The art of argument has a lot of tools. One of them I loathe: the personal attack. Paul Krugman, a partisan Democrat, is a master of the ad hominem. I’ve taken issue with him before.
I’m reading a book of his, 1994’s Peddling Prosperity, for a class right now. Early on (p.23), there is a textbook use of personal attack to distract the reader from the matter at hand. Here, Krugman accuses someone of racism to discredit their main point, which has nothing to do with race:
In 1981 Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan uttered a startling pronouncement: “The Republicans,” he declared, “are now the party of ideas.” Moynihan was and is a moderate Democrat. He once served in the Nixon administration, and he earned the ire of many 1960s liberals both by his willingness to talk about the disintegration of black families and by his authorship of a leaked memo suggesting that the race issue be treated with “benign neglect.”
Moynihan’s “benign neglect” memo is despicable. But it has nothing to do with whether or not the GOP had creative ideas in the early 1980s.
Sadly, the average reader won’t see past that. They will take Moynihan’s wrongness on racial issues to mean he is automatically wrong on anything else he says.
Ah, distraction. When you don’t feel like constructing a strong argument, simply distract the reader. Maybe they won’t notice.
Inertia Wins! 