Right Wing Nut House

Yes, but is Glenn Beck good for the conservative movement?

After all, even if the man who seriously wondered whether the fasces symbol on the back of a 1917 dime meant that the US government under Wilson was promoting fascism is a little excitable, and, by his own admission, a “clown,” many rock ribbed conservatives seem to have adopted this paranoid waif as one of their own.

Peter Wehner believes that spells trouble for conservatives:

I say that because he seems to be more of a populist and libertarian than a conservative, more of a Perotista than a Reaganite. His interest in conspiracy theories is disquieting, as is his admiration for Ron Paul and his charges of American “imperialism.” (He is now talking about pulling troops out of Afghanistan, South Korea, Germany, and elsewhere.) Some of Beck’s statements—for example, that President Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people”–are quite unfair and not good for the country. His argument that there is very little difference between the two parties is silly, and his contempt for parties in general is anti-Burkean (Burke himself was a great champion of political parties). And then there is his sometimes bizarre behavior, from tearing up to screaming at his callers. Beck seems to be a roiling mix of fear, resentment, and anger—the antithesis of Ronald Reagan.

I understand that a political movement is a mansion with many rooms; the people who occupy them are involved in intellectual and policy work, in politics, and in polemics. Different people take on different roles. And certainly some of the things Beck has done on his program are fine and appropriate. But the role Glenn Beck is playing is harmful in its totality. My hunch is that he is a comet blazing across the media sky right now—and will soon flame out. Whether he does or not, he isn’t the face or disposition that should represent modern-day conservatism. At a time when we should aim for intellectual depth, for tough-minded and reasoned arguments, for good cheer and calm purpose, rather than erratic behavior, he is not the kind of figure conservatives should embrace or cheer on.

Wehner is about where I was on Beck 6 months ago - a superficial reading of the man based on his outrageousness rather than making a close examination of both his stagecraft and what he sincerely believes is his “philosophy.” Since then, I have tuned in several times in order to get a better feel for where he’s coming from.

It does no good to point out the dichotomies in Beck’s on-air personae - the rational mixed with the illogical and unreasonable - because the reality Beck has created for his legions of fans encompasses the whole smash of semi-serious critiques of Obama and liberals with a passionate, heartfelt objectivism that breeds an “us vs. them” universe taken to extremes where absolutely anything is possible. How many times have I seen Beck look right into the camera and refer to some outrageous exaggeration of what Obama and the Democrats are up to and say “This is part of their plan.”

I see this “government by conspiracy” theme repeated in comment threads across the internet, and while Beck is certainly not the only pundit to advance it, he seems to be the one getting the most mileage out of it. By making opposition to liberals a cause to “take back the country” from socialists and Marxists, Beck has drawn what amounts to a “Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory” that apes the worst of what Ron Paul supporters were advancing during the campaign last year. The rich and powerful are in league with Obama and the liberals to steal our money, turn the US into a Marxist state, and rig the system so they will remain in power indefinitely.

No doubt, Beck was right about Van Jones, ACORN, and the bunch gimlet eyed radicals Obama has been peppering the government with since he got into office. But, my children, this is not conspiracy; this is politics. Obama throwing sops to his radical base by tossing a few fellow travelers and pinkos into positions of marginal responsibility is hardly indicative of the International Communist Conspiracy (does it still exist?) making inroads into the highest levels of the US government. Nor is there any evidence that there is some kind of “plan” to turn us all into good little communists, or take over the American economy, or hand us over to al-Qaeda, or “destroy the country,” or enslave us in some kind of Obama-manufactured socialist paradise.

From what we’ve seen of this crew, they aren’t smart enough to pull something like that off. Jesus Lord, look at the problems they’re having getting health care reform passed. And these are the revolutionaries who are going to remake America into some kind of Marxist Utopia?

I will ask the same question of Beckites that I asked of liberals when Bush was president; how can someone be extraordinarily incompetent and stupid while at the same time demonstrate Machiavellian cleverness in amassing power to become a dictator? Paranoid thinking throws logic out the window and allows those afflicted with it to find it perfectly natural to believe in two obviously mutually exclusive concepts.

Why Beck’s following among conservatives? Basically, his rabid opposition to Obama and liberals tends to obscure the objectivist streak that runs through much of his more rational critiques of the left. I like Dan Riehl’s take:

Only a media that doesn’t know what one is, or is more interested in defining them to be what they want them to be, as opposed to what they really are, would mistake Glenn Beck for a conservative. He isn’t and never has been that, so far as I’m aware.

[...]

What he has always reminded me of most is Larry “Lonesome” Pines played by Andy Griffith in A Face In The Crowd. And, unfortunately, no, that one didn’t end very well for many of the people involved.

And that brings us to Beck’s stagecraft, and as Riehl points out, his resemblance to the manipulative, darkly cynical personality of Larry Pines. The homespun, down to earth charm that was the public face of Pines masked a coldly calculating mind that sought to turn his radio celebrity into political power. I’m not saying that Beck wants to run for office. He’s too smart for that. But his stunts - and perhaps some of his more outrageous, exaggerated claims about Obama and the left - are extremely effective drama, worthy of anything any Communist propagandist ever dreamed of.

But this goes to the heart of the Beckian phenomenon: Does he really believe everything he says? Or is he just cynically manipulating the fears of his mostly conservative audience, playing to their paranoia about Obama that is also being stoked by other talk show hosts on the right?

Time’s David Van Drehle isn’t sure of the answer himself:

No one has a better feeling for this mood, and no one exploits it as well, as Beck. He is the hottest thing in the political-rant racket, left or right. A gifted entrepreneur of angst in a white-hot market. A man with his ear uniquely tuned to the precise frequency at which anger, suspicion and the fear that no one’s listening all converge. On that frequency, Frankowski explained, “the thing I hear most is, People are scared.”

[...]

His fears are many — which is lucky for him, because Beck is responsible for filling multiple hours each day on radio and TV and webcast, plus hundreds of pages each year in his books, his online magazine and his newsletter. What’s this rich and talented man afraid of? He is afraid of one-world government, which will turn once proud America into another France. He is afraid that Obama “has a deep-seated hatred for white people” — which doesn’t mean, he hastens to add, that he actually thinks “Obama doesn’t like white people.” He is afraid that both Democrats and Republicans in Washington are deeply corrupt and that their corruption is spreading like a plague. He used to be afraid that hypocritical Republicans in the Bush Administration were killing capitalism and gutting liberty, but now he is afraid that all-too-sincere leftists in the Obama Administration are plotting the same. On a slow news day, Beck fears that the Rockefeller family installed communist and fascist symbols in the public artwork of Rockefeller Center. One of his Fox News Channel colleagues, Shepard Smith, has jokingly called Beck’s studio the “fear chamber.” Beck countered that he preferred “doom room.”

It might be accurate to say that Beck is dumb like a fox and doesn’t actually subscribe to half of what he proposes. That’s not the half I’m worried about. If he wants to manipulate the emotions of his emotionally overwrought audience by creating an alternate reality where any cockamamie dot connecting is possible, more power to him and American capitalism. If millions of Pet Rocks could be sold, it should be obvious, as the equally cynical H.L. Mencken once said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

I would add to that the caveat “about some things.” And one of those things is an apparent weakness of ours that knows no ideological boundaries, but manifests itself in our desperate desire to believe things about the political opposition that is demonstrably untrue. Whether Beck taps that undercurrent of resentment and fear deliberately or whether he has had the good fortune to fall into his success, doesn’t matter. The effect is the same; mindless and distorted opposition that plays into the hands of our political enemies and makes rational discourse impossible.

