Putting Our Brains on Hold

Liberals and conservatives agree on very little.  One thing upon which they do concur is that stupidity is rampant.  They merely identify it as residing in different places.  Each side is certain that the worst nonsense is located among their foes.  Those other guys obviously wouldn’t recognize common sense if it bit them in the derriere.

When I was young, I assumed that people were getting smarter all the time. With so many more of us receiving college degrees, we were plainly using our brains more effectively.  Higher education promised to instill critical thinking and this was surely happening.

At the time, I had not heard about Harold Wilson’s observation regarding colleges.  This former Cambridge Don and English prime minister explained that these schools enabled students to recognize nonsense when they encountered it.  Because universities spouted so much highfalutin drivel, their graduates were no longer intimidated by it.

Neither was I aware of Thomas Sowell’s later assertion that well-educated people are frequently experts at rationalization.  It’s not that they know more than others, but that they can use their intelligence and learning to devise arguments that sound persuasive, despite their absurdity.

Nowadays, of course, the primary source of nonsense is politics. The arguments about how we should be governed have become so heated that intelligent people support the most ridiculous proposals.  The Green New Deal is a case in point.  A moment of unbiased reflection would demonstrate that its aspirations are untenable.

But who has time to reflect when so much is at stake?  Politicians are not seeking the truth; they are seeking power.  The goal is to defeat their rivals, not to add to our shared store of knowledge. Thus it is and thus it has always been. Indeed, it is built into our genetic makeup.

I am currently completing a manuscript that I hope to have published in a month or two.  It is entitled Social Stupidityand its main thrust is that no matter how smart we are we are destined to do foolish things. Our social nature is such that we often refuse to use facts and logic when making important decisions.

Part of the reason is that the world is so complex we seldom have the time or the resources to ascertain the truth.  Another is that for our societies to function, we need shortcuts to adjudicate the inevitable clashes of interest between individuals.

Human hierarchies provide a method for getting around these difficulties. Thus, we rank ourselves against others to determine where we stand.  This enables us to coordinate complicated activities—but at a cost.  Instead of thinking for ourselves, we follow the lead of our superiors.  They are regarded as authorities.

This is all well and good when our leaders know what they are talking about.  It can be a disaster when they do not.  Given that both liberalism and conservatism have run into empirical roadblocks, those in their vanguard are often misguided in their ambitions.

What is worse, these leaders are typically ideologues who do not care about ascertaining the truth.  The Mueller report supplies a lovely illustration.  To wit, members of the House judiciary committee demanded that they see this narrative in a completely unredacted form.  Then, when this was made available to its leaders, the Democrats refused to read it.

Why did they decline to review the facts?  The answer is simple.  Their goal was not to find out what was true, but to defeat their rivals. They wanted their side to win, even if they had to resort to fabrications to do so.  Interestingly, the Democrats also eschewed reading unfavorable materials when Bill Clinton was impeached.  

This attitude toward the truth is commonplace.  It is not that people are stupid, but that they often act as if they were.  The notion that we humans think for ourselves has more to do with inflating our self-opinions than with what we actually do.

We humans are a strange species.  Although we have larger brains than any other animals, we are not calculating machines.  We are a social species.  As such, politics is part of what it takes to maintain communal integrity, but oddly what can also rend us apart.

We are presently enduring one of those periods when our intelligence may be a handicap.  Instead of using our brains to figure out how we can work together, we are applying them to determine how to destroy our adversaries.  If this goes much further, we may all be in jeopardy.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

Kennesaw State University

Caught Between Denial and a Hard Place

Some years ago, I wrote a book called Evolution versus Revolution.  As you might imagine, I came down hard on the side of evolution.  Part of my argument derived from research done on mourning. I compared the stages of individual grief with what occurs when there are significant social changes.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross introduced us to the idea that when people die, they and those who care about them proceed through several phases before they come to grips with their impending loss.  They don’t accept this bereavement without fighting back.

By now most Americans are familiar with Kubler-Ross’s five stages. These are: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance.  Each must be traversed before a person is prepared to move ahead.  Moreover, it takes time for an undesired event to be fully accepted.

