Liberalism and the Ad Homonym

Someone other than Winston Churchill once said that “if you’re 20 and aren’t a liberal, you haven’t a heart and if you’re 40 and aren’t a conservative, you haven’t a brain.” The prophet Jermiah wrote in Jeremiah 17:9 that "the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" Put simply, my point is that liberalism hinges on emotional arguments, that is to say fallacious logic. Chief among these is the Ad Homonym.

Literally meaning “against the man,” the ad homonym is a logical fallacy based upon an attack on an arguer rather than his or her argument. To illustrate this cartoonishly,  an absurdly illogical argument against Barack Obama’s economic policy would be “he’s wrong because he has big ears.”

As true as the statement about his ears may be, it has absolutely no bearing on his grasp of economics.

While I cannot account for every self-professed conservative on every forum in every dark corner of the internet, conservatives generally fall back to this base rhetorical bludgeon far less often.

I still remember attempting to have logical conversations with liberals during the Bush presidency. I would, for example, attempt to explain the Iraq war and would more often than not be confronted with a position that roughly boiled down to “Bush is a Nazi!” (See Reductio ad Hitlerum or Goodwin's Law.)

Never mind the fact that Nazis were socialists; Bush’s ideology was irrelevant in a debate about the merits of a particular war.

Now, if Mr. Bush were again running for political office and there was actually reasonable suspicion that he were indeed a Nazi, then that might mean something.

Liberalism is a logic-free hodgepodge of feelings and imagination run amok. John Lenon can "imagine" all he likes, but the fact of the matter is that we live in a world populated by human beings and true conservatives seek to overcome this obstacle by employing our greatest asset: the mind.

To clarify, I don't believe that liberals are devoid of a mind, nor are conservatives missing their hearts. Rather, I believe that liberalism, and leftist ideologies generally, can only be advanced when logic is pushed aside and feelings are substituted.



I've attached an example after the jump. It contains adult language that I considered redacting but its target is the late great Andrew Breitbart. So in his honor: This is who they are, this is what they do. NSFW.

I think this speaks for itself.