Imagine that there are two people debating a subject matter. It could be any number of things – level of taxation, size of government, abortion rights, gun rights, the existence of God, whether Christianity is true or not, some point in physics or astronomy – the list is basically endless.
Now, when two people debate about a subject matter, they are supposed to stay on point, that is, stay on topic. Each side is supposed to give the reasons, the arguments, for why their point of view is correct and their opponent’s point of view is incorrect.
Sometimes, though, a person’s arguments don’t hold up to scrutiny, and don’t hold any water, and cannot stand up to the challenges of their opponent, whose arguments are superior. The more powerful debater destroys any ground upon which their weaker opponent stands, dismantles his arguments, and that weaker opponent ends up in a position where they are sinking.
The debater, whose arguments have been destroyed, in a last-ditch desperate effort to regain lost ground, redirects his energies off of the topic at hand, and focuses his attacks directly onto his opponent himself. He starts to attack his opponent’s intelligence and credentials. He questions his opponent’s ability to really debate the subject being debated. He questions his character. He calls him names.
When a person goes off-topic, and starts attacking his opponent directly, rather than staying on-topic, this is referred to as an ad hominem attack.
“Ad hominem” literally means, in Latin, to “attack the man” (or person). If you attack ad hominem, you are attacking the person who presents an argument rather than debating the argument itself. This is a bad form of reasoning, which is irrational, because the person offering the argument has no bearing on the validity and quality of the argument, unless the person is actually appealing to his or her own authority on the issue being discussed.
An Example
It appears that the whole “racism is everywhere” motif, particularly the portion of that motif that is directed towards the Republicans being racist, is nothing more than an ad hominem attack – especially since all the things they accuse Republicans of were actually done historically by the Democratic party. It appears the left, and the left-leaning media, call people – especially those that identify as Republicans – “racist” as an ad hominem attack. The political left knows that they have no ground to stand on, and that their arguments no longer hold water, that their policies and programs actually hurt the black people, and worsen systemic racism in the country, and that their arguments to try to defend them are inferior to the arguments of those who disagree with them and expose their programs and policies for the anti-black schemes that they are.
They especially go after those on the political right, and so they have launched a massive ad hominem attack, with ever more tentacles that encompass more and more of our society, and cause more and more division and hate, to attack their opponents on such a massive scale that it’s reached fever pitch. It seems they won’t stop until society destroys itself. They really liked to launch ad hominem attacks on President Trump when he was president – it seems like every ten minutes, they are, once again, calling him “racist” rather than giving counterarguments to the President’s challenges. (Seriously, I think “carrot-face” would be way more fun than “racist” when it comes to name-calling…)
And who is at the center of this whole thing? Who gets hurt the most? The black community. The black family. The African American. They get hurt the most in this whole ordeal. The political left doesn’t care about them – they’re fully content in using them for their own political benefit, all at the expense of the black people. It wouldn’t matter to them if their programs completely wiped out the black family and left the black community in a more ruinous state than it already is in – they would manage to turn the whole story around by telling the black people that they will take care of them in their sorry state (that they created), that their deprecated place is continued proof of how much society, especially the political right, wants to hold them down (no, only the political left), and that those opposed to their treachery are the real racists (no, their opponents are just trying to stop the anti-black nonsense being pushed by the left) – thus continuing the ad hominem attacks.
Anyways, now that you know what an ad hominem attack is, you can practice discernment, and look out for this ploy in political arguments.