Imagine my surprise when I heard representative Matt Gaetz allude to these stages during a meeting of the House Judiciary Committee.  The committee was in the midst of deciding whether to condemn Attorney General William Barr for defying a congressional subpoena when he made this comparison.

Gaetz’ point was that Democrats are still trying to come to terms with their electoral loss to Donald Trump.  Their defeat was unexpected and unwelcome.  As with death, it was something they hated and hoped to reverse. Losing, I have argued, is akin to a loss.  Rather than dealing with something that is gone, it deals with what we can never have.

Liberals certainly did not attain an ardently desired goal.   They are still feeling the pain.  Hence, in order to cope, they have descended into denial. They could not believe that a man as obnoxious as Trump had won.  After all, Hillary Clinton was destined to prevail; he must be a usurper.

The next stage of grief is anger and liberals did not disappoint. They loathed Trump.  He was alleged to be the epitome of all that is evil this this world.  A liar, a cheat, a bully, a dictator, a fascist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a sexist and a homophobe, he embodied every imaginable kind of immorality.

Gaetz was thus right on the money when he described progressives as having experienced denial and anger.  Where he went wrong is in alleging that they had entered the bargaining phase.  As the committee hearing amply demonstrated, Democrats are not yet prepared to bargain in good faith.  They are far too angry to be fair.

No, they are still in profound denial.  The Mueller report was supposed to settle the matter of whether Trump colluded with the Russians to steal an election.  Before it was made public, liberals were certain it would provide the evidence to impeach the impostor in the White House.  They were shocked when it did not.

As a result, they resorted to denial.  According to them, the president was not exonerated.  Although Mueller decided there was no collusion, the Democrats argued that this was only in a legal sense.  He had conspired with the Russians, but the evidence didn’t rise to the level where he could be found guilty in a court of law.

Their solution was to transfer to a venue where a guilty judgment could be rendered.  If Trump was not legally culpable, he was surely politically culpable.  Given that the Democrats had captured the House of Representatives, they could use their newfound clout to reverse a deplorable decision.

This is where we now are.  Liberals have no intention of bargaining with conservatives.  They made this plain when they adopted the strategy of resistingTrump at every turn.  Their attitude is that we were right and you were wrong; consequently we cannot allow you anything that smells like a victory.  That would be tantamount to endorsing evil. 

We see this in the Democratic refusal to acknowledge that we have a migration crisis on our southern border.  We see it when they pretend that the current economic growth spurt is due to Obama policies.  We also witness it when liberals claim there were no scandals under the last administration.

As for Attorney General Barr, he has to be converted into a villain in order to discredit the Mueller report without discrediting Mueller.  To this end, Barr must be censured for something. He personally has to be the one who distorted the meaning of the report.

To this end, we get the hilarious spectacle of condemning Barr for not doing what it is illegal for him to do.  Because their denial is so deep, Democrats are unable to see that they are asking for information which cannot lawfully be released.  This absurd gridlock will surely continue until liberals admit their defeats.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

Kennesaw State University

Is Leadership in Our Genes?

Hillary Clinton argued that one of the reasons she should have been president was because she was a woman.  Today several women are vying for the opportunity to achieve what Hillary did not.  They too assume that it is long past due that a woman lead our nation.

Those who want a woman to become our chief executive often contend that females are better suited to wielding power than men.  They are said to be less bloodthirsty and more cooperative than males.  If so, they are presumably better suited to providing peace and prosperity.

To be sure, we have had some excellent female leaders.  Elizabeth I of England and Margret Thatcher come to mind. Then again we have also had some less than exemplary women exercising power.  Some may disagree, but Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez plainly have their drawbacks.

What cannot be disputed is that over the course of history men have been far more likely to hold the reins of power.  In every nation, during every time period, this has been the case.  The question is why is this so?  It cannot be because men are always wiser than women.