Stacy McCain thinks this opposition to Beck by people like Wehner is based on “envy” due to Beck’s overwhelming success, and what he has referred to in the past as “careerist” impulses among some conservatives who seek to climb the ziggurat of power in Washington by trashing “the grass roots.”

The GOP establishment in Washington has a surfeit of such parasitical careerists, who think that the Republican Party is about them, and not about all those millions of grassroots people who are, in fact, the conservative movement.

Wehner’s attack on Beck is framed as if the problem is political or ideological, but in fact the problem is Wehner’s own envy and ambition, which poisons his soul. And we know where that kind of attitude leads.

I wonder how Stacy can glean “envy” from Wehner’s discourse - perhaps he has been vouchsafed an ability us lesser mortals have been denied. I know that if I were a religious man, I would hit my knees every night and thank the Lord that, as muddled as my thinking can be at times, I am saved from the affliction of illogic and paranoia from which Glenn Beck apparently suffers.

How success automatically makes one impervious to criticism, I have yet to figure out. And what it has to do with whether Beck is a manipulative cynic also escapes me. I guess Stacy is saying that because Beck is hugely successful, this is proof that he is a logical, reasoned, thoughtful man - or perhaps he’s merely “effective.” If that’s the case, then we have reached a point in our political discourse where instilling fear and loathing using wildly exaggerated, over the top charges of conspiracy on the part of the opposition is the best path to power.

Is there nothing wrong with that picture? For millions of conservatives, apparently not.

A lot of things have happened this week that have entered the airy cavity sitting atop my neck and floated around waiting to be recognized as conscious thought.

I can imagine all these little snippets of inner dialogue waiting patiently in some line, bitching about how slow a goose I am at moving them from the dark of my subconscious where they effect my thinking in mysterious ways, to the light of consciousness where I can examine them, caress them, milk them for their illuminating properties.

It’s easy to allow emotion to crowd out valuable insights that appear from time to time. At best, we recognize through reflection that perhaps we shouldn’t have written this, or said that, or made a mistake in judgment when analyzing something else. You end up wishing you hadn’t snapped back at your spouse, or yelled at your kid, or dismissed a co-worker’s attempt to be friendly.

I could start a blog and fill it with such reflections without any trouble - as could most of you, I’m sure. Learning from our mistakes is the essence of being human - probably the major factor in the rise of Homo Sapiens. Don’t get too close to that mammoth or you won’t come home from the hunt. Going after a Saber Tooth cat alone is not a good idea if you want to pass your genes on to the next generation. Trial and error not only advanced human evolution, it forms the basis of modern science and has led to the astonishing outpouring of creative thought we see today in everything from computers to razor blades.

Some venues do not allow for such errors. Political blogging is one of them. As ideology is set in stone and cannot be changed or challenged on either the right and the left, variance with the established themes and theses is not only frowned upon but punished severely. Here, “getting it wrong” does not mean that you are necessarily “incorrect,” only that you are in disagreement with the vast majority who march in ideological lock step. Deviate from the shining path and you are cast out as an apostate.

No matter. I came to the conclusion years ago that I could try to be honest with myself and my beliefs, incurring the wrath and disapprobation of those who consider themselves guardians of the Ya-Ya Conservativehood by challenging the underlying assumptions of their excessive and blindered ideology; or toe the line, betray my true beliefs, and enjoy the warmth of fellowship found in their ever narrowing definition of the “true conservative” path.

Lest some believe I am nailing myself to a cross by wallowing in self pity and whining about conservatives - most anyway - not taking me seriously, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. I celebrate my freedom from conformity every fu**ing day. I will lord it over those who, when confronted with a new issue, a new attack, feel lost and alone until they are told by others how they must think, be it Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, or other “movement” leaders.

To be fair, most conservatives don’t really need to wait for the word coming down from on high. All they have to do is unthinkingly, uncritically, hold a mirror up to whatever the left is saying about an issue and simply reverse the image. That’s what the Limbaughs of the world do anyway. There’s no reason or rationale to it. That comes later - at least the rationale - as the right congratulates those whose “insights” are the most vitriolic and hateful.

The ideological screen through which most opinion on the right is washed has become internalized so that favorite themes regarding the left - unpatriotic, hate America, socialists, communists, liars, traitors - can be pulled off the shelf and slapped on to any “analysis” to make it conform to the “right thinking” brigades of hysterical paranoids who believe themselves guardians of Reagan’s legacy or, in extreme cases of delusional thinking, of conservatism itself.

(I hasten to add that there are exceptions to be found in the writings of some conservatives like Ed Morrissey, Allahpundit, Victor Davis Hanson, and several other independent thinkers on the right. But as a general rule, I believe my analysis stands.)

In this way, ideology at the expense of rational thought is celebrated and rewarded.

And yes, we find the exact same kind of irrational, nonsensical paranoia on the left. There is no difference. One is not worse than the other, except perhaps there is a bigger responsibility generally recognized throughout history for the majority to treat the minority with respect. But this hasn’t been true in American politics for decades so why bother discussing it?

Barack Obama, to his credit, said yesterday that opposition to his policies is not based on race, but on the fear of change:

In a number of interviews that will air in fuller form Sunday morning, the president also addressed the tone of a heated summer debate over health-care, and the contention of one former president that much of the criticism Obama faces is because he is black.

Some of the most heated opposition to the president’s initiatives are not racially motivated, Obama suggested in response to comments that former President Jimmy Carter had made earlier this week, but rather reflective of the turmoil that is common “when presidents are trying to bring about big changes.”

“Are there people out there who don’t like me because of race? - I’m sure there are,” Obama told CNN’s John King. “That’s not the overriding issue here.”

Instead, Obama maintained, it is concern about sweeping government change that has fueled much of the “passion.”

“It’s an argument that’s gone on for the history of this republic,” Obama told NBC News’ David Gregory. “Wbat’s the role of government?… This is not a new argument, and it always invokes passions.”

He is absolutely correct, of course. Not sure that “fear” is exactly the right word to describe what conservatives are feeling. Anyway, I am very glad he said this. But we must demand he go much farther in condemning the wild, out of control explosion of charges being made by his supporters that tar opposition to his policies as motivated solely by race. I realize this is very difficult for him to do because he benefits politically by this ridiculous, false, and hateful rhetoric coming from the left. But as long as his allies continue to deliberately, knowingly, and smugly raise the issue of race and use it as a political club, he will be seen as giving such deceitful arguments credence by the wink and the nudge.

In response to a comment from my brother Jim on my Mary Travers remembrance post, I tried to make the point that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to engage in political combat, and they all boil down to this:

I joke about lefty folkies, of course - more playing to stereotype than reality. But we are of a generation that perhaps learned valuable lessons about civic disagreements and how they can truly lead to bloodshed unless we all remember that we are Americans who love our country and wish only the best for it. If only we could all start from that premise, I think a lot of the ugliness in our politics would be muted and we could get down to the business of truly addressing some of the problems facing the country today.

