How to Win a Fight with a Liberal   
by Daniel Kurtzman, Sourcebooks, Inc., 2007

How to Win a Fight with a Conservative
by Daniel Kurtzman, Sourcebooks, Inc., 2007

These are rollicking times for political satire in the United States. The rise of figures like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Michael Moore on the Left and Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Dennis Miller on the Right suggests that obviously flawed politicians have been working overtime to create material for wags at both ends of our political divide. While these less-than-ideal leaders often inspire hilarious riffs—think of Limbaugh’s song parodies on the Clinton-Lewinsky affair or Stewart’s celebration of Dick Cheney’s hunting accident—they also produce darkly comic examples of the degraded state of discourse in a country founded by such deep thinkers as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton.

This is the sharply satirical and consistently funny point Daniel Kurtzman makes in How to Win a Fight with a Liberal and How to Win a Fight with a Conservative, twin books that provide mirror images of what passes for argument in the United States today. In each of these volumes, partisans are encouraged to understand their own core beliefs, know their enemy, and avoid bullshit. Kurtzman is particularly effective in identifying and condemning logical fallacies and invented facts in common usage. The ideals he promotes will seem familiar to anyone who has ever studied logic: avoid emotional appeals, hateful invective, and sweeping generalizations. In place of these “habits of ineffective partisans,” Kurtzman urges us to follow the “Ten Commandments of Partisan Warfare,” which include: “3. Frame the Argument to Your Advantage, 4. Find Common Ground, …  8. Make Your Opponent Laugh, [and] 9. Be Open-Minded.”

For the most part, Kurtzman—who follows the daily production of political argument from his perch atop http://politicalhumor.about.com/, the ever-expanding and wildly popular website he edits for the New York Times Company’s About.com network—is going for laughs. Still, in the process of recommending logic and fact, he exposes the manipulative and deceptive practices in widespread use by both politicians and pundits.

The America Kurtzman describes is divided into such color-coded regions as the Brokeback Belt, Bagel Belt, Botox Belt, and Ivory Tower Belt (blue); the Kitsch Belt, Cookie-Cutter Belt, Bud Belt, and the Can’t-Buckle-My-Belt Belt (purple); and the Chastity Belt, Saved Belt, Dow Jones Belt, and the Locked and Loaded Belt (red). Civilizing the exchange of ideas across these ideological and geographic borders is the primary objective here.

 But first, partisans need to distinguish the variety of opponents they will encounter. While conservatives are likely to meet up with such creatures as Granolacrats, Oppressedbyterians, NPR Parrot-Troopers, Hollywood Ignorati, and Kumbayaniks, liberals can expect to run into Rapturefarians, Enron-omists, Big Brethren, Gunfederates, and FOX Trotters. As these examples suggest, Kurtzman has a fine ear for both cultural stereotypes and the opportunities they provide for neology.

 By offering differently illustrated sets of the same advice, Kurtzman highlights the sheer rudeness of our political exchanges. In How to Win a Fight with a Conservative, for instance, liberals are urged, not to “try to get in the last word with a conservative loved one at his or her own funeral. It comes off as insensitive to stand over a deceased conservative saying, ‘Guess that estate tax isn’t so important where you’re going.’” Similarly, in How to Win a Fight with a Liberal, conservatives are warned not to “stand over a deceased liberal saying, ‘Let’s see if that affirmative action plan helps get you into heaven now.’” A set of contrasting views juxtaposes the way liberals imagine the conservative utopia and vice versa. Newspaper headlines that liberals believe conservatives would “love to see” include “Schools Replace Math with Faith-Based ‘Intelligent Counting’; Witch Trials Recommence, Hillary Clinton Proves Fully Combustible; [and] Global Warming Declared Hoax, White House Calls New Kansas Coastline ‘Naturally Occurring Phenomenon.’” Meanwhile, far across the political divide, conservatives imagine that “liberals would love to see” such headlines as, “School Sex Ed Broadened to Include Alternative Lifestyles, Live Demonstrations; Global Terrorist Leaders Invited to Camp David for Self-Esteem-Building Summit, Yoga Retreat; [and] Global Warming Solved Following Worldwide Oil Ban, Triumphant President Gore Takes Cross-Country Victory Lap in Horse Carriage One.”

Contrasting Halls of Shame in the different books feature such conservative “sex fiends, sociopaths, and weasels” as “Rudy Giuliani, America’s Adulterer, Ann Coultergeist, [and] Duke ‘Supersize my Bribe’ Cunningham”—and such liberal “perverts, morons, and degenerates” as “Jesse ‘Who’s Your Daddy’ Jackson, ‘Chillary’ Clinton, [and] William ‘Cold Cash’ Jefferson.” That most readers will find the book written for their ideological group more palatable than the one written against it is only natural, though it serves as yet another reminder of the rifts in our political culture.             

Considering the dishonesty (okay, lying) that has passed for leveling with the American people in recent years, Kurtzman’s diagnosis of the problem (bias, ignorance, closed-mindedness, and a give-no- quarter approach to argument) and his proposed remedy (a return to facts and logic) are useful. Still, not everything that has gone wrong with and for the United States in this new century has been based on the tenor of our discourse. Beneath the distortions and putdowns, the fallacies and factoids lurk questions we are evading and values we need to clarify. Beyond, if frequently supported by, the verbal jousting Kurtzman rightly pillories are actions that have spoken louder than our words.

George Orwell had this idea in mind when he traced the decline of political speech at the end of the Second World War to group-think and “the defense of the indefensible”:

Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties.

Examples in recent American policies and the arguments used to promote them would, unfortunately, be all too easy to offer. Indeed, Orwell’s examples seem eerily contemporary:

…political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.… People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

How to Win a Fight with a Liberal and How to Win a Fight with a Conservative update Orwell’s observation that “thought corrupts language [and] language...corrupt[s] thought.” Though they can be enjoyed as joke books, attentive readers will get Kurtzman’s satirical point: in the exchange of pre-fabricated positions, the appeal to emotion, and the indulgence of self-approval, we have been sidestepping, to our peril, urgent problems. Exposing such failures and mocking those responsible for them is the highest calling of the satirist.