Coulter is like a distorted Tinker Bell: It’s not applause that saves her from fading out of existence, it’s shock and jeers. These days, her ability to elicit that reaction seems to be the main reason Coulter gets campus bookings in the first place. If it’s not, and if campus conservative groups have mistaken Coulter for any sort of serious or interesting thinker, than the campus right may be in even graver trouble than the campus left. Being willing to say anything deemed outrageous is not the same thing as having significant ideas.

This dynamic means that traditional protest tactics turn the people who oppose Coulter’s presence into her props. The bigger the demonstration, the louder the uproar, the more significant the threat of violence, the more proof Coulter has that she’s an exciting and dangerous figure conservatives can use to tweak liberals. If folks on the left refuse to be tweaked, much of the rationale for booking Coulter would disappear. You don’t need to fight to deny a platform to a speaker when you can, by remaining non-reactive, completely eliminate the rationale for booking her in the first place.

I understand the argument that hateful speech and serious misinformation shouldn’t be allowed to linger unchecked, like a miasma that corrupts everything it touches. But it only makes good sense to use different tactics with people who are open to debate and capable of shame, and those who, like Coulter, are essentially performance artists. And if you can’t keep silent about Coulter, the next-best thing would be to point out just how tiresome her act is.

AD

AD

Bashing Muslims, immigrants, the looks and style of liberal women, single mothers — I could go on, but why bother? — may, at various times, have placed Coulter out of the mainstream of America’s major political parties, or at odds with generally accepted politeness. But the thing about U.S. politics is that there have always been plenty of people who don’t have much regard for that mainstream. Folks have been calling feminists ugly, single mothers sinful and selfish, and immigrants a threat since there were feminists, single mothers and immigrants available to disdain. These sentiments are nasty, and it’s a shame we haven’t addressed them with both culture change and public policy, but they’re also profoundly dull.