Last week in GOP triage punditry
It's not clear what precipitated this convergence, but the opinion pages of the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post all devoted space last weekend to op-eds ruminating on contemporary conservatism. For those who missed this odd confluence of punditry, here's a quick wrap-up.
In the LA Times last Friday, Ted Kennedy biographer Neal Gabler wrote that the conservative movement's ideological rigidity of late bears all the trappings of religion. An excerpt:
I don't mean "religious belief" literally. This transformation is less a function of the alliance between Protestant evangelicals, their fellow travelers and the right (though that alliance has had its effect) than it is a function of a belief in one's own rightness so unshakable that it is not subject to political caveats. In short, what we have in America today is a political fundamentalism, with all the characteristics of religious fundamentalism and very few of the characteristics of politics. ...
The tea-baggers who hate President Obama with a fervor that is beyond politics; the fear-mongers who warn that Obama is another Hitler or Stalin; the wannabe storm troopers who brandish their guns and warn darkly of the president's demise; the cable and talk-radio blowhards who make a living out of demonizing Obama and tarring liberals as America-haters -- these people are not just exercising their rights within the political system. They honestly believe that the political system -- a system that elected Obama -- is broken and only can be fixed by substituting their certainty for the uncertainties of American politics.
Read responses to Gabler's piece here and here.
Also on Friday, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that voters don't share with media and GOP elites the obsession over fringe-radio archetypes such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Although Brooks' piece explicitly targets GOP brass for giving too much weight to shock-jocks, I read his piece as a veiled defense of the common conservative voter. An excerpt:
Yet the imaginary armies do not materialize. McCain wins the South Carolina primary and goes on to win the nomination. The talk jocks can’t even deliver the conservative voters who show up at Republican primaries. They can’t even deliver South Carolina! ...
So the myth returns. Just months after the election and the humiliation, everyone is again convinced that Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and the rest possess real power. And the saddest thing is that even Republican politicians come to believe it. They mistake media for reality. They pre-emptively surrender to armies that don’t exist.
Last up is conservative scholar Stephen F. Hayward, whose Op-Ed article in the Washington Post on Sunday seems to be an amalgam of the ideas expressed by Gabler and Brooks. Hayward writes that the conservative movement benefits from the provocative populists in its ranks, but in the past the Hannity- and Limbaugh-types were counterbalanced by such serious conservative intellectuals as Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley Jr. Today, that balance tilts decisively toward the populists and needs an intellectual counterweight. He finds hope in (wait for it) Glenn Beck. An excerpt from Hayward:
Conspicuously missing, however, are the intellectual works. The bestseller list used to be crowded with the likes of Friedman's "Free to Choose," George Gilder's "Wealth and Poverty," Paul Johnson's "Modern Times," Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind," Charles Murray's "Losing Ground" and "The Bell Curve," and Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man." There are still conservative intellectuals attempting to produce important work, but some publishers have been cutting back on serious conservative titles because they don't sell. (I have my own entry in the list: a two-volume political history titled "The Age of Reagan." But I never expected the books to sell well; at 750 pages each, you can hurt yourself picking them up.) ...
The case of Glenn Beck, Time magazine's "Mad Man," is more interesting. His on-air weepiness is unmanly, his flirtation with conspiracy theories a debilitating dead-end, and his judgments sometimes loopy (McCain worse than Obama?) or just plain counterproductive (such as his convoluted charge that Obama is a racist). Yet Beck's distinctiveness and his potential contribution to conservatism can be summed up with one name: R.J. Pestritto.
Pestritto is a young political scientist at Hillsdale College in Michigan whom Beck has had on his TV show several times, once for the entire hour discussing Woodrow Wilson and progressivism. He is among a handful of young conservative scholars, several of whom Beck has also featured, engaged in serious academic work critiquing the intellectual pedigree of modern liberalism. Their writing is often dense and difficult, but Beck not only reads it, he assigns it to his staff. "Beck asks me questions about Hegel, based on what he's read in my books," Pestritto told me. Pestritto is the kind of guest Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity would never think of booking.
Which view comes closest to yours: The politics-as-religion analysis offered by Gabler, or Brooks' claim that Republican shock-jocks receive too much attention from GOP and media brass? Can Glenn Beck save the Republican Party? Or is the conservative movement on the right track? Post your comments below.
IMHO the conservative right is displaying all the signs of panic. I can't help but hear the pitiful cry of dying ducks when I listen to beck, hannity, o'brien, et al. Their power has been usurped. Their arguments (single payer equals socialism, or worse, communism, for e.g.) reflect desperation and yes, they are dangerous precisely because they are mortally wounded. In the meantime, most Americans, myself included are disgusted by the recent turn of events: Wall Street, Congress and the abysmal, lumbering pace of government. The movement for more self-sufficiency among the states has been increasing--why wait for Washington when we've got stellar private research centers that can partner with our state's climate agenda, for e.g. (think western states)? It's called decentralization--oddly enough, it seems that only the left is hoping for more government ('single payer' health care) these days.