The historian, Yuval Harari, in his book Species, notes that when something is this universal, there has to be a reason.  Were this pattern deliberately adopted, somewhere, sometime, it would have been decided otherwise.  And yet there has never been a matriarchal society. 

Harari suggests several theories as to why this is the case and concludes that none of them provides a satisfactory explanation.  One of them is that men are physically stronger than women and therefore are able to use force to gain and hold power.  They become the bosses because they overpower rivals.

This hypothesis does not work because the leaders of large societies are seldom the most muscular.  Franklin Roosevelt would never have become president if he had to beat up his competitors. After all, he was wheelchair bound and could not have managed it.

A closely related theory is that it is the most aggressive person who rises to the top and men are on average more aggressive than women. While it is true that men are, on average, more aggressive, leaders are seldom the most belligerent.  They have to be under emotional control, which is a far cry from what we see—let us say—in the wrestling ring.

What then is taking place when it comes to social hierarchies?  Harari confesses that he does not know.  As it happens, I think I do.  In my book, Human Hierarchies, I explain how these ranking systems develop and why men are more associated with them than women.

To begin with, we must realize that our ancestors were hunter-gatherers.  Moreover, it was the men who hunted and the women who gathered.  It could not have been otherwise in a world where women not only had the babies, but were responsible for breast feeding them.  Babies could not be taken on the hunt.

Furthermore, for the hunt to succeed, the men had to cooperate on their tactics.  For this to occur, they had to agree on a plan and often needed someone to coordinate their efforts.  In short, they required a leader who was respected enough to be voluntarily followed.

As a result, men spent a great deal of time trying to determine who was the best leader.  To do so, they competed to see which one had the best hunting, as well as the best interpersonal, skills.  Once this person was settled upon, his right to give orders was broadly accepted.

In many ways it is the same today.  Observe who has the highest status when boys choose up sides in a game of touch football and you will find that it is the best player.  In fact, boys expend a great deal of effort trying to identify who this is.  They also work extremely hard to improve their own rank.

This tendency is built into our genes.  Males are more hierarchical in their attitudes than females because this proclivity was valuable in our environment evolutionary adaptedness. This is not to say that women do not enjoy winning—they do—but that fewer are as oriented in this direction as males.

What this boils down to is that fewer women independently seek power than men.  Indeed, they are less comfortable with the competitive activities needed to rise to the top.  There are exceptions, and we see more of them as women enter the workplace, but they are not the majority.  And probably never will be.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

Kennesaw State University

The Real Aspirations of Liberals

Ever since the rollout of the Green New Deal, liberals have been touting their aspirations.  When it turned out that their environmental package would cost about a hundred trillion dollars and entirely remake our nation, they backed off of specifics.  

So what are their aspirations?  What are the ideals they would like to put in operation?  These turn out to be just as fuzzy and unattainable as their policy proposals.  They too are filled with social changes that if implemented would have disastrous consequences.  These may sound good if unexamined, but they fall apart if closely inspected.

Consider the aspirations of Plato.  Over two millennia ago, this Greek philosopher promoted the idea of a philosopher king.  He argued that someone smarter and nicer than ordinary people should make the important collective decisions.  Only then would the welfare of society be protected.

Nowadays it is liberals and socialists who intend to be philosopher kings. As they inform us many, many times, they are smarter and nicer than the rest of us.  If we listen to them and follow their advice we will therefore have better results than if we rely upon ourselves.

But how has that worked out?  Has there ever been a real philosopher king?  Mind you, this ideal has been around for a long time.  Somewhere, it must have come to fruition.  Except, of course, that it never did.  Real leaders are always imperfect.  Furthermore, because they are human, they always will be.

Not long ago, leftists behaved as if Barack Obama would be our philosopher king.  He would bring hope and change to a nation that had been betrayed by capitalism, nationalism, and hate.  Unfortunately, he delivered something else.  What we got was a weak economy, increased social divisiveness, and a crippled foreign policy.

Nevertheless, we shouldn’t blame Obama too much, because no human could supply what he promised or what his sycophants expected.  So what did they expect?  What were their aspirations?  In other words, what did they hope for and what did they want changed?