Does believing this make me any less passionate in my opposition to what I see are the wrongheaded, dangerous polices and politics of Barack Obama? Does not calling the president a Communist or Marxist disqualify my opinions because they are not hateful enough?

To some, yes. And those who cannot see what this kind of rigid, uncritical, self-defeating thinking is doing to our country - both right and left - may live to see the day where useful dialogue and reasoned debate become an impossibility and our country dissolves into weak, divided, quarreling bunch of ideologues who prevent us from facing vital challenges both at home and abroad.

As far back as 1999, it was apparent to anyone who listened closely to what he was saying that George Bush was not much of a conservative. This despite the lip service he gave to some conservative ideas (I wouldn’t say he was a study in advocating conservative principles), and his ability to excite the party’s evangelical base.

True, he was “more conservative” than Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. But so was about 70% of the country. It took about 5 years for the scales to fall from the eyes of many conservatives (some have never lost their true belief) for them to see that George Bush was a crony loving, big government elitist whose tangential connection to conservatism was more for convenience and political calculation than any belief in the efficacy of its principles.

Were we taken in? Partly, yes. But an honest appraisal of my former support for the man must include the fact that I was fooling myself more than anything. The writing was on the wall all along regarding the man’s faux conservatism - not to mention his many screw ups including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the prosecutors fiasco, justification for torture, and his curious habit of promoting and appointing incompetents for important jobs in government who also happened to be big campaign contributors or other cronies.

Now a book has been written by a former Bush speechwriter which has pretty much confirmed what most on the right now think of the ex-president. Matt Latimer reveals Bush to be an arrogant, self centered, elitist who looked down his nose at the conservative movement:

Latimer is a veteran of conservative politics. An admirer of Republican Sen. Jon Kyl, for whom he worked for several years, Latimer also worked in the Rumsfeld Pentagon before joining the Bush White House in 2007.

The revealing moment, described in “Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor,” occurred in the Oval Office in early 2008.

Bush was preparing to give a speech to the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. The conference is the event of the year for conservative activists; Republican politicians are required to appear and offer their praise of the conservative movement.

Latimer got the assignment to write Bush’s speech. Draft in hand, he and a few other writers met with the president in the Oval Office. Bush was decidedly unenthusiastic.

“What is this movement you keep talking about in the speech?” the president asked Latimer.

Latimer explained that he meant the conservative movement — the movement that gave rise to groups like CPAC.

Bush seemed perplexed. Latimer elaborated a bit more. Then Bush leaned forward, with a point to make.

“Let me tell you something,” the president said. “I whupped Gary Bauer’s ass in 2000. So take out all this movement stuff. There is no movement.”

Bush seemed to equate the conservative movement — the astonishing growth of conservative political strength that took place in the decades after Barry Goldwater’s disastrous defeat in 1964 — with the fortunes of Bauer, the evangelical Christian activist and former head of the Family Research Council whose 2000 presidential campaign went nowhere.

Now it was Latimer who looked perplexed. Bush tried to explain.

“Look, I know this probably sounds arrogant to say,” the president said, “but I redefined the Republican Party.”

Yes, Mr. Bush. You certainly “redefined” the Republican party by showing the GOP could be even more careless with the public purse than Democrats, as well as being a political cynic of the first order by pandering to the base of the party - the “movement” - while sneering at what it represented.

The charge of “patrician” made against his father back in the day should also be applied to the son. Here, the blue blood shows why you can’t trust elites. At bottom, their arrogance directed toward ordinary people is so profound as to cloud their judgment.

Given everything we now know about Bush, would I have pulled an Andrew Sullivan and voted for Kerry in 2004? Definitely not. But, as I did in 1992 when his father ran for re-election, the chances are pretty good that I would not have voted for president at all.

True, Bush’s fiscal profligacy was known back then, but weighed against the war on terror and what most of us believed was a slowly improving situation in Iraq, it would have been enough to dissuade me from voting against him.

Now we have a different story - that of Bush the hypocrite who had few, if any, guiding principles save “Whatever’s best for George Bush, is best for the party and the country.” That kind of selfish conceit may be endemic among presidents - it certainly was for Nixon, and probably Johnson - but it explains a lot as far as Bush’s cronyism as well as his cozying up to Wall Street, his sticking with Rumsfeld long after he had outlived his usefulness, and other stubborn acts that many conservatives still mistake for resolve. Quite simply, it didn’t matter if all the wise heads in government were telling him to change course in Iraq. He, George Bush, knew better. And the United States paid a bitter price in blood and treasure because of this hubris.

And, it explains Karl Rove to some extent. No doubt that Clintonites like James Carville had vast knowledge about the intricacies of American politics. But Rove is a human computer - a veritable font of information about the most arcane, and fractional tidbits of political trivia. There may never have been his like in the White House.

But Rove was decidedly not a creature of ideology. He possessed a burning desire to win as all good political consultants have. Beyond that, Rove eschewed the idea of using the movement for anything except what he termed a “permanent Republican majority” that combined massive numbers of evangelical Christians energized by relying on “wedge” issues like gay marriage and abortion to turn them out, as well as the foreign policy hawks. Fiscal conservatives could come along for the ride if they wished but it was clear that neither Rove nor Bush gave a tinker’s damn about them. Add supply siders and libertarians and Rove believed he had his “permanent” majority - a majority not based on conservative issues as much as on political expediency.

The results were predictable; a fracturing of the “permanent” coalition within two years of his 2004 victory. The corruption, the spending, and the war between libertarans and evangelicals over the Terri Schiavo matter exploded any hope that Rove’s makeshift, rickety political construction would outlast his boss.

So here we are in the wilderness with many conservatives still clinging to the notion that Bush made some mistakes but was still a good president. I have said in the past that fingering Bush as the “worst president in American history” is ridiculous. In the bottom ten, yes. But I abhor those who would use history for political purposes and the facts simply do not bear that judgment out.

Until conservatives can let go of Bush and his checkered legacy, we will not learn the lessons from supporting him and probably end up voting for someone similar. That is the mistake Democrats made when they were in the political badlands and we would do well not to repeat it.

(Note: Please do not crow in the comments “I told you so.” What - you expect me to listen to partisan lefties at the time? That’s unreasonable and you know it. Your verdict on Bush was reached looking through the prism of partisanship just as mine was. Just because the left was right about some of Bush’s shortcomings does not mean they had - or have today - a corner on truth when it comes to criticizing him. I would also add that their hate of the man - as virulent a hate directed against another politician I had not seen before, even against Clinton - disqualifies most on the left from making any rational judgment on Bush that a reasonable person could agree with.)

I have been taken to task in the past for railing against those whose rants against President Obama have crossed the line of reason and entered the dangerous world of paranoia. I include in this category the Birthers, of course, as well as those who believe Obama wishes to set up some kind of dictatorship, and those who believe our freedoms have been “destroyed” or are in the process of destruction.

As for that last charge, I don’t think it accurate to say that Obama wants to destroy freedom in America, but there is little doubt his policies “infringe” upon personal liberty. That’s the point of his “common good” agenda; that sometimes, individual rights must be subsumed for the good of all. The fact that the Supreme Court occasionally agrees with that idea is troubling but not indicative of any bent to eliminate constitutional protections for speech, religion, or assembly. The idea that the courts, or the opposition, would simply stand aside and allow our individual liberties to be “destroyed” is therefore, paranoid thinking.

