“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!”–Barry Goldwater. 1964.
I think Goldwater was right in this belief, even if I do disagree with some of what he believed needed to be done in order to defend liberty.
This is why it’s rather disheartening to me to see that Harry Reid chose to attack Sharron Angle by calling her “extreme”. Extremism is a relative concept, based off of what is considered “normal” in the conventional wisdom of the time and place. Only about a century ago, the idea of women voting was “extreme”. So what? That doesn’t mean it was a bad idea.
Paul Graham put it best in his wonderful essay “What You Can’t Say“:
“If a statement is false, that’s the worst thing you can say about it. You don’t need to say that it’s heretical… So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that’s a sure sign that something is wrong.”
Now, you might think from all this that I’m one of those people who thinks that Angle is being oppressed and slandered by evil liberals. Nothing could be further from the truth. Personally, I think Angle is absolutely dead wrong on almost all the issues. That, therefore, is the message that ought to be repeated by Reid.
Or am I being too extreme?
