on Seth Ackerman.) And what's a "facet of a fact" when it's at home?

I'm not going to argue, at least for the moment, about the specific cases he argues in which the Democrats turned out to be exactly like the Republicans—the party's failure to help Ned Lamont win the Connecticut Senate seat of Joe Lieberman, or to give Howard Dean the 2004 presidential nomination, Obama's permitting Summers and Geithner to be in his cabinet, and the Affordable Care Act not having a public option—since Freddie has never said and never will say that Democrats are ever exactly like the Republicans, except I might note, maybe, that Connecticut Democrats finally managed to replace that old scumbag Joe Lieberman with Chris Murphy, sometimes regarded as "slightly to the left of Elizabeth Warren", Howard Dean (who was never much of a leftist anyway in spite of his opposition to the Iraq war) has cheerfully endorsed Hillary Clinton, Larry Summers's economic views are hardly different from those of Paul Krugman (though his ideas on the appropriate recovery strategy for 2009 differed somewhat, probably wrongly), and, along with Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee, and others, could hardly have served in a Republican cabinet, and the ACA does have mechanisms through which a German-style semi-public option should be developed (Republicans have quietly managed to kill some of this for the moment).

But then there's Hillary Clinton's alleged failure to "move left" during this year's presidential campaign, which moves the rhetorical strategies out in the direction of outright lying—

Hillary has spent the primary denouncing cherished left-wing goals like single payer health care, universal access to higher education, meaningful reform of investment banks, and similar. Her campaign has also worked tirelessly to drive a wedge between the traditional constituencies of the left, engaging in vicious smear tactics against Sanders and his supporters, playing feminism against the campaign for economic justice and treating any concern for class as ipso facto racist and sexist. All of this before her inevitable hard-right turn in the general election

—because

• Clinton has not denounced the single-payer system or universal access to higher education but claimed that they are currently unachievable, which is sadly true, although
• the cherished left-wing goal is not the single-payer system but some form of universal health care, to which single-payer is only one approach, and she favors another;
• she has not denounced meaningful reform of investment banks but argued that the restoration of the Glass-Steagall act is not the be-all and end-all of doing it, neither necessary nor sufficient, and her own views on banking reform have become extremely fierce and persuasive since October;
• there has been some bad conduct on both sides of the primary campaign, which I do not condone, and that accusation, that Clinton "treats any concern for class as ipso facto racist and sexist" is an example of it; she constantly discusses issues of poverty and inequality as vital issues overlapping, not conflicting with, issues of race and gender;
• you can't make a point out of something that hasn't happened yet just by asserting that it's "inevitable".

Freddie followers know that the second last bullet is the thing that is primarily on Freddie's mind, because he has so often laid himself open to accusations that he is a kind of hippie Jim Webb, or socialist champion of the special sorrows of straight white men against those who fling around the word "privilege". Not that I'd ever make such an accusation myself, I've never in my life, etc., but you can check out the literature. I just wanted to point out that the way he's conducting this argument is not quite right, as rhetoric goes.