To keep it simple, their primary objectives were social justice and interpersonal cooperation.  Capitalism, in contrast, was condemned as fostering inequality and competition.  It thus led to people being mean, as opposed to loving.

So let us ask another question.  When have people ever been completely equal and totally cooperative? If this has never occurred at any point in human history, could there be a reason?  And could that reason be that we humans are inherently unequal and universally competitive?

The writers of the United States constitution thought so.  James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were convinced that the human tendencies to be competitive and unfair had to be controlled by pitting the selfishness of some against the selfishness of others.  This way they would balance each other out such that no one could rise to become an absolute monarch.

Again, if we look at history, these folks turned out to be correct. Our nation has prospered as no other. It increased in wealth and remained a representative republic despite a host of pressures—both internal and external. Although its aspirations were modest, they were fulfilled.

Meanwhile collectivist societies have been brutal.  Mao Tse-tung, for instance, promised Chinese peasants that he would provide them complete equality.  Once his followers got to Yunnan, however, they discovered that the communist elite lived much better than they did.

Moreover, if they complained, they were shot.  They were not even allowed to leave.  In the end, Mao probably murdered over a hundred million souls.  Need I remind you, these were real people, not statistics.  Collectivists like Stalin and Pol Pot did not reach these figures, but it was not for want of trying.

Aspirations are fine, but they have to be attached to reality. They are not automatically worthy of deference.  This isn’t something the current crop of Democratic presidential aspirants understands. They assume that if they can dream something, they can make it happen.

The rest of us must be more careful.  Words are only words.  If they cannot be converted into beneficial realities, they may be entertaining, but they should not be taken seriously.  To do so is dangerously juvenile.

So when candidates get on the hustings and laud their aspirations, these ambitions need to be examined.  To uncritically assume they will make our lives better is to place our fate in the hands of folks who care more about obtaining power than helping us.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

Kennesaw State University

Liberals Are Smashing Their Guitars

It has been years since I first described liberals as unhinged. When they began their war against Donald Trump, they behaved in ways that made no sense.  In order to defeat their foe, they resorted to tactics detached from reality.  Things have only grown worse since then.

Every time the Democrats sustained another loss; they resort to more extreme measures.  Do you remember when they were able to get away with stigmatizing Republicans as extremists?  Those days are gone because it is now easy to tell which party is more radical.

The Mueller Report precipitated the latest liberal lurch into fantasyland.  Democrats should have been prepared for a presidential exoneration, but they were not. Although there was scanty evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians, left-wing politicians convinced themselves that molehills were mountains.

As a result, they were ill equipped to reverse course when there was a finding of no conspiracy.  They merely doubled down by denying the validity of the investigation they had touted as a Trump-killer.  If this inquiry had not brought down the scoundrel, they would launch dozens of others.

To this end, they commenced a vitriolic propaganda campaign.  Now they are threatening to jail the president’s people if they do not comply with congressional subpoenas.  Are they serious?  Do they want to tear our government apart?  

When the Democrats controlled the White House, they sponsored many unconstitutional measures.  Are the Dems proposing to do the same in the House of Representatives?  Do they believe that our democracy can survive if legislators begin thinking of themselves as executives?

Of course, those who have been paying close attention understand the reason for this overreach.  It is designed as a preemptive strike before the Attorney General begins indicting Democrats for attempting to stage a coup against a sitting president.

Enough information has become public for objective observers to suspect that liberal partisans in the FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice used illegal means to spy upon Trump and his supporters.  So serious is this assault on our institutions that some of those involved may well go to jail.

In any event, the liberal strategy is that the best defense is a good offence.  Rather than allow the Democratic Party to suffer the fate Republicans did after Watergate, they intend to put the president on the defensive.  If he is tied up in protecting himself, he won’t be able to attack them.

The umpteen aspirants vying for the Democratic nomination for president are playing the same game.  Their approach is to make the most outrageous proposals so that others have to react to them. In this way, they can control the dialogue and keep it focused on them.

