Reactionary Rhetoric

Yes from Bloomberg.com which means that the author most likely has an agenda…

IMO a very interesting discussion of the various political arguments going on across the country but primarily inside the beltway…

An article/commentary by Cass Sunstein:

Don’t Buy the Slippery-Slope Argument on Guns

In 1991, the economist Albert Hirschman published a biting, funny and subversive book, “The Rhetoric of Reaction,” whose principal goal was to provide a kind of reader’s guide to conservative objections to social reform. Hirschman wanted to demonstrate that such objections are pervasive, mechanical, routinized and often unconvincing.

Hirschman used the words “perversity” and “futility” to describe his best examples of reactionary rhetoric. Conservatives often object that reforms will turn out to be perverse, because they will have the opposite of their intended effect. For example, those who oppose increases in the minimum wage contend that such increases will worsen unemployment and thus hurt the very people they are intended to help — a clear example of perversity.

Alternatively, conservatives argue that reforms will do nothing to solve the problem that they purport to address. For example, those who oppose gun-control legislation contend that such laws will fail to decrease gun-related deaths — a clear example of futility.

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