Blind "Patriotism"

(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)

I came across this disturbing article by Andrew McCarthy (via Orin Kerr at Volokh). McCarthy is a former Assistant US Attorney, law professor, and currently is a fellow at the (deceptively named) Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. McCarthy is a conservative columnist who in some ways lives up to the reputation of a more famous person of the same name.

The article in question is aimed at attacking the "Guantanamo Bar" (those private lawyers who volunteered their efforts on behalf of alleged terrorist detainees in cases with very challenging legal questions) and at associating the political Left in America with the radical, militant Islamist movement.

They are anti-American, anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-individual liberty, pro-totalitarian, pro-collectivist, etc. They hold that American interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere, especially our military interventions, are exploitations of the Muslim world aimed at robbing its natural resources and spreading Western principles that are anathema to the indigenous culture. Leftists (including leftist lawyers) can easily sign on to much of that without signing on to all of Islamist ideology.

This is a classic attempt at guilt by association. McCarthy takes a hated group, then says that people on the left can agree with "much" of what the hated group says. Therefore, they must be just as bad. Of course, the argument is facetious. If there were something wrong with the views that they have in common, then McCarthy should deal with those views directly. By using terrorists as his intermediary in attacking the political left, he demonstrates an unwillingness (or incapability) to actually debate the issues.

Islam and the Left are not perfectly aligned, but they are substantially aligned, much more so than most people realize. And as I said in my post, the issue isn't so much whether, in a vacuum, Leftist lawyers are pro-al Qaeda or pro-Islamist. It is where their sympathies lie as between two opponents: the United States as it is and Islamism.

This post creates an either/or fallacy. It assumes that the only reasonable positions are to support the United States as it is (the traditional definition of conservatism) or to support Islamism (is that even a word?)

Of course, there are more options. One can support change without supporting all kinds of change. One can even support the goals of a movement like Islamism without supporting its methods. Either/or fallacies are nasty because they allow unscrupulous writers to claim all kinds of evil about their opponents. McCarthy attempts to prop up his either/or fallacy with a false analogy:

I disagree with John McCain on a number of issues that are of great importance to me — more issues than Paul cites as divergences between Islamists and Leftitsts. Yet, I supported McCain for president. Could you say I was pro-McCain? I suppose. But I wasn't dealing with McCain in a vacuum; I was dealing with a choice between McCain and Obama, and on that it was no contest.

By comparing a situation where there are only two options, like an election (unless you count third-party candidates) to a situation where there are more than two options, McCarthy tries to make his original fallacious claim more credible. I wish there were a technical term for using one fallacy to support another fallacy, but I guess I'll just have to go with 'idiotic.'

Another example of guilt by association in the article (just so you have an idea of the prevalence of fallacies in McCarthy's arguments):

The Marxist Center for Constitutional Rights has aggressively advocated for al Qaeda for years.

The rest of the article continues as a rant alternating between condemning the rule of law in cases of terrorism, and claims that people who take up unpopular legal or political causes are traitors. In other words, the article reads very much like the suggestion that membership in a certain ideological group can qualify someone as a traitor. If you disagree with Andrew McCarthy's views on American values, you have therefore committed treason.

Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?

[The astute reader may accuse me of a similar guilt by association fallacy to the ones I criticize above, in that I associate Andrew McCarthy with Senator Joseph McCarthy. However, since they are in fact similar in their views and methods, the similarity of their names serves for comic relief and to make a point, not actually for guilt by association.]