The problem with this is that in order to obtain attention, they must become increasingly bizarre.  Socialism is no longer enough to differentiate themselves.  They now have to propose racial reparations, free college, votes for prison inmates, unlimited government run medical care, and, of course, the green new deal.  Money is no object.

Liberals are essentially experiencing the dilemma of rock and roll artists.  In order to be seen as different and exciting, these performers have to smash their guitars or set their hair on fire.  Anything ordinary is liable to be rejected as boring.

As a consequence, we have a political rush away from reality.  Leftist politicians never talk about the grunt work of implementing their proposals.  They tell us, for instance, that they will improve the economy, but never explain how.  It is enough to pretend that the Trump economy is not booming.

But you know what?  Reality is reality.  Sooner or later, people are going to pick up on the fact that the Democratic candidates have no clothes.  This showdown might come with the arrivals of the debates.  The contenders may then start pointing out the nakedness of their rivals.

As for congressional foolishness, the shrillness of the Democratic committee chairs is beginning to grate.  So many certifiably false statements are made that even the most loyal partisans have trouble denying the obvious.  After all, how long can people claim they have proof of collusion without showing it?

My guess—or maybe it is just a hope— is that reality will eventually reassert itself.  At some point, even the most rabid progressives ought to grow tired of making excuses.  The denouement might come if Trump wins a decisive electoral victory.  Or it could arrive if a Democrat prevails and then wrecks the economy.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

Kennesaw State University

Lessons from the Sri Lanka Massacre

I was surprised.  Maybe you were too.  When I learned that most of the suicide bombers who perpetrated the attacks on Christians in Sri Lanka were well educated, it took me aback.  Several actually came from very wealthy families. What kinds of grievances could these folks possibly have that would justify such viciousness?

Nonetheless, I shouldn’t have been shocked.  After all, Bin Laden also came from a wealthy family. Likewise many of the 9/11 bombers were well educated.  How often do we hear that a Muslim with an engineering degree was involved with some atrocity?

Why is this so?  Isn’t poverty supposed to be at the root of Islamic complaints about the West?  If only we help lift tens of millions of poverty-stricken Middle Easterners out of their desperate conditions, they will cease trying to murder Christians.  Christians, after all, are a proxy for Westerners.

By now we should realize that affluence will not change the mind-set of those who hate us.  They don’t hate us because we are richer than they are.  They hate us because we are more powerful.  These folks know that in a one-on-one showdown we will beat them every time.

Well-educated Islamists are leading the charge against us precisely because they are the ones most familiar with the disparities between their culture and ours.  They have read the books, seen the media, and often experienced these differences first hand. For them, their geo-political inferiority is galling.

It was not long ago when the Islamic world was richer and more powerful than the West.  In places like Egypt, Iraq and Iran, a sense of superiority prevailed.  From the rulers down to the peasantry, this preeminence was associated with their religion.  It provided the edge over the non-believers.

Then, quite unexpectedly, Europeans rose to dominance.  Ever since Napoleon it has been clear that these parvenus could defeat any followers of Mohammad who attempted to challenge them. Although it took time for this to sink in, when it did it was painful.

For most Muslims, however, this was not the case.  They were poorly educated provincials who did not realize there had been a historic reversal of fortune.  As a result, they remained docile in the face of European colonization. For peasants, one ruler was the same as another.

Not so for the increasing number of urbanites.  The more they learned, the more disgruntled they became. As a result, they sought to copy Western technology in the hope of fighting back.  This was why socialism was so attractive.  It promised a short cut to parity with the invaders.

Now that this optimism has faded, the dissatisfaction has intensified. Today millions of Islamists want revenge against their erstwhile oppressors.  Having few options, they revert to terrorism.  The goal is now to intimidate people into submitting to their worldview.

The irony is that this cannot work.  It cannot because the very mindset they wish to promulgate is what keeps them behind their enemies.  After all, the technology that has underwritten the dominance of the West is available to the Islamists too.  Why hasn’t it allowed them to prevail?

