Ann Coulter and purposeful polarization

By Charles Austin

Published April 22, 2008

It’s taken for granted among most people that Ann Coulter is an unpleasant human being. She’s radical to the point of absurdity, and she looks like the child of an unusually ugly horse and some kind of reptile. The latter of these points is apparent on the hideous cover of her 2006 book “Godless: The Church of Liberalism,” and the former point is apparent on the inside cover flap of the same book. If readers were to read solely the cover flap and the description on the back of the book, they would think the entire premise has to be a joke. As a rational human being, it would seem likely no other rational human being could actually believe any of the things written on the outside of this book. This was basically where I stood this past summer, when I decided I owed it to myself to read at least one entire tome penned by Coulter. My reasoning was something like this: One of the greatest tragedies of our politically polarized country is no one actually takes the time to hear what anyone on the other side of the fence has to say. I think the perfect analogy for this comes to us by way of a “Home Improvement” metaphor. Tim Allen is either political party. Wilson is the other party. From behind a fence, (which, of course, only sweetens the deal of this analogy by acting as the metaphorical “something in the way” between the two parties), Wilson gives Tim his stance on whatever Tim is thinking about. This is usually reasonable advice, but then Tim takes that advice, completely misinterprets it and does something stupid. This is the constant struggle between Republicans and Democrats, syndicated for early-afternoon TV. Perhaps the only difference is that Tim is too stupid to understand Wilson, and both liberals and conservatives are just too stubborn to try to understand the other half. Keeping this in mind, I read the entirety of “Godless: The Church of Liberalism.” At times it was pretty much what I expected: outrageous rhetoric riddled with either questionable citations or no citations at all. But that’s not really my point because there was actually a lot less of that stuff than you might imagine. Occasionally, Ann Coulter had something to say that made sense. While reading the section about education in particular, I actually found myself agreeing with her more often than not. For a short while, it seemed as if the wall between conflicting political ideals had been breached, and everyone in the world were going to live together happily amid raindrops on roses and other things alluded to in the “Sound of Music.” The only problem is Ann Coulter frequently and deliberately ruins any point she tries to make. Her reasonable and logical discourse fell to pieces when she began saying public school teachers are alcoholics and child molesters “at best,” and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I completely understand Ann Coulter is trying to be funny here, but more than that, she’s trying to be as polarizing as possible. Much like Shakespeare’s character Hamlet, whether Ann Coulter is actually crazy, she wants desperately to seem crazy. This is why the most extreme rhetoric is printed on the outside of the book, and this is why she constantly backs up reasonable claims with outrageous ones. Everyone knows that extremists have conviction, and if Ann Coulter is on to anything, perhaps people like to mistake conviction for correctness.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This column originally ran on Oct. 16, 2007.