Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Quote of the Day: We Must Mock the Left
No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.”
The Joke (1967) by Milan Kundera
I’ve said this before here on Ricochet and I’ll say it again: One of the best ways to fight the Left is to ridicule and mock them. President Trump was great at that Montana rally, mocking the fake Cherokee. Let’s face it: every time a leftist opens his/her mouth, s/he sounds like an idiot. Case in point: Nancy Pelosi, or better yet, Maxine Waters.
Published in General
For example, Matthias Rust flying his plane to Red Square had a powerful mocking effect on the Soviet Union.
Wellllll….
Canada’s a big place, with lots of different biomes. Not every biome would benefit from global warming. While some places could become more fertile, other places could dry out. Furthermore, some places could become more prone to flooding. It all depends on the local geography.
And then there’s the question of the North-West Passage. Yes, a new sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific is good for world trade, but will Canada really benefit? It’s potentially just as likely that it simply makes Canada more of a strategic target. There’s already plenty of disagreement over whether the North-West Passage belongs to Canada or should instead be considered international waters. It could be a major strategic headache.
None of this is to say that the hystericists have a point. I generally take the position that climate change is inevitable and that human activity is at best exacerbating it at the margins. The positive/negative effects to different parts of the country will probably happen regardless of human action. Either way, the overall net effect for the country as a whole is very hard to predict.
There’s also a pretty old argument that if Germany was an English-speaking nation Herr Hitler definitely would have been laughed at, because when you translate his speeches to English they sound quite ridiculous.
Hard to say. It could just be 20-20 hindsight. It could be more about cultural difference than about linguistic difference. It could also be more about the dialects used by demagogues rather than the language. There are lots of moving pieces when it comes to this question.
Maybe Oswald Mosley would have gathered more support with the average punter if he hadn’t been an aristocrat speaking the Queen’s English with a posh accent, and maybe Hitler would have failed as a demagogue if he’d spoken more like a member of the German aristocracy rather than speaking with a rural Bavarian dialect.
Anyhoo, I can’t find a serious link to the argument, so here’s a humorous one:
I think mockery is a poor alternative to a rational discussion. However, it’s an invaluable tool for defanging the humorless progressive scolds who try to impose their frankly silly worldviews on the rest of us. In that sense, it does more to buoy up fellow conservatives than it does to tether the gender-diversity acolytes to reality.
Good point. The left rarely wants to debate. They use name-calling and other tactics such as talking over an opponent to further their causes.
Mocking is good because one doesn’t have to debate a leftist. Illustrating the stupidity of their statements or actions bypasses a debate, and lets listeners, viewers, or tweet readers figure out for themselves how the left’s positions are untenable . . .
That’s the word I was looking for! Thanks! I was having a brain fart . . .
These days, mockery is the only alternative to debate because of the left doesn’t want to debate (see my comment #35).
The target audience for mockery is not just fellow conservatives, but a large number of people who would like to hear a real debate, but never get one because of how the left comports itself in a debate setting.
Is trying to “create an imaginary bridge” by landing in Red Square exactly an act of mockery to the idea of International Socialism? As an empirical matter it points to failures in the leadership and military, as well highlighting an instance where diplomatic concerns trumped domestic defense concerns. However, it does not make exaggeration or humor out of the Soviet form of government.
Do you consider the crazy man who jumps over the fence into the White House Lawn to be making an act of mockery to the American form of government? I doubt it.
Mockery is not intended to make the eccentric seem normal but to rather highlight why the eccentric is in fact not normal and it is also about being contemptuous, not simply making fun of but also intending to degrade another person.
Because of that Rust is a poor example of mockery.
Point of order: Mockery need not be unfactual. Just because one points out the logical inconsistencies of one’s opponent’s position in a humourous way it doesn’t automatically mean that one’s criticism is logically invalid.
e.g. When PoliticianX says something that’s patently, verifiably, factually, incorrect, must I be required to point it out with a dry and sober rebuttal or might I reach a wider audience by pointing it out with a rip-roaring joke?
Note that I didn’t say it was an act of mockery. As far as I know that wasn’t Rust’s intention. I said instead that it had a powerful mocking effect. If you don’t believe me, you could re-read what I wrote. It gave people within the Soviet Union something with which to mock their system, and it had a demoralizing effect at the top. There was a lot of exaggeration and humor at the expense of the Soviet government because of this incident.
Of course, if there had been no other basis for this mockery, it wouldn’t have had much effect. That’s why I said it went hand-in-hand with the internal contradictions.
I didn’t realize that this all had to be explained; I figured a reminder would suffice. But I suppose there are youngsters among us who don’t remember those days.
In order to mock something it has to have changed to the point of needing mocking (become outside the norm), thus mockery cannot come first (unless you are outside the norm trying to change it).
Besides those people were not motivated by mockery to go out and protest the collapse of that regime. It was all the suffering and corruption that had been occurring for decades prior. No amount of jokes about Brezhnev or Stalin was going to move people, they had to in fact be suffering themselves.
The issue of norms though is why I have an issue with using mockery as a major strategy. The OP states:
There is just one issue with this assertion. It presumes a majority culture. A mean from which to mock those too many standard deviations away. America does not have that. America has a number of sub-cultures between each other.
Us mocking Warren for lying on her heritage does not in fact show why feel good progressive policy is wrong. If it did then we would be seeing changes in political elections by now. We would have seen Moore win in Alabama, but we didn’t.
Mockery has no real power in a nation without a mean.
Neither of these is mockery. Who’s saying it is?
Do we have evidence of polling that Rust’s actions did? Its easy to see as someone from the USA that what Rust did mocks the competency of the Soviet Government. But in a nation like the USSR where information was censored and tightly controlled I don’t think it would have had the effect you presume it to have.
