I’m curious about how you reconcile some of what you’re saying here with the notion that anyone who might potentially vote for a Democratic candidate should demand the total exclusion of Al Sharpton from any political or public venue.

As for postmodernism–I do take my rhetorical tack (as do most rhetoricists) as an attempt to thread the needle between the authoritarian implications of sovereign reason and the epistemological tapioca of postmodernism. If you like, I take myself crucially to be on the side of the Enlightenment in my recognition of the existence of objective standards and facts, but to prescribe a different method by which to prescribe we approach them and apply them. There are indeed convergences between conservatives and postmodernists, although that can be overstated–the opposition to the authoritarian ambitions of the Enlightenment is what they have in common, but that is by no means necessarily the most important attribute of either group. As for the meeting-place of rhetoric and postmodernism, I believe it lies in hermeneutics, somewhere between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jean-Francois Lyotard, perhaps hovering around Paul Ricouer. (I could be wrong–these are deep intellectual waters, and I really barely know the names.)

As a historian and cultural observer, I’m interested in everything that people believe and do. As a person involved in political conversations and the action of politics, I’m not interested in everything that people believe and do. It’s not possible to listen to and equally consider all views in a political sense, so pragmatically, one listens to those which are either held by the largest numbers of people or seem to have the best fit to the facts as they are known. Moreover, I’m unfashionable enough to think that some things are more true and other things are less true, and that we can in fact know the difference, if not as a matter of absolutes then as a matter of probability. I’m not obligated to invest nearly so much patience and care in a political sense in views that strike me as being very far from the truth.

I am not obligated to have conversations with anyone and everyone, or to regard with equal seriousness the contributions of everyone to our national conversation. You would be taking an unusual detour into cultural relativism if you suddenly declared your personal desire to seriously hear from, listen to, and value all possible views and ideas in deciding what is to be done. I await with baited breath an account of your serious, patient engagement with Satanist views of American policy, or your advocacy that elected representative undertake this task.

In fact, your last comment is a pretty good demonstration of something that has struck me with increasing force in the last six years: the most postmodernist political faction on the landscape in the United States today are actually conservatives.

Let’s take an issue like, “does the government need to provide or subsidize low-cost housing for poorer citizens in some communities?” (federal, state or local government). If that kind of issue is on the table, I can readily accept and be interested in a range of initial principled statements that runs from, “that is philosophically never the role of government, under any circumstance” to “government has a responsibility to secure the right of all citizens to shelter”. I can see the reasoning behind almost any of those statements of principle. I’m much more inclined to the libertarian end of that scale for a lot of reasons, both philosophical and pragmatic.

So then if we proceed past that to evaluate, “Were the housing projects of the Great Society successful?” there is a wide range of things that I’m prepared to hear. “No, and that’s because the entire idea violated principle”, “No, because they weren’t adequately funded from the outset”, “No, because they were conceptually flawed”, “No, because they were part of a white scheme to marginalize poor urban blacks”. Some of those statements will strike me as false, some well-meaning but wrong, some basically on the money, but all have a place at the table. Someone who says, “Failed? They didn’t fail: we just didn’t make enough of them, we need more money for housing NOW, the Great Society’s housing policies were spectacular and it only went wrong when the Great Satan Reagan defunded them”, on the other hand, is doing the political equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and humming real loud. Either they really believe that–and therefore I question their judgement–or they don’t believe it but they believe it’s bad to show political weakness by endorsing any potentially conservative position. In which case, they’re engaging in political bad faith, and breaking any hope of a deliberative consensus politics.

When someone looks at this White House and says, “I don’t see any untoward or unusual degree of politicization of the operations of the federal government, or any novel use of the resources of the federal government for the narrowly political advantage of this particular President and his party”, that’s the same thing to me as saying, “Cabrini-Green was great until the Reagan Administration defunded the Great Society”. I understand that people may believe this to be true, but I have no choice but to think that they’re either not paying attention or that they’re calculatedly lying to me. Something at that moment “breaks” for me and we step beyond the range of what strikes me as healthy pluralism.

