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It’s considered poor form in the blogosphere to trash the marketplace of ideas, but nonetheless the rise of blase anti-Semitism – its acceptability as another viewpoint on the political spectrum – should be cause for worry. LGF has a terrifying piece today about the way in which one can just get away with “apologizing” for literally the most open anti-Semitism imaginable in today’s political terrain.
These kinds of phenomena cause me to question whether or not we should endorse a model of public discourse where “everything is up for debate” and we can have faith that “the better argument will win.” I’m uncomfortable with denying terse concepts – the Enlightenment gesture toward universal(ized) rational dialogue is something that I would like to embrace – but I’m beginning to believe that there are ideas and modes of thinking and speaking that should be outright excluded from public discourse. Slavoj Zizek, writing in the London Review of Books, makes a similar point from the Left in regards to the introduction of torture as a legitimate subject for debate:

In short, every authentic liberal should see these debates, these calls to ‘keep an open mind’, as a sign that the terrorists are winning. And, in a way, essays like Alter’s, which do not openly advocate torture, but just introduce it as a legitimate topic of debate, are even more dangerous than explicit endorsements. At this moment at least, explicitly endorsing it would be rejected as too shocking, but the mere introduction of torture as a legitimate topic allows us to court the idea while retaining a clear conscience. (‘Of course I am against torture, but who is hurt if we just discuss it?’) Admitting torture as a topic of debate changes the entire field, while outright advocacy remains merely idiosyncratic. The idea that, once we let the genie out of the bottle, torture can be kept within ‘reasonable’ bounds, is the worst liberal illusion.

Those of us on the right should not be afraid to take the same approach in regards to certain topics. Should we entertain the notion that anti-Semitism may be ok, even “if only to disprove it”? Those of us who are willing to embrace this almost fetishistic obsession with rational dialogue should be forced to recognize that even the introduction of something like anti-Semitism as a topic for legitimate debate changes the terms of any debate – and the new terrain may be worse than what the situation would look like were we simply to declare some topics “out of bounds”