Advocacy's Limits

It may have been Learned Hand who said that an obligation of an attorney is to tell the client when that he is making a damned fool of himself.

That concept seems to have been lost over the years. Blind advocacy and the ascribing of terrible motives to the other side are far too common. The Far Right demonized Clinton and the Far Left demonizes Bush. The other side cannot simply be wrong, it must be evil.*

Television adds to the climate of advocacy with news analysis programs in which seasoned advocates talk over one another and where precious little time is devoted to analysis. Even when an allegedly balanced approach is presented, there is often an unequal matching of opponents.

The role of the advocate is not merely to advocate, but to be persuasive. That last part is often missed as people continue to push their arguments when the best approach would be to acknowledge when the other side makes a valid point.

You can find similar behavior in workplaces where the attitude of "He may be a weasel but he's our weasel." Management doesn't deserve kneejerk support and the idea that no picket line should ever be crossed is ludicrous.

Advocacy has a role to play but achieving some restraint in its use is a key step toward building credibility.

[*One of the drawbacks to this loose usage is that it dilutes the stigma of evil. There are some truly evil folks out there. President Reagan shook up the intelligentsia when he called the Soviet Union an "evil empire," but it was indeed both evil and an empire.]