The Good: There are end notes citing her sources
The Bad: Intellectually sloppy, Broad generalizations, Factual errors, Not witty, funny and seldom interesting
The Basics: Any hope Ann Coulter had of making a cognizant or convincing argument of liberal ineptitude and conservative heroism in dealing with Communism is gutted by her omission/distortion of facts in Treason.
The more I read of Ann Coulter’s works and the more I write about them, the more I feel like my reviews are becoming repetitive. I mean, there are only so many times one may write "intellectually dishonest," "logical fallacy," and/or "disingenuous" in the space of a week and still feel any passion behind it. So, I'm going to avoid becoming too repetitive in my reviews by beginning my review of Treason: Liberal Treachery From The Cold War To The War On Terrorism (henceforth simply referred to as Treason) by acknowledging three things:
1. The reason I find myself repeating myself in my reviews of different work by Ann Coulter is that she repeats many of the same arguments, makes many of the same mistakes and utilizes many of the same logical fallacies (errors in debating tactics) throughout her various books. Indeed, the high point of Treason for me had to be finishing the book and realizing that while Coulter had referenced Senator Edward Kennedy in four places, she had not called him a drunkard or referenced the death she attributes to him as a result of drunk driving. There are some small miracles here.
2. After reading so many works of Ann Coulter in such a short span of time, I've begun to have a recurring daydream (it's a moneymaking scheme actually) where I have a talk show with Ann Coulter and I'm paid $100 every time she commits an ad hominem attack (that's simple name calling, attacking the person making a point instead of the point they are making) on anyone. By the end of my first week of this fantasy talk show, I'm completely solvent with all my creditors and pretty much set for life. One of Coulter's most severe problems is that even in a book like Treason where she is attempting to apply a thesis to United States history, she cannot seem to resist such puerile tactics as ad hominem. It ought to be beneath her, it ought to be something conservatives shy away from Coulter for; they deserve better and they do not get it in her hands.
3. I'm beginning to find Ann Coulter funny. Seriously, if you read enough of her works and truly get her written voice in your head, it's hard not to laugh at what you're reading on the page. Honestly, sometimes, when something is so monolithic and all-encompassing, it has to make one laugh because otherwise one ends up just hating everyone and everything.
Let me explain.
Treason is a new take on the history of the United States from the end of World War II through 2003 when the book was published. The thesis of the text is simple enough and made explicit by Ann Coulter in the opening lines of the book when she writes, "Liberals has a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason. You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position" (1). Neglecting for a moment that America as a nation has never established a firm position one way or another on Scrabble for one to take an anti-American position on it, Coulter's use of tremendous generalizations like that plague the entire book. Liberals are always the enemy, they are always anti-American and they are always wrong in Coulter's explicit world view as laid out in Treason.
And what do we have to back this up? Coulter's word. The opening paragraph of Treason continues with Coulter declaring "Everyone says liberals love America, too. No they don't" (1). Well argued, Ann. It's hard not to sit down to Treason and find oneself thoroughly turned around. After all, if Ann Coulter declares that everyone says or does something, it must be true. And Coulter's take on liberals is so brazenly grand in its scale one feels they must acknowledge instantly that she is absolutely right.
The problems - begun here on the very first pages of Treason - are that Coulter never establishes what makes a liberal, what constitutes an "American" position, what constitutes treason (her definition seems to be a pretty loose concept of anything she deems un-American) and what makes a patriot. Coulter's definition of liberal seems to be synonymous with Democrat and the troubling extension of this is that she appears to define the power of liberals as that of the President of the United States of any given time (except when it is liberals interfering with Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan).
