Right or Wrong, the GOP Sure Is Brave -- Isn't It?

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According to liberal orthodoxy, Virginia Republicans are a tremendously courageous lot.

How so? Because, in opposing an extension of unemployment benefits, they are standing up for their convictions in the face of popular opinion. That is the brave and noble thing to do, right?

When the subject is taxes, the answer almost always seems to be yes.

• Barack Obama's stand against a gas-tax holiday "qualifies as political courage," wrote The Washington Post last May.

• Obama's effort to raise taxes on hedge-fund managers and private equity firms is a "truly courageous budget move," say writers for The New Republic.

"Powerful anti-tax rhetoric has made legislators at every level of government afraid to talk publicly about a need to raise taxes," opined Robert Frank in The New York Times. Such "anti-tax rhetoric . . . is at the root of many of our current problems," and the country needs "candidates with the courage to confront it head on."

• According to former Gov. Gerald Baliles, "a hardy band of courageous 17 Republican delegates" in the General Assembly broke ranks to help pass Mark Warner's $1.4-billion tax hike.

• According to the Newark, N. J., Star-Ledger, "scrapping [property tax] rebates is the right and courageous thing to do."

• For reversing his anti-tax-hike stand a few years back, Time magazine dubbed Alabama Gov. Bob Riley "America's most courageous politician" and "the bravest chief executive in the country."

Further examples are redundant. Calling those who favor higher taxes courageous is a cliché that has become threadbare from overuse. The rhetorical reverse is also common: Support for cutting taxes is routinely denounced as craven "pandering" (e.g., "For Politicians, Tax-Cut Pandering Has Lost Its Magic" -- The Boston Globe).

Why is support for higher taxes so often termed courageous? For one thing, it's an unpopular stance that invites political peril.

BUT THAT'S not the only thing. It's not even, really, the main thing.

After all: The same clearly holds true for the unemployment-benefits vote. The House GOP's rejection of federal stimulus dollars to help the unemployed during during an hour of great need plays straight into the stereotype about heartless right-wing troglodytes ignoring the plight of the unfortunate.

And the other party is squeezing the issue for every last drop of political gain. "Democrats have been pounding the Republican-led House of Delegates and Robert F. McDonnell, the GOP's candidate for governor" over the issue, The Washington Post reported this week. "Democratic candidates are increasingly convinced that voters will see the rejection of the federal dollars as a betrayal of struggling workers . . . . The three Democrats vying in a June 9 primary to oppose McDonnell have made their outrage over the vote a standard part of their stump speeches."

Republicans have stood fast, even in the face of widespread public denunciation. By the terms of the political discourse that applies to taxes, the GOP position should be widely hailed as courageous, while the Democrats should be condemned for shameless pandering. That is not happening. And the fact that it is not reveals the pale white underbelly of the rhetoric about courage and cowardice.

COURAGE IS content-neutral. One can show just as much bravery defending a bad position as a good one. (Many soldiers of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan displayed tremendous personal valor.) Curiously, those who praise advocates of higher taxes as courageous for saying something unpopular do not apply the same standard to the House GOP. Nor do they say the same of, say, Fred Phelps -- the preacher who shows up at funerals with "God Hates Fags" signs. They don't extend the compliment to neo-Nazi skinheads who need police protection to hold a whitepower rally. Yet as despicable as Phelps and the skinheads are, they have to have guts to show their faces in public.

The widespread practice of calling tax-hike advocates courageous really isn't meant to highlight personal character at all. It's actually a surreptitious means of investing tax hikes with an aura of nobility -- a way to imply that raising taxes is the morally superior alternative, without coming right out and saying so directly.

Of course, the "courageous" meme hangs its hat on the sense that a politician is brave for saying exactly what's on his or her mind. Yet those who who employ the term to make a sly point about the virtue of tax hikes are doing just the opposite. Rather ironic, isn't it?

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.

Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or bhinkle@timesdispatch.com.