Every once in a while, a friend of mine, understandably unfamiliar with how truly bizarre the discourse has become among the mainstreamed far right – because who, after all, can possibly believe it, unless you make a point of following it? – accuses me of being intolerant for refusing to “engage,” “listen,” and “argue” with the right. It happened a couple nights ago, in fact.
“Don’t you know, ” he said, “that people on the right are saying the same things about you that you’re saying about them? We need dialogue to get rid of this dreadful polarization.”
“Who’s interested in building a dialogue? Not me! All it does it provide terrible ideas a status they don’t deserve.”
My friend was horrified.
But I thought about it later and and wondered if maybe I should re-consider, maybe there was something to reaching for a common ground.
Mickelson went on to argue why jails, which he claimed are a “pagan invention,” are inferior to slavery: “We indenture them and they have to spend their time not sitting on their stump in a jail cell, they’re supposed to be working off the debt.”
“Wouldn’t that be a better choice?” the host asked.
“Well, it really would be,” Huckabee replied without missing a beat. “Sometimes the best way to deal with a nonviolent criminal behavior is what you just suggested.”
I believe that treating Huckabee and Mickelson’s ideas as if they are merely a different viewpoint worthy of engagement and thoughtful disagreement encourages far worse polarization than merely laughing at them and refusing to give them the intellectual time of day.
To paraphrase Wolfgang Pauli, ideas like Mickelson’s and Huckabee’s are so screwy and off-base that they’re not even wrong.
And as Digby says below about the same incident, Huckabee really is making a play for being adjudged the worst of the worst.