O'Reilly Upended by Rhetorical Judo

Bill “Papa Bear” O’Reilly used formidable one-two combination of name-calling and straw man argumentation when he suggested that the man who traveled to Europe after being diagnosed with TB was acting in line with “secular progressive” values. According to O’Reilly, secular progressives "put themselves above all others. That philosophy says, 'Me first, then I'll worry about you,'" while "traditional-values people put others on a par with themselves."

Who “secular progressives” are isn’t clear. It’s simply a term O’Reilly means to be pejorative (name-calling). The way to make it pejorative is to associate it with yucky things, such as selfishness. So O’Reilly constructs a fictional entity called “secular progressives” who hold the beliefs he attributes to them (the classic "straw man" fallacy).

Not only does this allow him to turn a specific incident in to a commentary on a huge group of people whose politics he disagrees with (something we’ve seen plenty of recently, most notably with the Virginia Tech shootings), but it helps solidify the bogeyman of the “secular progressive,” making it a more potent name to call perceived enemies in the future.

There are two possible lines of critique/response one could offer to this attack. The simplest is to argue directly against O’Reilly’s assertions and say that people who identify themselves as secular and/or progressive don’t hold the positions O’Reilly attributes to them.

A more effective way might be to flow with O’Reilly’s attack and ask him (and those who buy his argument) to identify the “secular progressives” he’s talking about. Certainly any thinking person is against people recklessly endangering others—let’s identify those who aren’t so that we can appropriately respond to them.

My suspicion is that this would result in lots of hemming and hawing without a lot of specifics. Should O’Reilly or his ideological playmates name the groups who are most often associated with “secular progressive” politics (feminists, environmentalists, people in favor of multi-culturalism, people against institutionalized prayer in schools, etc.), it’s easy enough to say, “But wait, these are groups that conservatives usually criticize for paying undo attention to social ‘rights’ at the expense of individual freedom. Doesn’t this contradict the premise of your comments about the guy with TB?”

In fact, one can easily turn O’Reilly’s attack back on him by granting his premise: it’s bad to put individual desires ahead of the collective good. Fine. After chastising Mr. TB, perhaps we should continue by going after heads of corporations who pollute the environment to make a bigger profit. Maybe we need to go after people who insist they have a sacred right to own semi-automatic weapons despite the fact that guns kill thousands of Americans every year. Let’s attack those who want tax cuts for themselves at the cost of astronomical debt for future generations. Let’s go after those who oppose universal health care. And the list can go on an on and on.

Rhetorically, it’s often best to simply grant the premise of an argument and ask the one making the argument to follow it through. When the argument is as dopey as what we see from O’Reilly, the attack trips over its own feet without getting into a battle of accusations.