How about this: Those who want to engage in mockery and understand how it works can engage in mockery, and those who don’t will not. A deal?
Now I’m heading back to look for more opportunities to mock @ocasio2018 on Twitter. It’s easy to mock leftists here on Ricochet, but not nearly as much fun as when you engage them directly.
Yes, it was, because much of the Soviet Union’s prestige came from cultivating an image of unassailable competency. e.g. “I’ve seen the future, and it works.”
By flying a recreational aircraft past Soviet air defences and landing it right in front of the central seat of Soviet government, he demonstrated that the vaunted Soviet competence was overhyped.
(The other side might try to argue that it merely demonstrated the Soviets’ superior prudence and compassion. i.e. “Of course they didn’t shoot him down. They knew he wasn’t really a threat. They’re not trigger-happy like you Yanks!”)
@henryracette, I’m reminded about what CS Lewis (via Screwtape in the Screwtape Letters) said about lewd humor:
I find that mocking humor is a lot like lewd humor. It’s funny and effective when it points out real incongruities. It’s pretty shoddy when it’s mere pretext for nastiness.
Sometimes, it’s possible to write mocking humor which succeeds for everyone. @susanquinn recently posted an example of that — both lefties and righties can chuckle over that short, though for different reasons.
I dunno about internal Russian polling, but according to Wikipedia, one of the results was that Minister of Defence Sergei Sokolov and the head of the Soviet Air Defence Forces Alexander Koldunov were dismissed along with hundreds of other officers. This was the biggest turnover in the Soviet military since Stalin’s purges 50 years earlier.
According to this article, after the incident Moskovites jokingly referred to Red Square as the third terminal for Moscow’s international airport, and there was a joke about defending the fountain outside the Bolshoi Theatre from submarine attacks.
More than 200,000 people were hurled off to reeducation camps in Soviet Russia for cracking jokes that the regime did not approve. One of these people was my aunt’s university friend. In the 1980s communist Cambodia political cartoonists and novelists were arrested and sent off to reeducation camps for the exact same crime as in the USSR. A family friend found himself sitting in a Hanoi jail because he made fun of a regime apparatchik. Mockery and satire undermined these regimes. Of course satire and mockery don’t really translate to a victory for the right. But they expose the hollowness and absurdity of the left and force people to reevaluate their beliefs and positions.
I’ve read memoirs and histories written by people in a position to know who say it did. Others mention things like Chernobyl as having more of an effect. Some talk about both. Jokes inside the USSR about what was going on in the USSR were a feature of everyday life. The KGB didn’t ordinarily suppress them unless they were a direct threat to the state, but kept its ear to the ground to keep tabs on what the people were talking about.
Information gets around even when the media try to suppress it, whether here or in the USSR.
Even Wikipedia knows about this:
They will tell you what they fear.
I maintain that P. G. Wodehouse kneecapped Sir Oswald Mosley with Roderick Spode. It’s hard to be a threat to national security when people are yelling “Heil Spode” wherever you show your face.
It often spreads faster when one tries to suppress it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Indeed I think that helps illustrate my point about how Mosley’s aristocratic background and dialect hurt his ability to persuade. Wodehouse would never have satirized Sir Oswald if he’d been a working-class guy like Corporal Hitler. Wodehouse’s popularity came from his satirizing of the upper classes. Going after a working-class version of Mosley would have been seen as “punching down”.
Of course, in Britain at that time it would have been pretty hard for a working class guy to gain the necessary education to rise to such a position. Hitler benefited from Austria’s public education system and he lived off an orphan’s pension until he was 20, at which point he scraped a living together by doing odd jobs and selling the occasional painting. A Brit in the same situation (orphaned at 14) would have had to leave school to work in a factory or a coal mine just to make ends meet. So, Hitler was impoverished-but-educated. Maybe that’s the deadly combination.
Someone above used the term, “demoralizing.” I think that’s perfect. Because the Left relies almost entirely on feeling morally superior, mockery is de-moralizing to/of them.
We may not be changing hearts and minds (although mockery seems to have worked for the Left), but it’s a lot of fun to watch their little heads explode, which is demoralizing to them as well…
No, we aren’t changing hearts and minds. I never have that as my goal. I doubt I’ve ever done it in my entire life. But I like to help them get to a place where they’ll change their own hearts and minds, and that has happened a few times that people later have told me about.
Great question. How does it work in practice? I find Senator Warren eminently mockable, but does the mockery convince anyone among those people who don’t pay much attention to politics yet still graces us with their vote every four years? I’d like to think so, but I really don’t know.
Are they laughing? Do they find it at least a little funny, despite themselves?
Mockery also has great potential to entrench someone in views opposed to the mocker’s views. When people think mockery isn’t funny, that’s a a clue that it might be doing exactly that. “They won’t laugh because they have no sense of humor” is a rationalization letting the mocker off the hook, but if the audience isn’t laughing, in all likelihood the mockery is persuading the audience to oppose the mocker’s opinions, not accept them.
Some of the people in this thread need to be mocked relentlessly.
Although you make an excellent point, LC, bear in mind that sometimes the things that emanate from the mouths of those on the Left are so bewildering it takes a few moments to come down from the shock of it all.
I confess I am not good at the quick and decent riposte.
Churchill was a master at it. A playwright once sent him two tickets to the opening night of his play, with the admonishment “Two tickets – in case you can find someone to attend it with you.”
Churchill wrote back: “I can’t make it til the second night of the production. Assuming there is a second night.”
Fair enough. So mock the contradictions. Isn’t that what Lileks does and Jonah Goldberg (sometimes). Sarcasm, irony, mockery and even ridicule have always been rhetorical tools. Use them all.