Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

Dennis Prager nails it. I have a question for you. Many progressives believe that it is a waste of time to engage conservatives rationally. During my progressive days, I recall telling fellow graduate students that the only debates worth engaging in are between liberals and radicals. Conservatives, I said, are like cockroaches: You don't reason with them; you squash them. I've obviously changed my mind about that. But now I wonder whether it's worth it for conservatives to engage progressives. Few of them, even in the academy, are interested in the truth. They're interested in character assassination. Instead of inquiring into the grounds of views with which they disagree, they speculate about the motives of those who disagree with them, and invariably find something disreputable. Conservatives, in their view, are always motivated badly. They're bigoted, prejudiced, racist, xenophobic, sexist, nativist, war-mongering, greedy, homophobic, imperialistic, jingoistic, Islamophobic, and so forth. There is no possibility that those who spew these epithets will listen to reason. They're not interested in reason; they're interested in victory. They see the clash between conservatives and progressives not as a contest of ideas, but as a struggle for power. The end, they believe, justifies the means. As long as this is so, conservatives should seriously consider disengaging from them. This is not to say that conservatives should cease stating the grounds for their views, for that would be to abandon rationality; it is to say that they should not expect their arguments to have any effect on progressives, who have, regrettably, withdrawn from the field of reason.