It’s clear to me that Conor and to a lesser extent Rod don’t understand what Jamelle, Freddie, E.D., and myself have been driving at in our various critiques of reform-minded conservatism.  Conor’s misunderstanding is made apparent in this statement from his interview with Scott:

Perhaps we’re getting at what puzzles and galls me so much about recent posts at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen about how dissident conservative writers ought to conduct themselves. The notion is that these writers should assess an ideological subset of the American public, discern their sensibilities, and craft all subsequent writing so as not to offend them. What a fool’s errand. There are times when people react badly to hearing the truth plainly stated. It is a journalist’s job to tell them that truth anyway, as forthrightly and accurately as one can put it.

Although I don’t wish to speak for Freddie, Jamelle, or E.D., this seems to miss the point of our critiques entirely.

Our point has nothing to do with insisting that Conor or anyone else soft-pedal their critiques of Limbaugh, et al, although those attacks may well have the effect of making matters worse.  It certainly does not suggest that reform-minded conservatives should refrain from objecting to torture or the conduct of the War on Terror or civil liberties violations by the Bush Administration – quite the contrary, Ron Paul’s growing influence on conservatism shows that it is possible to passionately dissent without forfeiting the ability to move conservatism in your direction.  Nor do I think we are suggesting that Conor or any other specific reform-minded conservative is to blame for the current state of the Republican Party.

No, the point is that reform conservatives need to recognize that there is an ideological problem with conservatism as currently constituted as an amalgam of libertarianism, hawkishness, and religious fundamentalism that leaves modern conservatism incapable of governing well or ethically.  It is all well and good to criticize the Bush Administration or to take issue with talk radio, but until reform conservatives recognize what caused the Bush Administration’s faults and the hyper-vitriol of talk radio, they will be unable to do anything about it.

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It’s interesting to watch how conservatives and liberals treat each other.  How they categorize one another.  I’ve tried to distinguish between the two – since it seems they each have different methods of dehumanizing the other side.  I’ve boiled it down to the title of this post: caricatures and demons.

Conservatives demonize liberals, and liberals caricaturize conservatives.  And perhaps I’m picking at nits with this, but there does seem to be a difference between the two.

In popular conservative myth, liberals “hate America” and long for some neo-Stalinist socialism.  Liberals are painted as weak and yet entirely capable of running a massive state/media coup of the nation in order to redistribute wealth and impose draconian regulations and taxation on honest, hard-working Americans.  And the motivation for this?  Dread “multi-culturalism” and America hatred for hatred’s sake.

Liberals, on the other hand, act as though the loudest and most verbose of their critics in fact represent not only the conservative movement, but the very philosophy upon which conservatism draws.  Certainly the phrase “conservatism is dead” is second only to its younger cousin “rock is dead” in frequency of use.  And second, only because “rock is dead” makes for a far better t-shirt.  This supposition is drawn, often as not, from a caricaturization of the movement or philosophy based mainly on its chest-thumping class of pundits.  If Rush Limbaugh is a conservative, after all, then certainly this is how all conservatives must be – ergo, conservatism is dead.  (Man cannot live on Rush alone, after all!) [Read more →]

I read Steven Hayward’s article on intellectual conservatism with some interest, mainly because I thought Hayward – as a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute and frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard – would have enough movement credibility to convincingly argue that talk radio populists aren’t conservatism’s best standard bearers. The substance of this critique has been around for awhile, and anyone who frequents this site is probably already familiar with the case against Happy Meal Conservatism. Hayward’s article, however, seems tailor-made for a skeptical audience – unlike perennial talk radio-bashers David Frum or Andrew Sullivan,  he is incredibly (some would say overly) solicitous of the Becks and Limbaughs of the world. The piece makes no mention of Beck’s questionable history, praises his “intellectual curiosity,” and readily acknowledges the importance of conservatism’s populist roots.

So it was depressing to hear the exact same epithets that are routinely hurled at a Sullivan or a Frum directed at Hayward, who was immediately derided as elitist and out of touch with the movement’s grassroots for criticizing conservative populism. The closest I’ve come to finding an actual refutation of Hayward’s arguments is from Redstate’s Erick Erickson, who seems to have given up on defending the conservative movement’s intellectual bona fides in favor of denying that a lack of carefully thought-out policy ideas is a problem in the first place.

It is not surprising to read the Right’s vituperative reaction to, say, David Brooks’ latest column on talk radio. Whatever his faults, Brooks, at least, has never been a movement hack. But if people aren’t willing to give someone like Hayward a respectful hearing, I wonder what it will take to convince the base that following Levin, Limbaugh and Beck off a cliff isn’t a blueprint for conservative revival. At this point, one suspects that if Glenn Beck renounced his talk radio populism tomorrow, he would immediately be dismissed as a traitorous elitist.

