CAMBRIA, CA -- It is always nice to escape to the Paso Robles Wine Festival this time of year, the more so after having spent two long days at a mainstream public policy conference on land use and environmental issues in Los Angeles. Seldom have I needed the comforts of the grape more.

It is not the opinions I disagree with that get me worked up these days. Rather, it is the soft jargon that is increasingly used to shroud fundamental disagreement the way Novocain is used to deaden a tooth. Nothing is more common these days than to hear someone offer the peroration, "This is not about A versus Z (A and Z representing the opposing viewpoints on an issue); it is about finding common ground to solve the problem and move us forward together; it is about embracing consensus rather than conflict; dialogue instead of argument, blah, blah, blah." Of course, the matter is about A versus Z; common ground, consensus, and dialogue are mere balms to disguise this unfriendly fact. The pervasive appeal to such watery sentiments are examples of our tendency to let clichés do our thinking for us (as in, "We need a paradigm shift").

Increasingly it seems that America has become one vast 12-step program. To borrow the pop vocabulary, we seem to be obsessing over Happy-Talk, and in denial about our real disagreements. (Though in denial usually indicates the healthy resistance ordinary people have to elitist agendas, as in "the people are in denial about the need for higher taxes. . .")

On the surface it might seem that this softness of language is merely a hyperextension of the civility we are supposedly so short of these days. But in fact these linguistic evasions serve a liberal agenda, for they cause a kind of rhetorical disarmament that makes effective resistance to nonsense extremely difficult. The "consensus/ dialogue" is always about how far we should move to the Left, and seldom the other way around. But if you stand publicly for argument instead of dialogue, for conflict instead of consensus, people who are increasingly conditioned to respond to Happy-Talk will instantly think you are a Bad Person.

As Churchill remarked, "What is the good of speaking one language if you can't put your differences to each other plainly?" His great successor Margaret Thatcher put the matter even more directly, decrying consensus as "the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner `I stand for consensus'?"

-By Steven Hayward