There is a line between passionate, reasoned opposition to Obama and the kind of paranoid thinking that drives Birthers and others to oppose the president. The terms are not mutually exclusive but one kind of thinking is productive and effective while the other is poisonous and unbalanced. Equating the president with Nazis may be emotionally satisfying but is so far beyond the pale of rationality that it pegs anyone who uses such a cockamamie analogy as ignorant and not seriously engaged in debate. Ignorant because it is painfully obvious that anyone who refers to any American politician, right or left, as a Nazi” hasn’t a clue what Hitler and his thugs believed; and not serious about debate because the epithet is used to stifle discussion rather than encourage it.

Similar attempts to paint the president as a “Communist” are equally paranoid and stupid. (Using the term “socialist” may seem more accurate but there too, it appears that there is a deliberate attempt to exaggerate the effect of the president’s policies and incorrectly define the term.)

I saw a lot of passionate opposition to the president’s policies at the tea party at the Capitol on Saturday. Most of it was spot on and based on patriotic notions of the constitution as well as a fierce desire to protect our liberties from the “common good” brigade of liberals who seek to promote policies that infringe upon our personal freedoms.

Were these protestors, who eschewed labeling Obama as dictator, or a Communist, or illegitimate because of his birth, any less passionate in their opposition than the paranoids who hold those beliefs?

I think it is demonstrable that they were not. The fire that burns in their bellies against the president’s policies is no less bright, nor does their failure to join the kooks in their conspiracy theories mean that their commitment to the cause is any less total than those whose passion has allowed their thinking to spill over into the realm of the silly. To infer otherwise is not logical, nor is it very helpful.

“Passion” for a cause, by definition, engages the emotions and motivates one to act outside of themselves for a higher purpose. Those who believe that the president is wrongheaded, that his policies will lead to economic disaster, who can’t abide Obama’s prevarications, and see the enormous debt being piled on our children and grandchildren as preposterously unfair - without claiming the president wants to put his opponents in concentration camps - are channeling their opposition down a healthy, democratic path.

Not so much the paranoids. Despite evincing similar passion, all they are doing is giving the opposition the wherewithal to define all opponents to the president as crazies:

Amid a rebirth of conservative activism that could help Republicans win elections next year, some party insiders now fear that extreme rhetoric and conspiracy theories coming from the angry reaches of the conservative base are undermining the GOP’s broader credibility and casting it as the party of the paranoid.

Such insiders point to theories running rampant on the Internet, such as the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is thus ineligible to be president, or that he is a communist, or that his allies want to set up Nazi-like detention camps for political opponents. Those theories, the insiders say, have stoked the GOP base and have created a “purist” climate in which a figure such as Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) is lionized for his “You lie!” outburst last week when Obama addressed Congress.

They are “wild accusations and the paranoid delusions coming from the fever swamps,” said David Frum, a conservative author and speechwriter for President George W. Bush who is among the more vocal critics of the party base and of the conservative talk show hosts helping to fan the unrest.

“Like all conservatives, I am concerned about this administration’s accumulation of economic power,” Frum said. “Still, you have to be aware that there’s a line where legitimate concerns begin to collapse into paranoid fantasy.”

There was plenty of that on display at the 9/12 protest in Washington but a fair assessment of the tone and substance coming from the hundreds of thousands who were there would relegate the crazies and paranoids to a small, but significant minority. I would guess that up to a quarter of the protestors could be identified with those fringe elements. This is worrying but not as fatal as Obama supporters would have you believe. In some respects, the real problem is not so much their numbers, but their influence on mainstream politicians:

Insiders’ criticisms have been dismissed by some conservative leaders, who argue that the party needs an energized base — even if it’s extreme — to gain in future elections. Some analysts think that conservatives’ summer revolt against Obama’s healthcare agenda helped erode public approval of Democratic leadership enough that the GOP could pick up as many as 30 House seats next year.

Leaders in both the establishment and the base think that the tension could define the upcoming battle over the party’s 2012 presidential nominee.

“There’s a war going on, a pretty big one,” said Dan Riehl, a Virginia conservative whose popular blog, Riehl World View, has criticized those challenging the base. “Many of us distrust the elite Republican establishment.”

Michael Goldfarb, a spokesman for John McCain’s GOP presidential candidacy last year, likened the conservative fringe to liberal activists during the Bush years. The antiwar group Code Pink drew headlines, for example, when a protester with fake blood on her hands accosted then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — but Democrats still won elections later.

A little refresher course in recent history; in 2004, Democrats played with their own kooks, catering to many of their conspiracy theories, lionizing fringe players like Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore, while trying to tap the “enthusiasm” of the netroots - as bonkers as any conservative crazies we have today.

That worked out well for them, didn’t it?

The point isn’t necessarily to purge the paranoids, but to marginalize them and deny them influence in the party. I know that Dan Rheil is not a paranoid and that his anger - justified at times - directed against GOP and conservative “elites” has both practical and ideological elements. But I think Dan would draw the line at some of the more paranoid beliefs held by those in the base and recognize the damage it does to reasonable, and wholly legitimate arguments against Obama and his agenda.

Passion does not equal paranoia. Those on the left who insist on equating “anger” with psychosis do so knowing full well that the passions aroused by President Obama’s policies take many forms and are not all outside the realm of legitimate debate. It is simply convenient for them to lump all opposition to the president as crazy, or “racist.” And it plays well among their own base as well.

Accepting those who are passionate in their opposition to Obama without having arguments meander into the fever swamps of conspiracy and fear would lead to the more rational elements in the opposition to come to the fore while de-emphasizing the kooks. That can only lead to more effective resistance to the president’s plans to “remake” America in an image none of us - kooks or rationalists - want to see become reality.

I could have just as easily titled this piece “Ideologues vs. The Realists” or some other descriptive caption for what boils down to a debate now fully underway among conservatives about the best way back to power.

Are the ideologues in the movement correct? Is a lack of “passion” regarding opposition to the left, as well as a less than 100%, strict adherence to their idea of conservative “principles” responsible for the right’s slaughter at the polls in 2006 and 2008?

Or are the pragmatists correct that the demand for “purity” by the ideologues coupled with the prominence of a conspiracy mongering, angry, paranoid base has connected conservatism to an unsavory, and unelectable politics?

At stake, a battle for the soul of conservatism in America and perhaps even the preservation of republican virtues given the left’s ascendancy and their first real opportunity in 40 years to “remake” America in ways that are an anathema to the tenets of modern conservative thought.

In the midst of this fight, a book by Sam Tanenhaus called The Death of Conservatism has been published which has already added fuel to the fire. Tanenhaus’s thesis is that movement conservatism has undermined the Burkean roots of conservative philosophy and that rather than trying to preserve and “conserve” institutions, movement-cons, who he terms “revanchists,” seek to destroy that which has been carefully built up over centuries.

The book is based on a shorter essay Tanenhaus published in The New Republic (no longer available) that I wrote about in depth here. I found that the essay reflected some of my own beliefs about where conservatism had gone off the rails, but was seriously flawed in its analysis of what Tanenhaus believed were “excesses” of the movement.