More troubling is Coulter's lack of definition of what makes a position American or not. Coulter makes disturbingly broad statements that are factually suspect because she seems to equate patriotism with war, like when she discusses the lead-up to the war in Iraq by saying, ". . . liberals were constantly admitting that it was the Democratic position to root against America" (224). This is one of Coulter's many, many uncited assertions throughout Treason. Democrats were opposing the war resolution, which Coulter discusses in depth in the paragraph that precedes that. In her methodology, opposing war is being anti-American and that is a leap of logic that is pretty much an intellectual long jump record. Not wanting to rush into a war, regardless of political ideology, is hardly un-American; it's responsible. Even George W. Bush believes that or else he wouldn't have asserted on many occasions leading up to the war in Iraq that all other options had been exhausted. Coulter wants it both ways, her heroic version of George Bush overcoming the obstructionist footdraggers without acknowledging the fundamental reasonability of others asking "Are we sure?" when Bush declares "we have to strike now." (That's not a direct quote).
But that's leaping to pretty much the end of Treason. Treason is a lopsided view of history of the last sixty years that blames Democratic presidents for the rise of Communism, the failure of their containment policy, and the failure to stop it from spreading within the United States. This vision is pitted against the patriotic efforts of Republican presidents and Senators who root out and destroy Communism at home and abroad. As a result, Coulter engages in any number of logical fallacies as she explores history from the end of World War II through the beginning of the War In Iraq.
But the more I read into Coulter's Treason and its take on liberal apologists for Communism, her adolations of Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and of the many lies liberals tell about conservatives and Republicans in regard to this history, I began to wonder why Coulter did not start at the beginning. Karl Marx is mentioned in passing on two occasions, The Communist Manifesto is absent from the text altogether, and there is absolutely no differentiation made between Communism and Stalinism. This allows Coulter to ask if, in relation to Communists "Aren't the dreams of murderous dictators, gulags, and death camps at least comparable in evil to segregated lunch counters" (193)? Coulter, like many high school student (I know, I've taught many of them!) is confusing Communism, which is an economic system, with totalitarian dictatorship, which is a political system. Communists in the United States and in many other parts of the world abhorred Soviet dictatorship while still supporting the principles of Communism. Communism, according to Marx and Engel (who do not appear in Treason), is what capitalism evolves into; there is no correlation in Communism with military dictatorship. The only correlation has been in the practical application of it in many of the places in the world that never had an overbearing capitalist system to evolve into Communism (in other words, Communism was a forced change there).
And this led me to wonder why Coulter's history starts where it does, with World War II. For sure, she blames Democratic president Woodrow Wilson for Russia falling to the Communists and becoming the Soviet Union and is forced to acknowledge that Republican president Coolidge let the Soviet Union expand (155) - interestingly in Coulter's version of history, the Soviet Union did nothing during the brief Harding presidency. But for all of her praise of the military force used against the Communists around the world Coulter fails to address the biggest failure of a Republican president in her own criteria of might-makes-right and force-ended-Communism argument:
A Republican was president when Lenin died.
Lenin died and the Soviet Union was in political chaos as he left no distinct successor. The result was a political freefall until Stalin seized control. The point here - and one that Coulter never deigns to address - is that the Soviet Union was never in a weaker position than when Lenin died and if Communism was as all-encompassingly evil as Coulter claims that it was (and evidently was from its very inception) and military might was truly the patriotic way to combat this evil, then it was a Republican president who dropped the ball.
As a result of her simply neglecting arguments that inconveniently refute the truths she purports - like liberals being weak and indecisive in the face of warmongering and the Communist threat - Coulter undermines her whole argument's credibility. So, too, does she undermine her credibility with statements that are simply not true. While Treason is riddled with them, my favorite comes on page 211 when in discussing the build up to war in Iraq, Coulter declares, "The idea that America would be transgressing the laws of man and God by invading Iraq - unless and until Saddam nukes Manhattan - was absurd" (211). Well, actually, on the "laws of man" part, Coulter's adherence to her literal interpretation of the Constitution has to be questioned; after all in the Constitution when a treaty is ratified, it becomes the law of the land, and the U.S. ratified the U.N. charter which has very specific rules for beginning a war. And under those rules, invading Iraq would be illegal. As for the God part, and this is why this quote is my favorite, Coulter backs herself into a position that forces her to either contradict herself or make a mockery of her perceptions of the use of the U.S. military. In the closing pages to one of her later books, Godless, she declares that the Bible is an absolute document, that it is not a living document and that the strength of her faith comes from being bound to rules that do not change. Well, one of those rules is "Thou shalt not kill." That's an absolute, it's one of the big ten. Now, Coulter either needs to accept that an invasion of Iraq would have likely transgressed that law of God's or convince her readers that she had a good faith belief that if the United States military invaded Iraq, there would be no deaths as a result.
