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Is Intolerance Tolerable? Stanley Fish Says Yes

February 22, 2012   ·   1 Comments

Source: NYTX

By Marie Burns:

Stanley Fish misses Pat Buchanan. In a New York Times “Campaign Stop” post, Fish tells us why he is sorry MSNBC fired Buchanan from his job as commentator. Fish is fully aware of the reasons MSNBC fired Buchanan (and in my opinion, never should have hired him). MSNBC suspended Buchanan last fall after the publication of his most recent book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? In the book, Buchanan reiterates views he has expressed for decades. As Fish writes,

Buchanan admits nostalgia for the America he knew as a young man and the privileged position of the white race, then taken for granted. He asserts that there has been ‘a long and successful campaign to expel Christianity from the public square’ and to ‘reduce its role to that of just another religion.’ He declares that nothing in the Constitution ‘mandated social, racial or gender equality.’ He asks, ‘What motivates people who insist that America’s doors be held open wide open until the European majority has disappeared?’ He refuses to apologize for seeking to ‘preserve the country we grew up in.’ He maintains that when ‘black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds,’ we still ‘shared a country and a culture’ and ‘were one nation.’

Here are a few citations from the Buchanan book, via Talking Points Memo and Salon:

If [conservative political commentator Heather] Mac Donald’s statistics are accurate, 49 of every 50 muggings and murders in New York are the work of minorities. That might explain why black folks have trouble getting a cab.

Those who believe the rise to power of an Obama rainbow coalition of peoples of color means the whites who helped to engineer it will steer it are deluding themselves. The whites may discover what it is like to ride in the back of the bus.

Indoctrination of recruits, soldiers, and officers into an acceptance of the gay lifestyle will transfer authority over the military, the most respected institution in America, to agents of a deeply resented and widely detested managerial state.

As Media Matters laid out, the offensive observations in the book are mild compared to remarks Buchanan has made in the past. How many Americans, after all, would describe Adolf Hitler as a “an individual of great courage” and “a genius”? In fact, most of us find it intolerable when a politician (Rick Santorum) compares the President of the United States to Hitler.

Stanley Fish is well aware of Buchanan’s history. He writes, “… Buchanan had been saying the same things for at least 40 years….” But Fish doesn’t care. Fish misses Buchanan’s insider insights. He writes, “Buchanan is an extraordinarily acute observer of the political scene. His knowledge of past campaigns – including knowledge of what went on behind the scenes – is encyclopedic.” Buchanan “is not only reporting on history in the making, but has been part of that history himself.”

I suspect your reaction to both Buchanan and Fish is visceral. Mine, too. For a while, I was writing to MSNBC once a month asking them to fire Pat Buchanan. I never got so much as a form e-mail thanking me for my interest. So I’m mighty grateful to Color of Change and the Anti-Defamation League, whom Buchanan calls “thought police” given to “smelly little orthodoxies” who “smeared and stigmatized” him to such an extent that MSNBC finally caved to the “blackmail.”

But let’s try to be reasonable rather than emotional. After all, Buchanan pretends that his views stem from reason. So our first reasoned question is this: Is Pat Buchanan intolerant? After all, were it true (and I have not found any figures to dispute it), this is not a racist statement: “If [conservative political commentator Heather] Mac Donald’s statistics are accurate, 49 of every 50 muggings and murders in New York are the work of minorities.” It’s a statistic. Buchanan’s corollary is, on the other hand, racist: “That might explain why black folks have trouble getting a cab.” Buchanan does not outright say that were he a cabbie cruising Midtown, he would not pick up a young black man flagging a northbound cab. But his implication is that such cabbies are being reasonably cautious. (If I recall correctly, said cabbie also would be violating a city ordinance against racially profiling potential fares.) Buchanan uses a statistic in support of a racist rationale. Just because some young black people commit crimes doesn’t mean all young black people do any more than the fact that some white people commit crimes means that all white people are dangerous criminals. By Buchanan’s rationale, if you have any white male friends, watch out! Most serial killers are white males. By the way, MacDonald herself, who works for the right-wing Manhattan Institute, is a fairly well-known “intellectual racist.” It isn’t surprising that Buchanan finds her work useful.

Buchanan probably sees himself as a racist. The entire premise of his book(s), after all, is that the nation is in decline because of waves of immigrants of color. As he once asked Sam Donaldson, “I think God made all people good, but if we had to take a million immigrants in, say, Zulus, next year or Englishmen and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less [sic.] problems for the people of Virginia?” The contrast Buchanan set up between the British and a people famous as warriors who defeated the British is hardly accidental. The Zulus are enemies of nice white people who sip tea.