The Israelis provided the answer.  These mostly European transplants have beaten the odds.  They obtained military victories when the forces arrayed against them were ten to one.  This was possible because they think like Westerners.  Committed to science, progress, and rational organization, they come out ahead each time.

In other words, the Islamists cannot win on a large scale unless they change the ways they think and feel.  And yet, they are fighting so that they do not have to change these patterns. This puts them in a bind, which only increases their frustration.  Now furious, they become violently destructive.

Will this change?  Not any time soon.  Cultures can be intractable.  They shape people’s lives and provide a reason for living.  As a result, it can take centuries before they evolve into something new.

In the meantime, we must be prepared for additional attacks.  Sri Lanka was chosen, not because it is the most Westernized place, but because it was vulnerable.  If we want to escape a similar fate, we have to be relatively impregnable.  This includes being willing to intimidate those who would harm us.

We must be ready to defend our culture, however much we prefer to be pacifists.  Why? Because fate favors those who intelligently favor themselves.  

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

Kennesaw State University

The Democratic Show Trials: Part I

During the 1930’s, Hitler and Stalin competed with one another to see how firmly they could consolidate their grip on power.  Both utilized show trials to intimidate potential opponents. They identified their enemies and then publicly found them guilty of political crimes before executing them.

Needless to say, the outcomes of these prosecutions were predetermined.  The victims were usually tortured beforehand so as to make sure they confessed to offenses they had not committed.  This way the public could rest assured that their leaders were ferreting out subversives and making them pay for their sins.

Nowadays in America, the Democrats have updated this ritual.  They too are using quasi-legal proceedings to destroy their enemies.  For them, as for the dictators who preceded them, the rule of law is a hindrance they readily dispense with.

Act I in this political show trial was the Mueller investigation.  It was begun under false premises and continued in ruthless secrecy.  Just as happened in Germany and the Soviet Union, the guilt of the target was determined ahead of time.  In this case, it was Donald Trump and any one associated with him.

To this date, we do not know who initiated the inquiry into supposed collusion with the Russians.  It begins to look more and more that it was fervent Democratic partisans in the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the CIA.  The trail of breadcrumbs may even lead to the Obama White House.

In any event, the evidence that Trump and his team had done anything wrong was extremely thin.  This did not matter to the moving lights of this probe.  Their goal was never the truth or the protection of the nation. It was always to prevent Trump from becoming or remaining president.

Then, after the investigation was launched, the methods employed were unsavory.  Potential witnesses were not physically tortured, but they were browbeaten to extract phony confessions.  These admissions, however, did not develop as desired because there was nothing to confess.

Happily, people were not taken out and shot.  They were merely stripped of their assets or had their careers ruined. Individuals, who did nothing wrong, were treated as if they had.  As with the Nazis and Communists, it was “first comes the punishment and then the conviction,” which in this case never came.

The Democrats decided that the rule of law demands “guilty until proven innocent,” rather than the other way around.  So certain were they of their righteousness that anyone who ran afoul of their ability to control the government had to be convicted of some kind of felony.  Evidence was irrelevant.

The appearance of the Mueller Report confirmed this.  Although the narrative asserted that there was no collusion, Democrats rushed to the airwaves to declare that this was only in legal terms.  There had been collusion, it simply didn’t rise to the level needed for conviction.

If that was so, they had a remedy.  They would move the trials into the halls of congress.  Now they would take advantage of Mueller’s ambiguity about whether Trump committed obstruction of justice.  There was still be a crime; only it shifted its location.

The idea was to keep accusations of Trump’s misconduct front and center.  Evidence would still be unnecessary as long as uncorroborated claims made the president look sleazy.  This would be Part II of the show trials and play out on television.

But back to Mueller.  He could have left out the part of his report that discussed obstruction of justice. Since he did not settle on a finding in this area, he could have left it at that.  He could also have included exculpatory information, but chose not to. So far as I can see, this is evidence of his guilty mind.  

So too was how Mueller composed his legal lineup.  These lawyers were all rabid Democrats.  They hated Trump and hence even though they could not find guilt, they could—and did—write up conclusions to make him seem corrupt.