A pluralistic society should contain the widest possible range of political opinion, but not all of that range should figure in the deliberative process within the public sphere. If we’re talking about what to do about global warming, I take for granted that there is someone out there who thinks it’s caused by aliens, someone out there who thinks “The Day After Tomorrow” was a documentary, someone out there who welcomes a climatic apocalypse because it will end human domination of Gaia, someone out there who thinks global warming is a good way to achieve white supremacy over tropical peoples. A good pluralist society makes it possible for that range to exist. But it wouldn’t be a good thing if every time we considered the question, “What is to be done”, we felt obligated to sit down at a deliberative table with seats laid out for all of those individuals.

As for examples, beside Libby–which I have already given you, please note–I do think the expulsion of Sen. Lott from Majority Leader status was a good example of Republican housecleaning, and I disapprove of his return to a position in the Senate Republican hierarchy. Sen. Vitter’s recent scandal presents a very good reason for Louisiana voters not to vote for him. I am in the process of swallowing my unease perforce, but Mayor Giuliani’s deeply undemocratic and unconstitutional attempt to grab a third term as mayor, sans election, provides a compelling reason for Americans never to vote for him for president. Rep. Paul’s shifty dances on the fringes of racism and anti-Semitism are deeply noxious and worthy of condemnation. FYI.

Now–and this is to shift arguments–sadly, we are not in agreement either as to the facts of the matter as to whether the Bush administration has departed from democratic procedural norms. The difference, however, is that you seem to take my understanding and interpretation of the facts as in some manner fundamentally illegitimate, whereas I take your understanding and interpretation of the facts as incommensurate–heck, wrong!–but legitimate. These incommensurabilities I take to be the warp and woof of a pluralist, democratic polity, and the inevitable context for pluralist, democratic debate.

I mean, we could trade off personalities all the live long day to see if we think they’re scum or not. Sharpton? Scum, yes, absolutely. Proceed down the checklist so we can get clear on all the freaks in the sideshow tent if you like. Then what? What of consequence has been decided? That we all have comparable standards for rectitude, honesty, fairness, commitment to public service, transparency? That would in fact be a good thing. Tell me which prominent contemporary Republicans or conservative you think wouldn’t make the cut and you’d be willing to say don’t belong anywhere near a respectable conservative political movement or party. I’d be fully willing to agree that Sharpton doesn’t belong within a thousand miles of any respectable liberal or left politician. I have a long list in fact of people who crop up in Democratic politics from time to time that I feel that way about.

But seriously, all of that is first asymetrical to what the President of the United States does to a wide array of institutions. And second, I’m not sure that any political party actually can structurally prevent someone that has some kind of constituency from being some kind of presence at the table. Strom Thurmond was a loathsome artifact of a bad political era, but if people elect him, what you gonna do? The Republican Party couldn’t magically undo that, and I wouldn’t expect them to or demand that they try. I’d just expect that Republicans wouldn’t raise a glass to toast his segregationist achievements, that’s all. Just as I would expect Democratic politicians to avoid saying, “Al Sharpton is a great guy and my good friend”.

The fact that Al Sharpton is symmetrical in your calculation to the political management of a war that has led to the deaths of thousands of US soldiers and the wounding of many more, not to mention serious devastation to Iraq and Iraqis, and comparable to the political conduct of the President of the United States and his closest White House advisors is pretty damning, in my view.

I am not spending much of my time whining about Ann Coulter, loathsome as she is. You know why? She’s a sideshow, a circus freak. I might judge any individual poorly who thought she was great stuff, just as I would have a really low opinion of anyone who thought Al Sharpton was anything but a corrupt con man. But the idea that our political leadership on other side should spend even the least iota of energy complaining about or acting against either person in a time where there is serious business for the grown-ups in the room to worry about practically defines how trivializing some forms of partisan tit-for-tat have become.