I bring up Hedges not because I think that his words incite violence, but because I am convinced they do not. And I am just as convinced that most of the people calling for a “new tone,” for a rhetorical disarmament in the discussion of politics, are motivated not by an equal opportunity antipathy to non-empirical hyperbole, but by a partisan revulsion at excess from the side whose beliefs they happen to find distasteful.
If “death” and its variants truly were the new verboten in political discourse, as the New York Times editorial page and countless commentators suggested in response to the GOP’s post-Loughner “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act,” then Hedges, whose new book is titled The Death of the Liberal Class, would no longer be welcome at the adults’ table. And yet there he was on National Public Radio, giving the disaffected-progressive response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, arguing that Communists were “partly” right in their economic analysis, and categorizing any Democratic tack toward the political center as “capitulation.” For Hedges, politics is a question of life, death, and war. And on that score, at least, he is right.
If you read one piece in our package about the political class’ truly bizarre (if distressingly predictable) reaction to the Loughner massacre, make it Senior Editor Radley Balko’s piece about “The Deadliest Rhetoric.” There Balko makes the always timely and almost always ignored point that the government’s use of “war” rhetoric, particularly in the horrendous four-decade war on drugs, has, in concert with the militarization of local police departments, led directly to the outright murder of scores of innocent people. Violent rhetoric begat wretched laws whose enforcement killed the very Americans who were allegedly being protected. It is a status quo that should shock the conscience of every citizen.
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