In reviewing the book, Garry Wills pointed to the classic tension between Burkeans and the movement personified by one of the most intellectually productive relationships in American history; the friendship and mutual admiration society that existed between Whittaker Chambers and William Buckley:

Tanenhaus is a deep student of modern conservatives. He wrote a biography of Whittaker Chambers, a self-professed Beaconsfieldian (Disraeli was the Earl of Beaconsfield), and he has been working for some time on a biography of William F. Buckley Jr. This short book is a kind of bridge between his two great projects, and it fits his revanchist–Burkean paradigm. Chambers and Buckley, though friends, began at opposite ends of the “conservative” spectrum. Buckley, who admired Chambers’s witness against communism, tried with all his lures and charms to recruit him as an editor of National Review when it began in 1955. But Chambers thought Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom the magazine championed, would doom Republicans. Besides, he was loyal to his ally in the Hiss case, Richard Nixon, and to Nixon’s meal ticket Dwight Eisenhower, while the magazine opposed them both as impure compromisers. (In 1956, only one National Review editor, James Burnham, endorsed Eisenhower for reelection.)

But Buckley finally wore Chambers down—in 1957, with great misgivings, Chambers joined the magazine. Murray Kempton wrote that Chambers finally went to work for a boss he could respect—which was not saying too much, since “Chambers’s former employers happened to be Colonel Bykov of the Soviet Secret Police, the late Henry Luce, and John F.X. McGohey, ‘then United States Attorney’ for the Southern District of New York.”[2] Chambers soon had to withdraw from the magazine for health reasons, but he and Buckley stayed in constant communication, Chambers advising, Buckley deferential. Tanenhaus makes the case that Chambers finally converted Buckley from a revanchist to a Burkean. Kempton, who studied both men closely, doubts that Chambers’s advice ever really took: “Buckley worshiped and did not listen: the Chambers of his vision is a saint whose icon stands in a Church where his message is never read.”

So close, yet so far apart. What we should take away from that extraordinary exchange of ideas between two brilliant men is that it was done amicably, with great respect for each other, and the debate was carried out with the recognition that both were working toward a common goal.

I don’t see that being possible today. With the absolute refusal of the ideologues to abandon their purge of who they consider less than ideologically pure conservatives, and with the pragmatists fighting what amounts to a rear guard action to marginalize the crazies who are, if not embraced then certainly tolerated by the revanchists, there is no “common purpose” that could lead to any amicability or respect.

Indeed, the revanchists look with askance upon most attempts to criticize conservatism at all, believing that “intellectual elites” are simply playing into the hands of the enemy by taking fellow conservatives to task for their idiocy, or paranoia. Relatedly, any criticism of conservatism coming from the left is automatically dismissed - usually without even reading it - because that would be allowing your enemy to define you.

As for the former, the idea that honest criticism is rejected outright because we’re at war with the left reveals a sneering anti-intellectualism among the revanchists that flies in the face of conservatism’s most cherished and important virtue; a duty to the truth above and beyond loyalty to ideology.

And while I sympathize and agree to a certain extent about not allowing your political foe to totally define your philosophy, that shouldn’t preclude anyone from exposing themselves to ideas with which you may disagree or close one’s mind to looking at the world from a different angle.

Tanehaus is a man of the left (former editor of the Times Book Review section) but he has also immersed himself in the history and personalities of modern conservatism more than most. He is a sincere critic of the right, a thoughtful man who wants to engage in serious discussions about the issues he raises. And while there is precious little empiricism on which you can hang your hat in his writings, some of his analysis will ring true with students of history who have given some thought to what ails the right today.

When Tanenhaus points to the very un-Burkean beliefs of many movement-cons, he is questioning how these revanchists can square their conservatism with the more traditional school of thought represented by Buckley, Hayek, Kirk, Arnold, and others who believed that preserving society’s institutions was the right’s highest calling. A reverence for our past has morphed into a psuedo-reformist mantra that seeks to destroy rather than build upon, tear down instead of conserve. Hence, liberals should not be defeated, they must be annihilated, along with the Great Society, the New Deal, and other “socialist” ideas. Supporting anything less calls into question one’s “true conservative” credentials.

The recent efforts by Jon Henke and Patrick Ruffini to counter these destructive beliefs are instructive. Henke’s call for advertisers and the Republican party to boycott World Net Daily for their enthusiastic coverage and endorsement of the Birther nonsense (among other idiocies) and Ruffini’s defense of Jon, along with a general criticism of the revanchists that is both trenchant and on point:

As a fiscal and social conservative, I happen to think Jon is completely in the right here, both substantively and strategically. Don’t raise the canard that we ought to be attacking Democrats first. Conservatives are entirely within their rights to have public debates over who will publicly represent them, and who will be allowed to affiliate with the conservative movement.

The Birthers are the latest in a long line of paranoid conspiracy believers of the left and right who happen to attach themselves to notions that simply are not true. Descended from the 9/11 Truthers, the LaRouchies, the North American Union buffs, and way back when, the John Birch Society, the Birthers are hardly a new breed in American politics.

Each and every time they have appeared, mainstream conservatives from William F. Buckley to Ronald Reagan have risen to reject these influences — and I expect that will be the case once again here.

But there is another subtext that makes Jon’s appeal more urgent. As a pretty down-the-line conservative, I don’t believe I am alone in noting with disappointment the trivialization, excessive sloganeering, and pettiness that has overtaken the movement of late. In “The Joe the Plumberization of the GOP,” I argued that conservatives have grown too comfortable with wearing scorn as a badge of honor, content to play sarcastic second fiddle to the dominant culture of academia and Hollywood with second-rate knock-off institutions. A side effect of this has been a tendency to accept conspiracy nuts as a slightly cranky edge case within the broad continuum of conservatism, rather than as a threat to the movement itself.

In addition to “the trivialization, excessive sloganeering, and pettiness” exhibited by those in the movement, one might add the curious and debilitating attitude of equating thoughtfulness with “elitism.”

Stacy McCain, who can be brilliant when the mood strikes him, wrote this about Henke’s and Ruffini’s efforts at marginalizing the crazies:

Grassroots conservative activists are, by their very nature, not engaged in the political process as a career. They tend to be older, well-established in non-political occupations and less concerned about the Big Picture questions than in finding immediate, practical ways to oppose the menace of liberalism. The question one hears from the grassroots is not, “Whither conservatism?” but rather, “What can I do?”

The Tea Party movement — which will host a major rally in Washington next weekend — has given the grassroots something to do, so that joining en masse to voice their opposition to the Obama agenda, they are actively engaged in the political process.

However, grassroots activism has consequences. One of the consequences of a ressurgent conservative grassroots is that their concerns, beliefs and attitudes are sometimes not in sync with the concerns, beliefs and attitudes of smart young Republican activists like Patrick Ruffini.

Stacy, who later goes on to say that the Birthers “are diverting attention from more valid critiques of the Obama administration and its liberal policies. So they should be discouraged or ignored…” fails to see the Birthers as a symptom of a larger problem; movement-cons rejecting criticism - even of Birthers - as “elitist” and ascribing dissent from their closed, ideological worldview as the critic having insufficient attachment to conservative principles.

