The McCain Mutiny

As you can see from the updates to yesterday's entry - "The McCain Defamation" - the imbroglio between Robert Stacy McCain and Patrick "Patterico" Frey has resulted in most conservative bloggers siding with McCain and questioning Patterico's intent in pursuing his line of questioning. The simple fact is the Stacy is not a racist and the implication that he is has angered those of us who are sick of defending ourselves against the baseless charge over and over again. It's bad enough when coming from liberals, but when one conservative effectively calls another a racist (even if he may not have intended to do so) - and when the evidence does not support the allegation thereof - those of us conservatives observing the situation will inevitably side with the aggrieved party.

Today, Stacy has posted a new entry titled "Let's Parse that Sentence Again, Dan", wherein he addresses the statement from 1996 that is at the core of the present controversy. In the entry, Stacy writes:

As I explained in a comment at Little Miss Attila's blog, my object in that 1996 e-mail debate was to isolate the white separatist Wheeler (and any of his ideological soulmates) on very narrow grounds. Fully comprehending the subtext of his argument, I didn't want Wheeler to win sympathizers on the basis of such a "litmus test."

In other words, just because someone had personal issues about interracial relationships, there was no need for them to endorse a white separatist political agenda. "The personal is the political" is an identity-politics slogan popularized by feminists, and we see how it not only leads to feminist nonsense, but to racialist nonsense and gay-rights nonsense. Here I was, in 1996, confronted with Dennis Wheeler's argument that all whites must adopt a Politics of Whiteness -- an evident fulfillment of [Kent] Steffgen's 1966 prophecy [from a book titled The Bondage of the Free]:

Americans will be told, in effect, that they must make a choice between their own heritage and prejudice toward Negroes. That is the way the Communists have it rigged. Ten thousand interracial themes will not beat a path to brotherhood but into the moral sewers which, in turn, will open up a market for the advocation of pure race doctrines from coast to coast and border to border for the first time in U.S. history. (Emphasis added.)

Steffgen's reference to "Communists" as instigating agents of such a development strikes us as bizarre in 2009, but that was written in 1966. Steffgen's perceived the likelihood of a Newtonian pendulum-swing reaction in racial politics, with militant advocacy of integration provoking a militant opposition. And who can say that Steffgen was not prophetic in this passage?

Go and read the whole entry. After doing so, it is simply impossible to claim there was racist intent behind what Stacy wrote back in 1996.

The "Dan" referred to in the title of McCain's entry is Dan Collins, another favorite blogger of mine who publishes the blog Piece of Work in Progress. The specific entry of Dan's to which Stacy is referring is "The Recent Unpleasantness (and happyfeet)" in which Dan conveys a sentiment, with which I concur, regarding this whole matter:

...it’s disappointing to see people playing capture the flag with one another’s integrity, yet again. I don’t particularly want to be a part of it, but as Stacy says, he’s compelled to join battle, because if one does not refute the charge of racism, one assents to the slaughter of one’s reputation in the public sphere. It is a death sentence (think about that expression) in the world of ideas.

Indeed. The charge of racism is so deadly that not responding at all just isn't a viable option. Nevertheless, I can certainly appreciate what Baldilocks wrote today in her entry "Say Goodbye":

What the flock is up with the Right side of the Blogosphere?

LGF is gone. Charles Johnson is gone. Face it.

He was never ours. How about we let him take his delusions and slanders and paranoias and obsessions and falsehoods with him? How about we stop looking for racists under every bed or behind every computer screen the way he seems to? How about you all stop flogging yourselves and each other for his loss and for being fooled by him?

I'm over it.

I am over it as well, if only because I was never a reader of Charles Johnson's to begin with. Even before the beginning of his break with the Right which started in 2007 when he attacked Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, I always found his writings and those of his commenters to be considerably off-putting. But Baldilocks's larger point - that the McCain-Patterico controversy is largely the instigation of those on the Left - is a valid one. Carol Minjares of Missoulapolis made the very same point in my comments yesterday:

I see it as a measure of the left's success at this tactic that they've gotten the conservatives to try to denounce and purge each other. I was catching heat myself over some commenter's remarks.

Sure there are racists on the far right (I guess) but those people are so beyond the pale I don't know anyone who links them or associates with them. They are not mainstream at all.

On the matter of linguistic intent as it concerns this debate, Jeff Goldstein today posted "More language lessons, revisited", in which he writes:

The fact of the matter is, and pace the assertion made by Frey, calling a statement racist and calling the speaker racist ARE the same thing, because a statement can’t be racist if the intent behind it was not; and if there’s no racist intent, there’s no racist statement. Conversely, if a statement is deemed racist, one must commit to the idea that it sprung from racist intent, and having racist intent is the very definition being a racist. It simply makes no sense to call a statement “racist” without first attaching it to some locus of racism. And where that locus lies is at the heart of this ongoing “debate” over how language actually functions vs. how it can be made to function.

What Frey is doing when he says now that he doesn’t know if McCain is racist, is essentially admitting that he doesn’t know McCain’s intent; but in lieu of that, he’s privileged the fact that HE feels the statement is racist-sounding to him in order to declare the statement racist, while leaving the question of McCain’s culpability open.

In other words, Frey himself is supplying the intent — in that he intends to see the statement as racist, regardless of whether it was intended as such by McCain — and it is Frey’s intent to signify the marks in a certain way that provides the statement its “racist” component.

Linguistically speaking, you simply can’t have it both ways. Saying “the statement seems racist to me” and then attributing that racism to McCain (Frey says he’s on the fence about this) is odious — and is precisely the maneuver used by progressives to suggest that right wing speech is rife with hatred, even if that hatred is hidden in “code words,” and even if those engaging in said hate speech are unaware that they are doing so. Had Patrick learned anything more from our last exchange on these issues than how to ban me from his site, we might not be going over this argument yet again.

Once again, read the whole thing. Goldstein has a strong academic background in literature and linguistics, so he understands matters of intentionality quite well.

It is rather unfortunate that this matter has dragged on for so long, and such infighting amongst conservatives benefits only those who seek to ultimately transform what is still a democratic republic based upon the principles of liberty into a European-style socialist oligarchy. However, when someone is falsely accused of being or is implied to be something which he is not, it simply is not in my nature to stand by and say nothing. I am heartened to see that other conservative bloggers feel the same way.

Update:

Robert Stacy McCain asks: "Is Baldilocks onto something?"; Little Miss Attila says "Yeah, We Can All Get Along"; DaTechguy posts "My (hopefully) last post on the McCain Patterico business"; Jeff Goldstein wonders "Is there racism without intent?"

Update II:

Patterico's latest: "If You Make One Racist Statement, Does That Automatically Make *You* a Racist?"