It's hard not to snicker at that, but Coulter puts the argument out there. For the record, there is a wonderful bit in the documentary The Crusades on how Pope Urban X convinced the honorable Christians who would not fight and begin the wars that became the Crusades that what God meant by "Thou shalt not kill" was that it applied only to other Christians. But then, that's not the Bible and if the Bible is not a living document and its words are absolute as Coulter has declared, then her own statement is either a blatant falsehood or based on the utterly ridiculous premise that a United States military action would not involve death. Either way, it is one of many, many easy-to-spot factual errors throughout the book.
And beyond that, Coulter degenerates into her most profoundly immature ad hominem attacks in any of her works. On page 205, she refers to Al Gore as "Al Bore," which one suspects must make her scholarly conservative readers looking for an interesting case against liberals just shudder. Coulter's name-calling and modifying objective statements with editorializing and biased phrases guts her credibility and clouds her case (her description of Jimmy Carter on page 15 is particularly unscholarly).
So too does her neglect of another significant thing: after deriding Liberals for their policies of containment and their flirtations with Communism, Coulter brushes off the most significant pre-Reagan concession to Communism the United States made. Coulter repeatedly notes that "Republican presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover refused to recognize the Soviet regime (though Franklin Roosevelt's very first diplomatic act as president was to grant the USSR diplomatic recognition . . .)" (51). She seems particularly disgusted by Roosevelt acknowledging the Soviet Union's existence, repeating it throughout the book - like on page 155 - as if acknowledging the USSR somehow made it more real. But after half the text of Coulter complaining about the weak Democratic president who acknowledged the USSR, there's a scant mention that "Nixon imposed wage and price controls, established relations with Communist China, engaged in detente with the Soviet Union . . ." (197). It's such a non-issue that a Republican president is acknowledging the most populous Communist nation on Earth that Coulter sandwiches it in between two other points! Like Nixon, Carter engaged the USSR in detente - and produced measurable results like the beginnings of nuclear disarmament - yet that policy when Carter practices it makes him a "failure" (139). This double standard is something that will trouble readers who are looking for a coherent argument that is well made and well cited.
As yet another example of the bias that riddles Treason, there is something particularly grating about Coulter's references to the Iranian hostage crisis at the end of Jimmy Carter's term. This is one of the many events she cites as being a black mark against the liberals, but with this, like many other parts of the book, she fails to acknowledge significant aspects of the event. She does not, for example even note that while the American hostages were held for 444 days, they all were returned home alive; Carter's diplomacy worked. And while she attributes the release of the final hostages on the day of Reagan's inauguration, she refuses to acknowledge that it was Carter's efforts that secured their release (not some magic Reagan action - he was off getting inaugurated!). Carter, by the way, details those final hours meticulously in his memoirs Keeping Faith (reviewed here!).
This work does have citations, but they are few and far between and almost none of them are associated with her most venomous commentary, which pervades the 292 pages of text. There are conservative voices that make strong, articulate arguments about the failures of our nation in dealing with threats like Communism, but none of them are as monolithic as Ann Coulter is in Treason. These are complex issues and they are nuanced and the collapse of Communism was a process spanning both Republican and Democratic Presidential Administrations and Congresses. It's not as simple as Coulter wants to make it seem.
But if she did, one wonders why she declares Reagan the great victor in vanquishing Soviet Communism and never mentions the efforts of Congressman Charlie Wilson (now immortalized in the based-on-true-events film Charlie Wilson's War, reviewed here!). Oh yeah, he was a Democrat.
It's unfortunate when the argument is buggered by those pesky facts.
For other books by Ann Coulter, please check out m reviews of:
Guilty: Liberal “Victims” And Their Assault On America
How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must)
Slander
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, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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