McCain doesn’t engage on quite that level but doesn’t mince words when it comes to taking down those he believes have “elitist” attitudes toward the movement (”rubes”). And while he makes some valid points about “careerism” and its deleterious impact on what passes for “acceptable discourse,” methinks he paints with too broad a brush at times. The Ruffini-Henke critique is hardly born out of a desire to advance or augment those two gentlemen’s standing with other conservatives or the Republican party but rather - and I think this fairly obvious - the practical, and pragmatic calculation that we can’t get there from here. Changes are in order so that the public face of conservatism has a smile, rather than a snarl, and promoting the idea that one can vigorously oppose Obama without descending into the fever swamps of conspiracy and hate.

The road back to political power and intellectual relevance for the right will not be found in the rantings of Birthers, the false accusations of apostasy directed against conservative critics, a dogmatic and ideological approach to defining principles, nor an unrealistic and unattainable political agenda.

Nor should we count on the self destruction of the opposition which, at this point, seems well underway. What we do when we achieve power is as important as how we get there. For that, Jon Henke, Patrick Ruffinini, and others like them should be heard out and their call for a return to reason heeded.

Winston Churchill is quoted as saying, ““There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.” Indeed, many have the wrong idea about conservatism in that they assume we don’t believe in “change” as it is generally understood.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as those of us who have read and understand Russell Kirk know:

The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world. When a society is progressing in some respects, usually it is declining in other respects. The conservative knows that any healthy society is influenced by two forces, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge called its Permanence and its Progression. The Permanence of a society is formed by those enduring interests and convictions that gives us stability and continuity; without that Permanence, the fountains of the great deep are broken up, society slipping into anarchy. The Progression in a society is that spirit and that body of talents which urge us on to prudent reform and improvement; without that Progression, a people stagnate.

Therefore the intelligent conservative endeavors to reconcile the claims of Permanence and the claims of Progression.

Careful, prudent change, solidly based on tradition and “permanence”, is a positive good, says Kirk.

I might add that Edmund Burke had a lot to say about “change” as well. His critique of the French Revolution (and his support for the institution of the British Monarchy) made it easy for his critics to denounce him as a reactionary. But one of Burke’s most famous quotations - “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation” - makes the valid point that change is necessary when the institutions and traditions of the state are at risk. Preserving them at the cost of change is necessary and good.

Why all this blathering about “change?” First, it gives me a chance to quote Kirk and Burke and aren’t you mightily impressed at that, dear reader?

Secondly, it serves as prologue to my sad experience from yesterday after I posted my piece “Angry Ideologues vs. The Statists” on my diary page at RedState. The reaction to the piece from Moe Lane, who is a regular poster and one of the site’s moderators, as well as other commenters flummoxed me.

A brief background: I used to cross-post my RWNH pieces quite regularly at RedState, having joined the community there almost as soon as I began blogging nearly 5 years ago. It was a good way to promote me and my blog and it was good exposure for my writing.

A about a year ago, I virtually stopped cross posting basically because I got lazy about the promotion thing and rarely visited after that unless directed by a link on Memeorandum or some other blog.

Recently, it occurred to me that my laziness about promoting myself and my writing was costing me potential readers (as well as potential revenue) so I decided to make an effort to learn the Twitter thing, and rededicate myself to get out of the rut I’ve been in since the election.

Hence, my triumphant re-appearance at RedState - or not. Many of my diary posts had been heavily criticized in the past so I was not unused to the notion that I was not a popular poster there. And the diary in question was heavily critical of some conservatives - “angry ideologues” - so I expected the usual mindless name calling from, who else, angry ideologues.

Enter Mr. Lane into our little drama. Here is a comment exchange between the two of us that made me realize that RedState was not a very conservative site anymore - at least not so far as I understand the meaning of conservatism:

Lane: That’s nice, Rick. What did your local GOP chair say…
Moe Lane Monday, August 31st at 3:22PM EDT (link)

…when you explained this to him or her?

Me: “Conservative” not “Republican”
Rick Moran Monday, August 31st at 4:28PM EDT (link)

If I mention the party at all in the piece - and I don’t reference it specifically - it is as a vessel to carry conservative principles.

I am not a party man. I am concerned with conservatism. As far as Republicans are concerned, I feel if I can help reform conservatism, that helps the party.

Lane: In other words, you didn’t.
Moe Lane Monday, August 31st at 4:50PM EDT (link)

Now, did you have anything useful to contribute, or are you just going to waste my site’s bandwidth some more with complaints that do nothing but annoy actual activists and drive down their diaries?

If Mr. Lane’s intent was to give me a pep talk about getting with the program and cheerleading for our side, I’m afraid it fell rather flat.

But I don’t think that was his intent, do you? Trotting out the old “chickenhawk” argument used by the left against Iraq War supporters was surprising enough (if I haven’t told my local GOP chair that he’s a raving, right wing ideologue, then my critique is worthless). But then, to actually set a standard for acceptable speech about whether something is “useful” or not was the real kicker. And I told him so:

Me: I believe my views are indeed useful
Rick Moran Monday, August 31st at 5:18PM EDT (link)

And I’m afraid annoying people is the price paid for revealing unpleasant truths that many conservative ideologues resist believing.

So I’m sure you welcome all viewpoints that are reasonably argued, and can be responded to in a reasonable way. Thank you for that.

Mr. Lane chose not to answer - as he also failed to address any single point made in my diary that he considered “useless” or that “annoy[ed] actual activists” - and proceeded to remind me of blog policy about cross posting:

Lane: That would be another “No,” then.
Monday, August 31st at 5:24PM EDT (link)

So noted.

PS: I note that this is a reprint of something that was originally from your site. While RedState permits full reproductions of posts and articles by the author, we expect the post to link back to the original source. Please do so in the future.

Obviously, a man of few words - and little else. Of course, he needn’t worry about the future since after this post hits the tubes, my name will be mud at RedState and even if I were allowed to, the prospect of posting on a site with such anti-conservative moderators and commenters (read the rest of what passes for criticism) has lost its allure.

What drives a person to close off their mind so completely, so determinedly, to where challenging orthodoxy is a transgression worthy of such contempt? No, I possess no thunderbolts of truth and wisdom to hurl at my detractors and open their eyes to new vistas, new ways of thinking. All I have are opinions that differ from theirs.

I suppose I should be used to it by now, but it never fails to amaze me how truly remarkable is our capacity as humans to subsume our natural ability to think, and slavishly, doltishly, mindlessly allow our critical thinking skills to fall into slothful disuse. I am not immune from committing this sin as my regular readers know. It takes real effort to break through the clutter of your own lazy thought processes, and thankfully, the few readers I have left at this site never let me go for long without letting me know of my backsliding.

Not challenging your own beliefs by constantly re-energizing and reinvigorating the underlying assumptions that form the bedrock of your thinking by exposing yourself to alternative viewpoints leads to the kind of knee-jerk nonsense espoused by Mr. Lane and most of his fellow RedState commenters who never engaged me on the substance of what I wrote, choosing instead to simply try and outdo each other with their invective.

It is a decidedly unconservative attitude to hold and proves to me that, although there are many fine conservative writers still at the site - Eric Erickson, Warner Todd Huston, and Pejman Yousefzadeh to name just a few - the community that is RedState has degenerated into a barbarous brew of angry yawpers.

A pity, that. What was once a vibrant, stimulating place has become a gray ghost of its former self - a place where orthodoxy trumps almost all and where new ideas go to to die.