Guess what?  Talk radio hosts and cable tv stars like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck say crazy, paranoid, flame-baiting, stupid, awful things.  Surprise!

They do it for the ratings.  It’s a ploy that is very, very successful.  It works on the right a lot better than on the left for sociological reasons beyond my understanding.  It makes the television and radio broadcasters a great deal of money.  It makes the stars a great deal of money.  And they get fantastic pulpits from which they can grind out their populist ire, churning up whatever angst or fear already exists amongst the grassroots fans who adore them.  They lie, they exaggerate, they race-bait and call names.  They represent the lowest form of debate.

And it’s high time we stopped talking about them.  [Read more →]

A few days ago Conor wrote:

[C]able news networks should ban Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin (I haven’t listened to the other hosts enough to make a judgment one way or another) — not because they are talk radio hosts, but because as radio personalities they consistently prove themselves to be intellectually dishonest, intemperate partisans whose very approach to public discourse is deeply destructive of it.

To which I replied, in the comments:

Intellectual dishonesty is not something you can scientifically pin down. One man’s intellectually dishonest pundit is another man’s political mentor. I generally don’t like these pundits, Conor, but the notion of banning them from cable news shows because you think they’re dishonest is reprehensible to me.

And, to just wrap up this lengthy quotation session, Conor, in a follow-up post asks:

I’ve got a question for E.D. and other like-minded commenters: Is there anything that would cause you to classify a political commentator like Rush Limbaugh as intellectually dishonest? What if I could demonstrate, for example, that he makes factually inaccurate statements, plays misleadingly edited audio clips, misrepresents the views of his political opponents, and uses obviously fallacious reasoning every single fortnight he is on the air, for years on end? Would that be sufficient evidence to objectively deem him intellectually dishonest, or would it still just be a matter of my opinion? Would it be sufficient to justify his exclusion from news programs?

Now, my response to this is fairly straightforward.

First off, I could care less whether or not a talk-radio pundit is intellectually dishonest.  I don’t think that disqualifies them or anyone else from appearing on a cable talk show.  I’m sure Conor could find an abundance of “misleadingly edited audio clips” for each of these talking heads, and I would even agree that these and others – including many cable TV talk show hosts – actively engage in falsity and propaganda.  Even so, that is part of political discourse.  We can’t just wish it away.  Misinformation will accompany us wherever we go. [Read more →]

Much as their blind loyalty discredited the Right, perhaps the worst effect of Limbaugh et al. has been their draining away of political energy from what might have been a much more worthwhile project: the fostering of a middlebrow conservatism. There is nothing wrong with lowbrow conservatism. It’s energizing and fun. What’s wrong is the impression fixed in the minds of too many Americans that conservatism is always lowbrow, an impression our enemies gleefully reinforce when the opportunity arises….

It does so by routinely descending into the ad hominem—Feminazis instead of feminism—and catering to reflex rather than thought. Where once conservatism had been about individualism, talk radio now rallies the mob. “Revolt against the masses?” asked Jeffrey Hart. “Limbaugh is the masses.”

In place of the permanent things, we get Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar. Gone are the internal tensions, the thought-provoking paradoxes, the ideological uneasiness that marked the early Right.

Let me first of all say that I only agree with John Derbyshire occasionally, but this is unequivocally one of those times.  The passage above is taken from his recent article at The American Conservative, and it’s not really a surprising piece given Derbyshire’s long-professed elitism, but the invective is well worth the read, nonetheless.  It also speaks a great deal to the discussion we’ve been having about “talking-points conservatism” and the realignment of the Right into what is rather regrettably little more than talk-radio populism, with a dash of unrealistic Reagan worship thrown into the mix.  Mark had termed this “talk radio dogmatism” but I think the populism label applies just as well.  Derbyshire’s “Happy Meal conservatism” may say it even better.

The talk radio shows do appear to be at the vanguard of the movement, with Rush front and center, and the Little Rush’s like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity yapping at his heels.  Perhaps this is an effective strategy, to rail against the “others” and rally the mob to your cause.  But, then again, the pundits themselves seem so mercurial, so opportunistic in their ideology, one has to wonder whether the cause is at the heart of things, or whether all this “lowbrow” talk radio is really just a matter of self-aggrandizement.  In other words, it certainly pays to go this route, as Limbaugh’s ratings show.  It’s hard to walk away from such success, even if it is wrong-headed.

I’ve always been wary of populism.  I see a fairly direct lineage between the rise of populism in the United States and the gradual strengthening of the Executive Branch, stretching all the way back to Jackson, our first “President of the People” and a man who took great care to strengthen his office, and sidestep the “middle men” in Congress.  Like some modern evangelical preacher, Jackson wanted to do away with the trappings of organizational restraint and speak directly to the masses – to be their vessel, checks and balances be damned. [Read more →]