Buchanan’s views on ethnicity go beyond skin color. As Media Matters documented, Buchanan wrote after Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court, “If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the US population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?” Funny, he hasn’t complained that the other six justices are Roman Catholics, a percentage that greatly exceeds the percentage of Roman Catholics in the general population.

That leaves two questions: (1) Is intolerance tolerable? (2) And, if not, how much intolerance or discrimination can we tolerate?

Stanley Fish implies that intolerance in the service of some greater good, like historical perspective, is indeed permissible, so permissible that it is worth paying someone to make intolerant arguments, so permissible that it is proper to associate him with one’s business, and so permissible as to give him a platform to promote his intolerant views to a wide audience. Imposing some arbitrary standard of political correctness, Fish implies, is curbing the great American debate. We are missing something, Fish implies, when we stifle that “debate.”

Buchanan has a First Amendment right to express his racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic – and I would add, anti-woman – views, and he will surely continue to do so on his blog at The American Conservative, a magazine he co-founded. People who enjoy this stuff can buy the magazine or read Buchanan online. (And apparently also watch him on the syndicated “McLaughlin Group.”) There are intimations that they may soon be able to enjoy Buchanan’s brand of intolerance on Fox “News,” too.

But Buchanan doesn’t have a “right” to his job, and a news organization like MSNBC does have a responsibility to employ commentators who refrain from making incendiary remarks, even if those remarks do provide some historical context; i.e., in the past, many Americans shared some of Buchanan’s most outrageous views. (Okay, not many Americans ever defended Hitler as a courageous genius.) As Chris Wallace of Fox “News” said, Buchanan wasn’t “blacklisted,” as he claims. Wallace noted that MSNBC had a right to fire him and the groups that advocated his firing had a right to complain about him. It is at the very least dismaying that a New York Times blogger like Fish can value the worldview of someone like Buchanan. Buchanan’s views are the sort we want to expose, not celebrate as “living history.” To pay Buchanan to express those views is an implied endorsement. It says, “The NBC Network believes that racial, ethnic, religious and gender discrimination is part of acceptable discourse.”

My second question was “How much intolerance can we tolerate?” The answer seems to be “Quite a bit.” For instance, opposition to same-sex marriage is obviously discriminatory. Heterosexual couples can marry. In most states, gay couples cannot. Some kinds of couples can marry; some cannot. If you assume that actual discrimination is an expression of intolerance, then opposition to same-sex marriage is intolerant. Yet in all likelihood I will be voting for a President who says he is still “evolving” on same-sex marriage. In fact, I voted for him once before he had begun to evolve on the issue. That is, I not only tolerate intolerance, I aid and abet intolerance. So in truth, even those of us who don’t like to admit it put up with a great deal of intolerance.

Numerous people have mentioned, in the wake of Buchanan’s firing, that he was often pretty affable and “inoffensive” in the manner he expressed his views. Fish begins his post by noting that he is not alone in missing Buchanan: “’I miss him already,’ the MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews said.” Fish doesn’t say so, but Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show (where Buchanan was a regular) opposed MSNBC’s decision to fire Buchanan. This is the “crazy uncle” excuse for intolerance. If I recall correctly, Rachel Maddow sometimes referred to Buchanan as “Uncle Pat,” presumably in an elliptical reference to the “crazy” part.

Perhaps, like me, you had an actual crazy uncle. I loved my crazy uncle, but I also told him to shut up when he made racist remarks. After a couple of these incidents, my crazy uncle quit making such comments in my presence. I’m sure I didn’t change his mind. I suspect in different company, he continued to derogate people of other races. Do I miss my uncle? Well, yeah. But I also would oppose paying him to go on cable teevee to express his racist views, no matter how pleasantly he made them. I would not value him as a museum exhibit whose radically discriminatory views should be fostered.

Therein lies Fish’s error. He says it is tolerable for a television network to employ a commentator who holds an array of intolerable, discriminatory views and regularly expresses them in speaking and in writing. It is not. Pat Buchanan is a relic of a past we dare not forget but ought never to encourage. MSNBC was right to fire him and should have done so sooner.

One last note. Take a look at the comments to Fish’s column. Look first at some of the “reader picks,” then at the “NYT picks.” (When I viewed NYT picks, moderators had selected only three.) In the past, New York Times  moderators chose comments that represented “a variety of the views expressed.” Evidently not any more. Among the comments to Fish’s post, readers picked comments that disagreed with him; the Times moderators chose three out of three comments that agreed with him. One has to wonder just how tolerant the New York Times is.

Marie Burns blogs at RealityChex.com

By marieburns

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