Stardate 20021212.1507

(Captain's log): If Harold Pinter hadn't existed, we probably would have created him. Kent writes:

This Pinter guy is obviously one of [the people who give liberalism a bad name]. DON'T pigeonhole reluctance to fight this particular war and/or distaste for the Bush administration (and its policies) as being part of the same insanity this guy is spouting

There's a word from set theory, paradigm, which is also used in the computer industry, but its common use meaning which most people understand is not really related to the one I learned in set theory. When you have a set such as "chairs" into which you group everything that you think of as being a chair, you get a very wide variety of things such as recliners, folding chairs, thrones, the seat in a fighter jet, and many other things. Each of them has the characteristic of chairness but each also has other characteristics which they don't share with others. A paradigm is an example of the class which seems to best epitomize the characteristic that produces the category, while expressing as few unimportant and irrelevant features as possible. It's sort of the center case, the most pure example. In the case of "chair", the paradigmatic chair would be a standard wooden kitchen-chair, more or less like these:

Another way of putting it is this: if someone asks you to visualize a chair, the chair you visualize is the paradigm.

Harold Pinter is not the paradigmatic anti-war leftist. He's something else entirely. His paranoid anti-American rant posted in the Telegraph is something else entirely. It distills into a small space almost every pathology of the left without including anything healthy or valid. In fact, if someone like Victor Davis Hanson had wanted to write a parody article which tried to put the leftist position in the worst possible light without outright lying about it, he could have done no better than to produce what Pinter himself wrote, apparently with complete sincerity.

I don't doubt that there are many on the left who disagree with much, even most, of what Pinter wrote, but I suspect that a lot of anti-war leftists would agree with at least a few of the points he made. None of the arguments he made were unique; everything he said has been said by others on the left at other times, and a substantial part of the anti-war arguments I've read have included at least one of the arguments Pinter included.

The anti-war left has not served us well, for it has utterly failed to produce any kind of argument which actually has a chance of appealing to the broad middle of our electorate who, ultimately, will make the decision about what we do. Part of the reason why, I believe, is that the leftist culture includes considerable contempt for that broad middle and a belief that their opinions don't actually matter. There's a strong elitist strain to the leftist position, a belief that if we'd all just trust them to run things, and if all the rest of us just stayed out of it, then everything would run a lot more smoothly. But that's not going to happen, and the leftists have almost totally failed to present their position in terms which make sense to that broad middle.

The process is something like a trial for a civil lawsuit, with two attorneys and a jury. Each attorney is an advocate who makes no pretense to objectivity. His job is to make the best case he can for his client. At the beginning of the trial, each side presents a summary of their position. During the trial, each side presents evidence and witnesses for their position, and each attorney will cross-examine the other side's witnesses to try to weaken their evidence. At the end, each attorney makes a closing argument, and then the jury talks it over and tries to decide which made the best case. If the system works properly, that's the guy who wins. If both attorneys are competent, we assume that the merits of the case was the primary factor, and assume that a good attorney defending a good position will do a better job than a good attorney defending a bad position.

Something similar happens in criminal law, although many of the rules are different. We as a society believe that justice cannot be done if one side does not have competent legal representation, which is why the Sixth Amendment gives us the right to legal counsel in criminal trials. But it all fails if one of the attorneys is actually incompetent, and there have been examples of that kind of thing. I remember reading about one guy who was convicted of a felony in part because his court-appointed attorney slept through most of the trial (and I mean literally snoring). He ended up being granted a retrial, because he had not had competent representation in the first trial.

I believe that our political process should work in the same way. Advocates, possibly self-selected, for different positions will try to present arguments and evidence for what they think we collectively should do. They will try to demonstrate the weakness of the arguments and evidence their opponents present, and to answer criticisms of their own arguments and evidence. And as this process continues, the large mass of people who are undecided will observe all of this and come to a consensus that one particular point of view is the best one, in part because its advocates have made the best case. The presumption is that if all the advocates are about equal in competen