As a tactic, shouting and bullying is the abandon of sane interchange, a forfeit of thoughtful interchange. Some truly disciplined debaters can manage to maintain their cool under those conditions. but such aplomb is rare under that kind of verbal abuse.
Shouting and bullying is now de rigueur, the norm for conservatives who tactically use the shout-down as the method for control of the platform. Some in the far left use it, too, but to less effect, probably because the left and left center is soft-hearted and not well moved by this hard-edged language and behavior.
The method has a few dimensions: bitterness, confusion and redirection, volume, the personality cult, contextomy, and so on. The main objective is to manipulate emotions.
The most powerful attribute employed is the leveraging of those tactics by the full extent of liberal freedoms we Americans enjoy.
If you think about it, that is truly the American way: Take available resources and employ them fully to gain advantage, promote the cause, and coach the team on to “victory.” Think deflategate.
In this case conservatives employ American liberal freedoms to further the anti-liberal cause.
It works when the opponent is unwary or otherwise falls into the traps set by this inventive, very American approach to problem solving. It does not work on those who can manage rational evaluation.
Is it scary for someone who sees it in action? That depends. If you “believe” these actions are widespread and are valid, I suppose you could convince yourself that the hazards/risks of a number of unhappy outcomes could precipitate.
For the sake of your inner peace, keep this in mind: When you forfeit your feelings to the machinations of another, or of some foreign fabulation (i.e., originating outside your own direct experience or mind) you give away most of your power to whatever emotive response that fabulator can elicit in you.
In the case where you may have fallen for this gambit, and may have been moved to fear or bad feeling, a rational justification of your feelings needs to occur to return to peace of mind. That is, one must evaluate the actual magnitude and extent of the threat.
Without direct personal experience of those actions or persons, the fear is based on what is merely a fable, a conflation leveraged by the perpetrators of the method in order to further confuse and manage the emotions of their mark: you.
A bully has to talk a big game, has to push around and intimidate and act bigger than he is, to provide self-assurance and to ‘lead’ his small band of recruits bent on taking down their imagined foe. America has bred this foe-creation/foe-destruction pattern as a militant method to manage everything from corporate and civil initiatives to military operations.
Applied to political objectives, though, it looks scary to some.
Once again, apply rational and objective reason.
How many people or even organizations (news sources, citizens groups) do you actually know who harbor those “scary” behaviors? When most people get right down to it, it is nil. A fable.
Chances are, you can count them on one finger.
Christopher Lucero
Saugus