This is another installment in my award winning series of blog posts on “What Ails Conservatism?” (Note: The awards have been of the “RINO of the Day” and “Squish of the Month” variety).

The purpose of this series has been to clarify my own thinking about modern conservatism and it’s relevance in a 21st century industrialized democracy of 300 million people.

***********************************************
Conor Friedersdorf, writing at Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish, has a thoughtful critique of Mark Levin’s huge bestseller Liberty and Tyranny.

It caught my eye because I finished the book last week and was as impressed as Conor with some of Levin’s arguments, especially how he constructed a logical, and coherent framework for applying traditional conservatism to problems associated with modern America. It was a brave attempt to marry philosophy with politics and Mr. Levin should be congratulated for going beyond the usual cotton candy conservatism we get from the Hannity’s and Becks of the right.

However, like Conor, I was troubled by what might be termed, Levin’s problem with “enemy identification:

As I reflect on Liberty and Tyranny’s final pages, however, I find myself unable to respond without addressing a larger feature of the book that I regard as its most consequential flaw: Its every section, including the Epilogue, references few if any concepts as often as “Statism.”

[...]

The United States that he comments on isn’t one that pits Republicans against Democrats, or conservatives against liberals, or the center right against the center left, or where citizens of complicated political persuasions — mixing ideology, pragmatism and ignorance — do some combination of participating in politics and ignoring it. Instead Mark Levin’s America is one where the conservatives are pitted against the Statists, or to put things as he would, where liberty is pitted against tyranny.

Freidersdorf never gives us his definition of “statism” so it is impossible to discover why he believes the label is so mis-applied in Levin’s book. Conor quotes Levin’s thesis:

The Modern Liberal believes in the supremacy of the state, thereby rejecting the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the order of the civil society, in whole or in part. For the Modern Liberal, the individual’s imperfection and personal pursuits impede the objective of a utopian state. In this, Modern Liberalism promotes what French historian Alexis de Tocqueville described as a soft tyranny, which becomes increasingly more oppressive, potentially leading to a hard tyranny (some form of totalitarianism). As the word “liberal” is, in its classical meaning, the opposite of authoritarian, it is more accurate, therefore, to characterize the Modern Liberal as a statist.

Do “modern liberals” desire to create a “Utopia?” That is an exaggeration. Liberals are no more enamored of Utopia than conservatives. Both political philosophies seek to create societies that emphasize different virtues; self reliance vs. community; moral order vs. fairness; personal responsibility vs. the collective good.

It is also mis-leading (though not entirely inaccurate) to say that liberals favor the “supremacy of the state.” It is more accurate to say that the modern left favors promoting “the collective good” at the expense of “selfish” individuality. They do not dismiss individual rights. They simply believe that in some instances - more than is healthy for liberty’s sake - those rights should be trumped by what is best for all.

This flies in the face of Kirk’s “voluntary community” but is a far cry of worshiping at the altar of “statism.” And Conor nails it when he takes Levin to task for generalizing and ultimately, mis-identifying the enemy:

Terrible as he sounds, The Statist that Mr. Levin describes—his ill deeds keep growing as the book winds down–would at least play a clarifying role in American politics if he actually existed. Imagine how useful a blueprint Mr. Levin’s book would prove if the primary opponents of conservatives were actually cunning Statists with malign motives and hatred of liberty in their hearts. But re-read all the attributes that describe the Statist. Does anyone in American politics fit that description, let alone a plurality sizable enough to enact their agenda?

In fact, the main antagonists that the American conservative vies with in politics are the independent, the liberal, the center left Democrat, the progressive, even some among the apolitical. The average people who support “Statist” President Obama’s domestic agenda are apolitical African American women who work in cubicles, law firm associates who earn six figure salaries, and working parents who fret about being uninsured—not utopian radicals bent on advancing a counterrevolution that destroys the freedom won by the Founding generation.

Levin obviously has in mind Democrats and liberals who support the agenda of President Obama - an agenda full of “solutions” to problems like health care, climate change, education, the home mortgage crisis, and our economic woes. Is this a “statist” manifesto or an attempt by a political party to curry favor with voters by offering to address their real life concerns?

I have resisted using terms like “socialist” and especially “communist” to describe the Democrat’s ideology because by strict definition, they are not trying to destroy the free market, repeal individual rights (as always, making an exception for 2nd amendment guarantees), set up a dictatorship, or impose “tyranny - soft or hard - on the American people.

Sllippery slope arguments are unconvincing, if only because the logical fallacy involved in the “boiling frog” scenario where we all just sit back and allow the government to descend into a kind of fascism, is belied by the stink being made by conservatives over some of Obama’s more anti-free market actions today. Can you imagine if Obama really tried to take control of the economy? I daresay we wouldn’t need Glenn Beck, weeping on live television about how bad things are with Obama as president to activate conservatives. And we wouldn’t be alone. Moderates, libertarians, classical liberals, and others would be standing with us, side by side, to strenuously oppose any move to socialize the entire economy.

But I too, have been guilty of using the word “statist” to describe what Obama and the Democrats have been doing. My definition is a little more benign than Levin’s in that the agenda being promoted by the left would not lead to tyranny, but rather a highly constricted free market of the sort that is practiced in many European social democracies; over-regulated markets that stifle inventiveness, innovation, and entrepreneurship. With such regulation necessarily comes higher taxes on all: reason enough to oppose the Democrats and thwart their plans for “fairness, transparency, and accountability” in the free market.

But I see Friedersdorf’s point. There may be a small clique on the left that would love to see an America that they could “guide” in a paternalistic sort of way. George Soros and his billionaire buddies come to mind. But in order to kill the free market, enslave the American people, gain control of the media, and destroy liberty, those ordinary folk Conor mentioned would have to be convinced that all of this would make their lives better - a tall order, that.

This problem with mis-identification that Conor writes about as well as the wrong headed definitions of where Obama and the Democrats are trying to take the country, feed what has become a perceived paranoia among many conservatives that is driving people away from the movement rather than rallying them to our standard.

At bottom is the argument I’ve been trying to advance in this series; that the excessive ideology fueling the rage that manifests itself in paranoid rantings on the internet against imagined socialism, the purging of perceived apostates, the obsession with ideological purity, and more recently, shouted down speakers at health care town halls - all of this damages conservatism in the eyes of people who might be inclined to support our cause. It also makes it extraordinarily easy for the opposition to paint conservatives as too emotional to trust with running the government.

Bruce Bartlett has some similar thoughts:

I think the party got seriously on the wrong track during the George W. Bush years, as I explained in my Impostor book. In my opinion, it no longer bears any resemblance to the party of Ronald Reagan. I still consider myself to be a Reaganite. But I don’t see any others anywhere in the GOP these days, which is why I consider myself to be an independent. Mindless partisanship has replaced principled conservatism. What passes for principle in the party these days is “what can we do to screw the Democrats today.” How else can you explain things like that insane op-ed Michael Steele had in the Washington Post on Monday?

I am not alone. When I talk to old timers from the Reagan years, many express the same concerns I have. But they all work for Republican-oriented think tanks like AEI and Hoover and don’t wish to be fired like I was from NCPA . Or they just don’t want to be bothered or lose friends. As a free agent I am able to say what they can’t or won’t say publicly.

I think the Republican Party is in the same boat the Democrats were in in the early eighties — dominated by extremists unable to see how badly their party was alienating moderates and independents.

