America's Slippery Slope to Nowhere

The most inadequate and even destructive policies in American government are spooned down our throats through a decades-old political lever known as the “slippery-slope” argument. Today, it’s employed indiscriminately by idea-deprived politicians who have no other arguments in their arsenals.

The slippery slope demands that you and I accept, without evidence, that giving an inch to our political adversaries is equal to cratering our core aims and values. Beyond imposing impossible expectations on a democracy of 300 million people, the slippery slope gives all the power to extremists.  It chokes progress and sucks the trust out of public institutions, private enterprises, communities of faith, and, more recently, friendships and families.  

 

The slippery slope offers a false choice between protecting our right to form a militia and preventing kids from being murdered in school. It tells us that the best way to protect the innocence of children is by shouting at each other over Shakespeare and Laura Ingalls Wilder in police-protected PTA meetings.  It insists that we cannot build a long-term plan to diversify our energy sources without first pitting Americans against each other over Teslas, windmills, and oil rigs in national parks.

 

Thanks to the partisan mentality fueled by slippery slope arguments, America stands out as the only nation that funds mental health through a gun bill.  Our government is incapable of working out a rational, actionable review of what did and did not go well in our response to the global COVID crisis until it completes televised hearings on who screwed America.  After a lifetime of protecting the opposing slippery slopes of abortion, the confused and devastated families of raped and pregnant 12-year-olds finally need answer only one simple question about their options: Which state was she raped in?  (Some hail this as a win for all concerned.)

 

Have you ever heard a slippery slope argument and wondered, “Does that make sense?”  Why not consider a second question: “What do I think?”  

 

The ugly truth is that the purveyors of slippery slopes do not want us to think.  At the top of every slope is a slope-lord who stands smugly by as we protect his interests or fortunes.  His bread is buttered with our division, discontent, and misery.  Broadcast news  organizations now offer coverage by slippery slope type.  The slope-lords have even capitalized massive social media machines that enable 50-year-olds to defend slippery slopes in seething arguments with friends from elementary school. They dare you to inject any common sense or public safety into their model so they can berate you publicly for going down the slippery slope of their First Amendment rights. 

 

As a result of our slippery slope government, free nations around the world are worried sick that the beacon of democracy is becoming rigidly incapable of solving problems featuring even the slightest nuances.  In America, they see a destabilizing partner that is prone to do an about-face on just about every global issue every four to eight years.  For some of them, it is reminiscent of calamitous eras in their countries.  Who would ever have ever expected this from America?

 

Should our nation ever go into a complete free-fall – and some argue we already have — it will not be because any of us failed to protect fictional slopes.  It will be because we failed to hold the line on common sense and civility while giving ourselves over to deceitful special interests.  

Vance Meyer is a husband and father whose real worries about America cannot be captured in tweets and memes.