Thank goodness this is the United States of America.  Had it not been, the Mueller hit squad would literally have drawn blood.  There would have been actual executions had our traditions allowed this.  As it is, the potential assassins were able to engage in propaganda slayings.

This should be a warning of what our politics might become.  Clearly the Democrats had few red lines they were unwilling to cross.  It is why the rest of us must be vigilant that they do not.

Melvyn L, Fein, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus 

Kennesaw State University

A Festival of Ad Hominems

Theoretically, arguments are supposed to be settled by the facts. Each side is expected to make its best case so that others, who are less emotionally involved, can decide which is stronger.  This way the truth will emerge and we can make decisions based on reality.

So much for theory.  It has been thrown out the window in this season of political malice.  Both political parties hate each other, but the Democrats decided that logic would play no part in their efforts to monopolize power.  They are perfectly willing to resort to logical fallacies, if this will enable them to prevail.

I know that I am expected to say that both sides are equally guilty of logical malfeasance.  The required mantra is that each engages in lies and manipulation.  That is true, but misleading.  The reality is that they do, but not in equal measure.  The Democrats are far more prone to non-rationality.

Two years ago, progressives objected when it was claimed that the media were biased.  But then a series of studies documented that more than ninety per cent of the stories about Donald Trump were negative.  Even-handedness and objectivity in journalism were myths.

It is the same with logic.  Those on the left discarded it as a hindrance in their march to power. Today they cheerfully employ fallacies to advance their causes.  One of these tools is the ad hominem argument.  This attacks the person on the other side, rather than the case he is making.

The ad hominem is effective because it puts its target on the defensive. Instead of explicating the facts, he is intimidated into defending his integrity.  Outsiders are likewise focused on his reputed lack of ethics instead of the validity of his claims.

A case in point is William Barr.  Hitherto our current Attorney General was widely regarded as a man of impeccable integrity.  Most of his colleagues thought of him as a lawyer’s lawyer.   He was a man who knew the law and stuck to it.  As was said, he unflappably crossed every “t” and dotted every “i”.

But then came the Mueller report.  Enemies of the president expected it to be the nail in Donald Trump’s coffin.  For two years, they had been proclaiming they had the evidence to prove our president was guilty of collaborating with the Russians.  

More recently, they gloated that the “the walls were closing in” on Trump. Any day, once the results of Mueller’s investigation were released, it would be possible to impeach this vile impostor who had no business sitting in the White House.

Then boom, the released report did not include evidence of a crime. Despite having been composed by lawyers who despised Trump, it did not furnish conclusive data that proved the original allegations.  This could not be believed.  It could not be true.

As was required by the law, Mueller duly reported his findings to the Attorney General.  Barr was then to disseminate the materials as he saw fit.  To this end, he decided first to write a summary of the Special Counsel’s conclusions.  Then he would furnish a lightly redacted copy of the report to congress and the public.

Barr was a good as his word.  Yet this was not good enough.  Something had gone wrong.  Since the left had virtually canonized Mueller, it could not be him.  Instead, Democrats settled on the messenger.  Out of nowhere, Barr became the bad guy.  He was responsible for misstating the case.

This is when the ad hominems began to fly.  Almost every liberal who came forward described Barr as a heinous villain.  He was a liar and a fraud.  This man was engaged in a cover-up.  He was a virtual toady to the president.

Time and again Democrats argued that the Attorney General was supposed to represent the nation rather than the president.  Without a scintilla of evidence that he pandered to Trump, they asserted he did.  His word could not be trusted because he was biased in favor of a corrupt chief executive.

This avalanche of false denunciations has deceived too many people. Ad hominems, no matter how many or vile are a sign of weakness, not strength.  When people resort to them it is almost always because the facts are not on their side.

Democrats have thus been caught with their pants down.  They are now trying to revive their prospects by destroying the reputations of their rivals.  The way they are behaving is testimony to their fears, not a commitment to our nation’s welfare.  

Melvyn L, Fein, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus 

Kennesaw State University