The Arpaio pardon and the eclipsing of principle by attitude

Sheriff Joe Arpaio is an example of an outrageous figure who comes along to fill a vacuum that should have been filled by principle-driven policy. (Sort of like a certain currently sitting president.) When he first emerged on the national radar screen. illegal aliens were pouring across the southern border with impunity. Far too many US businesses were hiring them with impunity. The public was becoming aware of just how prominently illegal immigration figured into the nation's crime statistics. The underlying issues, basic rule of law and cultural cohesion, had come to the fore.

So, like many a right-of-center hothead, he found a cheering section. Those less inclined to think through what ought to happen on a broad policy-implementation level found gratification in his practices.

But we can now see that the way he went about addressing the issue was immensely harmful to the ability to persuade the general public that strong but humane measures needed to be taken.

Charlie Sykes at The Contrarian Conservative lays out the specifics:

Good cops loathe Arpaio, regarding him as a clownish fraud who defames the profession. Imagine being a cop who respects the rule of law, who has worked to convince the community that they should trust law enforcement not to engage in racial profiling or brutality. What has Trump just said to that cop? And the people he is sworn to protect?

Here are some things you need to know about Joe Arpaio, via the Phoenix New Times: 

          He ran a jail that he described as a ‘concentration camp.”

Prisoners there died at an alarming rate. Close to 160 people have died in Arpaio's jails.

Prisoners hanged themselves in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's jails at a rate that dwarfed other county lockups.

One of his jailers nearly broke the neck of a paraplegic guy who had the temerity to ask for a catheter.

One time, as a publicity stunt, he marched Latino prisoners into a segregated area with electric fencing.

He arrested New Times reporters for covering him. They won a $3.75 million settlement.

Under him, the sheriff’s department failed to investigate hundreds of sex abuse cases, many of which involved children.

But he somehow found time and money to send a deputy to Hawaii to look for Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

In 2013, a federal judge confirmed what literally everyone in Phoenix knew: he’s been racially profiling Latinos.

By 2015, his fondness for racial profiling had cost county taxpayers more than $44 million. On top of the lives he had ruined.

I’ll leave it to another time to ask how someone as bizarre and unstable could become a hero to the Right. (Obviously, it’s no mystery why Trump would admire him so much.)

How is Trump-world responding to this move?

Well, here's Kurt Schlichter's tweet about it:

The main reason for President Trump to pardon Sheriff Joe was fuck you, leftists. 

The new rules, bitches 

It's getting to where you can intuit significant things about people on social media by what they repost from figures they obviously admire. You may start out, after following or becoming friends with someone, feeling that you've found a kindred spirit. But I learned some time ago that if they start posting the rants of the likes of Tomi Lahren or Jim Hoft that you are dealing with a bonehead.

Charles U. Zug, writing at the Claremont Review of Books, spells out just how thoroughly hell-yeah tribalism has eclipsed sound, principle-based thought, distilled in the course of civil polemical exchange, in the present moment:

Flourishing democratic politics depends on modesty and curiosity: “If I am unable to persuade you, then perhaps my own position is weaker than I initially thought. At the least, I have a duty to persuade those whom I disagree with, and to examine my own arguments if they fail.” The duty to persuade forces us to seek weaknesses in our own logic, and, by the same token, to seek hidden virtue in the perspectives we oppose.

Accordingly, politics in a world without the duty of persuasion ceases to be democratic, and quickly becomes despotic and tyrannical. As ordinary experience confirms, someone who enters a conversation convinced that the political opposition is unpersuadable has no incentive to deliberate: their only incentive is to use animal passions to humiliate the intractable opposition, and then to act.

The danger that such a transformation in incentives poses should be obvious. Tyrants have killed millions in part because they did not believe their respective political situations could be ameliorated through rational deliberation. The only alternative left, they felt, was to act: “triumph of the will”—and the death of reason.

Deliberation will be an important part of our society only so long as we collectively retain a sense of proportion in politics, discerning that our grasp of the political fundamentals is incomplete, and that we always have something to learn from one another. As the deliberation-based founding of our own country proved over two centuries ago, it is precisely our incompleteness and neediness as human beings, not our brazenness and bluster, that can give rise to the most admirable and valuable political undertakings.

I really like his phrase "the duty of persuasion." Now, a Trump water-carrier might say, "Hey, we've been good and persuaded. No question he's our guy!"  But such people weren't  persuaded so much as attitudinally revved.

This pardon is yet another example of how difficult the Trump phenomenon has made things for those of us who do indeed have the better argument on a given issue. It's wrong for people from other countries to come here illegally, but gratuitously making examples of those who get caught does not bolster defense of that truth. Rather, it provides easy fodder to those who want to obscure the whole matter with charges of bigotry and authority run amok.