The Good: The writing uses decent grammar and spelling . . . There are citations.
The Bad: Flawed premise, Terrible arguments, Generalizations that are ridiculous used to establish arguments.
The Basics: In her latest, Ann Coulter preaches to her choir that liberals are a bunch of idiotic pack animals in Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.
In the past when I have reviewed a work of Ann Coulter's, I have spent an inordinate amount of time simply arguing against her latest rants, theories or arguments. With her latest, Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America, I have vowed not to do that, if for no other reason than refuting the 295 page (355 after the citations and index) book would be a book or two in and of itself. But more than anything else, Demonic is a much easier volume of Coulter's literature to refute because the basic premise is so overblown and contrived as to make the arguments that follow it - and some of them are well reasoned if one accepts the initial, deeply flawed, premise - collapse under the weight of that initial assessment.
So I shall start instead by thanking Ann Coulter. Coulter caused me to learn a new word. On page 5 of Demonic, she writes "They [liberals] stage campaigns of calumny to get their way on gay marriage." "Campaigns of calumny" is pretty decent alliteration, but I had honestly never heard the word "calumny" before, so I had to look it up. Calumny, as it turns out, is libel or slander. So, I got to thinking, who did the Gay Rights Movement smear in order to get marriage equality? They called out the Reactionary Right for creating a separate and unequal legal situation and demanded it be rectified. They identified the problem correctly, identified the adversary who was perpetrating the problem and sought to end the injustice. I cannot come up with a single instance that liberals, gays, lesbians and/or bisexuals or Unitarians (for whom gay marriage has been legal for pretty much ever and it was a matter of church and state to have the discrimination) smeared anyone while trying to get the right.
Regardless, I learned a new word by reading Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America and I suppose there is some value to that. Unfortunately, the book that followed was a painfully inept argument that equates being a liberal with being a dumb sheep who follows only mob reasoning. Her thesis is made explicit rather late in the book when Coulter brazenly declares "Liberals are people whose entire lives are consumed with following the crowd" (260). Such a dramatic oversimplification is so easy to debase that it almost makes the rest of the review of the book utterly pointless.
I am a liberal, proudly, and I am not like any other liberal I know. Moreover, none of the liberals I know are nearly as monolithic as Coulter makes them out to be. Coulter buys into the stereotype - and perpetrates the stereotype popular among many conservatives who seek to demonize liberals - that liberals are all baby-killing, gun-hating, anti-capitalist, queers who hate the family, god, freedom and America. In fact, one of the most preposterous lines in Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America is when Coulter declares "Democrats disdain Americans, so unlike the Europeans they fetishize. . . " (187). Since when are Democrats not Americans?! I'm a liberal and I don't fetishize the Europeans. In fact, the only European elements I truly admire are the ones where European nations followed the model of the United States and rebelled against tyranny and then continued to fight for freedom, liberty and a sense of cultural responsibility, which is something many liberals, like myself, believe the United States has lost. That does not make us less American, if anything, it makes us more!
But to go back to the fundamental issue with Ann Coulter and Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America, Coulter equates Democrats with liberals (very few of us liberals actually look at the Democratic Party as the bastion of liberal philosophy anymore) and then makes many of her arguments equating the two interchangeably (and ridiculously). While she makes many arguments using historic examples - and distant ones - her equating Democrats and liberals alternates from the improbable to the ridiculous. So, for example, pages 260 and 261 are consumed with a joke David Letterman made wherein he mistook Willow Palin for Bristol Palin and made a date rape joke using the baseball player Alex Rodriguez. This entire absurd argument about how banal the joke is and how utterly wrong it was is relevant only if one accepts the premises that: 1. David Letterman (and/or his writers) are liberal, 2. Liberals actually found the joke or David Letterman funny and/or 3. Liberals are unable to distinguish between humor and fact and good humor and bad humor. My point here is that Coulter in Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America uses examples like tired humor from people utterly unconnected with Democrats or liberal philosophy and then tries to turn the bad humor on Democrats and liberals with examples of how she could write jokes in equally bad taste.
But to go back to the basic idea, liberals are not monophilosophical, like they are presented in Demonic: How The Liberal Mob Is Endangering America. I'm not necessarily for the legalization of marijuana, I'm not for the death penalty - though I make exceptions for serial sexual predators - and unlike Coulter's assertion on page 103, I love my wood-burning fireplace. Check it out, I reviewed it here! Coulter declaring what liberals like and dislike is akin to me declaring that all capitalists are obsessed with one flavor of ice cream. I am able to easily make the distinction, but Coulter does not seem to be. I, for example, am able to distinguish between truly evil people and those who just are not on my side. Coulter is not, like when calls Janeane Garofalo one of ". . . the world's most fiendish tyrants. . ." (29). And while with some writers, that might seem like evidence of a sense of humor or irony, but she is so straightlaced in her narrative throughout that she declares Garofalo a nemesis just the way she treats other liberals.
In addition to the way the book predicates so many false premises on inapt analogies, Coulter skews her own arguments. Demonic follows on Coulter's long tradition of fighting for gun owner's rights. Coulter, a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, has made the argument frequently that gun user's are responsible for their actions. However, she conveniently changes her position when it comes to blaming a liberal, as she does when she states "Angela Davis, former Black Panther, was the legal owner of the guns the Panthers used to blow off the head of Marin County judge Harold Haley in an attempt to free Davis's boyfriend, George Jackson. Today she is a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz" (170). The distinction here is all-important: in other works and arguments, she despises "guilt by association" and yet here she tries to equate Davis as a murderer because she owned guns that were used in a crime. Why shouldn't Davis be a teacher? She didn't kill anyone!
Demonic is a long series of arguments that pit Republicans as heroes, Democrats as evil, declaring "Republicans are the party of peaceful order [tell that to an Iraqui!]; Democrats are the party of noisy, violent mobs" (295). If you buy that oversimplification, then Demonic might work out for you. It doesn't work out for me and despite her many ridiculous statements on liberals, like me, like her assertion on 249, I would not like to be punched in the face for any reason. Reading Demonic is like getting punched in the face for anyone with a sense of reason.
For other books by Ann Coulter, please check out my reviews of:
Guilty: Liberal “Victims” And Their Assault On America
If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
Godless: The Church Of Liberalism
How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must): The World According To Ann Coulter
Treason: Liberal Treachery From The Cold War To The War On Terrorism
Slander: Liberal Lies About The American Right
High Crimes And Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton
1.5/10
For other book reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!
© 2011 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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