Posted by: Tara | October 05, 2009 at 02:15 PM
This is not about politics. It's about right and wrong and it's not the right that you are being conditioned to think about when you read the term right. Retired veterans in their late 60's, 70's, and 80's are weeping all over this country and asking why they spent their lives doing what they did for nothing.
This is about saving the country and the country is not the federal government. It is the people. The government has evolved into nothing more than a protection racket running one RICO protection scheme after another that, instead of protecting the country, serves only to strip it of its wealth and freedom while feeding the elite at the top of the food chain. We are on one side and the democrats and the republicans are aligned on the other.
Posted by: Web Smith | October 05, 2009 at 04:20 PM
Great piece right on the Mark !!!
Our country has real serious problems and I'm suprized that the dialoge is so silly from the right! Hopefully these observations will be taken to heart and addressed.
Posted by: Davey | October 05, 2009 at 09:27 PM
You are aware that Glenn Beck is not a Republican? Glenn Beck used to go after George W. Bush a year ago. Glenn Beck is an Independent who is going after corruption at the whitehouse and so far he has exposed it. Glenn Beck is not a Republican.
Posted by: Frank Campo | October 06, 2009 at 01:36 AM
and this quote from Neil Gabler, who used to be on Fox News, that the conservative movement's ideological rigidity of late bears all the trappings of religion. An excerpt:
Perhaps the single most profound change in our political culture over the last 30 years has been the transformation of conservatism from a political movement, with all the limitations, hedges and forbearances of politics, into a kind of fundamentalist religious movement, with the absolute certainty of religious belief.
I guess the Left has not noticed the Cult of Obama. There was even a video of Leftist minsters replacing God's name with Obamas;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzp-a9zH1-Y
See for yourself.
Posted by: Frank Campo | October 06, 2009 at 01:47 AM
I hear time and again about the huge listening audience the blowhard Limbaugh has, and how much influence he weilds. He calims a 20,000,000 audience daily, others claim it is actually 7,000,000. Let's face it - even if 20 million people in America line up at the Lush's kool-aid trough, there are 280,000,000 that do not. In terms of influence, that is hardly anything at all. O'Really, Speck and Shammity have far less listeners. Most people in this country get it. Conservative talk shows are to politics as WWE wrestling is to sports - and they usually draw the same audience.
Posted by: Dave | October 06, 2009 at 07:50 AM
This sounds kind of like a big left-wing conspiracy to me. Three of the biggest left-wing media newspapers writing almost the same thing. You forgot to mention that all the MSM and democrats were calling anyone who is against Obama's policies a RACIST.
I say go ahead, keep calling the average American a racist. You'll get your answer in 2010.
Posted by: chatmandu | October 06, 2009 at 10:25 AM
You know that there still might be some hope for some sanity in right wing politics when oldtimers like Pat Buchanan come out against George Bush's Iraq war. It is one thing to have opinions and make points based on fact or perceptions, but when you have right wing blowhards not even acknowledging that the President is standing up for America when he tries to get the Olympics for this country, we have a real problem. When we have extremists on the right talking about overthrowing the government by force...that is Civil War talk and we know that was based to a great extent on racism.
Posted by: Dan Basalone | October 07, 2009 at 08:26 AM
Glenn Beck is a big reason why the Republican party is in trouble. LIES! LIES! LIES!
Also, what have the Republicans ever done for the middle class? NOTHING!In fact their giving away America to big corporations.They're actually anti-american.
The democrats; 40 hr work week, child labor laws, Min. wage
& unions. (unions help create the middle class)
Posted by: Robert Shuster | October 07, 2009 at 11:18 AM
I cannot prove it, yet I strongly suspect that racism is behind much of the current far-right outcry. "Oh my God there is a Negro in the White House!" Otherwise I must ask, where were these tea party activists when G W Bush was actually eroding our civil rights (such as by using the NSA to eavesdrop on the phone calls of innocent US citizens, including members of the military making pillow talk with loved ones back home)? Instead of protesting then, they protest now, not over actual transgressions, but make-believe ones (Obama using FEMA to create concentration camps, Obama creating a secret army, Obama using eugenics to create a master race, Obama is Hitler, Obama is Stalin, Obama is a racist, Obama is not a US citizen, Obama is a secret Muslim, etc.).
Posted by: Farrow | October 08, 2009 at 03:38 PM
"IMHO the conservative right is displaying all the signs of panic." PANIC is the expression on your face the day after the 2010 election! Push, and shove every liberal pipe dream while you can. It exposes the Democrat's for what they are and what they believe in.
Posted by: throowrocks | October 09, 2009 at 05:01 AM