I don’t think you can accuse Bartlett, Friedersorf, or I for that matter, of lacking principles. I have made the argument that pragmatists are as principled as any ideologue. Where the extremists and I part company is in the application of those principles to real world politics. Not hating your opponent should not disqualify you from being a conservative, nor should dismissing the notion that Obama is a socialist be cause enough to question one’s conservative bona fides. Principled opposition in a republic must be based on the golden rule; respect others as you yourself would like to be respected. No, I don’t always live up to that credo. But I would like to think that I never question the good intentions of my foes. Wrong, not evil.

And on a related note, I would argue with Mark Levin that liberty does not exist in a vacuum, nor can free people exist apart from the community that bred them. There are responsibilities that go along with enjoying liberty that includes the recognition that we are not islands unto ourselves, and that government, however imperfect it can be, is nevertheless not the implacable enemy of liberty some conservatives believe.

A danger at times? Yes. But if conservatism is to triumph again, we must demonstrate that conservative principles can be applied to running government better than the those of the opposition. That is the essence of politics and we would do well to remember it.

So the Senate, giving in to Palin’s fear mongering, has decided to scrap the end of life consultation provision in the health care bill.

“On the Finance Committee, we are working very hard to avoid unintended consequences by methodically working through the complexities of all of these issues and policy options,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement. “We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.”

The Finance Committee is the only congressional committee not to report out a preliminary healthcare bill before the August congressional recess, but is expected to unveil its proposal shortly after Labor Day.

Grassley said that bill would hold up better compared to proposals crafted in the House, which he asserted were “poorly cobbled together.”

“The bill passed by the House committees is so poorly cobbled together that it will have all kinds of unintended consequences, including making taxpayers fund healthcare subsidies for illegal immigrants,” Grassley said. The veteran Iowa lawmaker said the end-of-life provision in those bills would pay physicians to “advise patients about end-of-life care and rate physician quality of care based on the creation of and adherence to orders for end-of-life care.

Grassley is right about the House bill. There are plenty of slippery slopes that hold the potential for appalling health care policy to emerge once the health bureaucrats got a hold of its broadly drawn and badly written provisions.

But the end of life consultations weren’t one of them. There was no - repeat no mandate to force people to talk to their doctors about DNR’s, living wills, and other crucial, personal, intimate, and private details of what our specific wishes are when we prepare to leave this life behind. Fact check after fact check done by a huge variety of newspapers and websites have thoroughly, completely, and totally debunked Sarah Palin’s cynical fear mongering on the subject.

But it worked anyway. And because of it, it is my belief that Sarah Palin has no business being a national figure in the GOP - nor Guiliani, or any Republican who didn’t have the courage to face the wrath of Palin Zombies and disagree with her. Sarah Palin was wrong. And if she made the “death panel” statement to gin up fear and outrage, then that is the kind of cynical politics I want nothing ever to do with.

If she really believed it, she’s an ignoramus and should stick to being an airhead ex-governor that has conservative little boys drooling over her like they drool over porn actresses and movie stars. If, during the most critical debate on a public policy issue since perhaps the Civil Rights Act of 1964, all she has to offer is an irrational, exaggerated, hyperbolic, and ultimately dishonest critique of the Democrat’s health care plan, responsible Republicans should want to have nothing to do with her.

We needed leadership. She offered fear. We needed a genuine critique of very bad proposals We got fake tears, exploitation of her disabled child in a dishonest cause, and dark hints of the evil our political opponents represent.

Think of the good she could have done if she stuck with the facts. There is - or was - a sizable segment of independent women who admired Palin for her accomplishments. Where are they now? Her lying may have ginned up her base of Zombies who rushed to defend the indefensible but beyond that, she is even losing favor with other Republicans as her positive stands now at 39%, down 7 points since May.

Someone with her visibility could have intervened and called for civil debate based on the facts, denounced people who were shouting down their fellow Americans, and elevated the entire tone of this debate. Instead, she debased herself with her reckless disregard for the facts. And now, an important provision for seniors (one she supported in her own state) that would have had Medicare paying for doctor visits to discuss end of life issues has been sacrificed, largely because she misused her influence to conflate this vital and necessary provision with “death panels.”

Do we realize the irony in all of this? It was 1976 when the country was torn apart by the case of a comatose patient, Karen Ann Quinlan, whose parents sought vainly for months to have her taken off a respirator.

Quinlan was in a persistent vegetative state with no hope of ever coming out of her coma. Despite the parent’s pleas, the doctors and hospital ignored them and kept the young woman on a breathing machine. The legal hullabaloo that resulted was emotionally wrenching, and split the country in two over end of life issues.

At that time, doctors were pretty much Gods who alone could determine what treatments were given to terminally ill or, as in Quinlan’s case, comatose patients with no hope of recovery. In practice, some doctors actually did “pull the plug” but if they were caught, they may have been charged with murder. Clearly, medical technology that could prolong life had advanced beyond our ability to build an ethical and legal framework that would place these decisions in the hands of the patient and the family.

Now that framework is in place and suddenly, we want to prevent seniors and others from exploring these options, one on one with their doctor. This is especially relevant given the fact that too often, doctors are left out of the decision making process altogether and when the time comes, are in the dark about their patient’s wishes.

Many people don’t want to think about these issues but if Terri Schiavo had put it in writing that she didn’t want to live like a vegetable, her family could have been spared a great deal of pain. A living will with that stipulation would have kept the doctors from taking the extraordinary measures they employed to keep her alive. Reason enough for everyone to spend the $45 or so in order to make their own wishes known in a living will so that there is no doubt how medical professionals should treat us if we were to suffer an accident or illness that incapacitated us.

It was a small provision, thought to be uncontroversial - and would have been if we were having an honest debate about health care reform. But we’re not. And thanks to Sarah Palin, who might have changed at least some of that from our side, we’re not going to have one anytime soon.

I’ve said it a thousand times; this bill is so bad that if we spent the same amount of time explaining the truth of it as we do in lying about it, it will be soundly defeated. A good leader, a true conservative lives for the truth. Sarah Palin flunked the test on both counts and deserves to be cast into the outer darkness of politics reserved for those who misuse the public trust she so cynically, and cavalierly abused.

Michael Moynihan has a post up at Reason’s Hit and Run that identifies at least one conservative “leader” who isn’t a talk radio host, or some other pop conservative polemicist.

After excoriating Republicans for spending like Dutch social democrats (and elevating halfwits to important leadership positions), I was asked recently by a radio host to name a Republican qualified to be “leader of the party.” The pickings are slim, but there are a few exceptionally bright, market-oriented contenders out there. So I plugged, with appropriate obsequiousness, the always impressive Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan. When I sat down with Ryan last month to discuss Obama’s education policy, he quoted Hayek, talked at length about handing out Rand books to staffers, and discussed his previous life as an economic analyst. Such conversations should be de rigueur with members of the House Budget Committee, but I suspect Ryan is the only one that could name an Austrian economist.

Further proof that the Republican Party needs more Paul Ryans: Yesterday, he beat up on MSNBC host Carlos Watson and The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel regarding the “public option” and why Congress shouldn’t pass bills it hasn’t read. Imagine such a performance from, say, Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann:

Indeed, Ryan dispatches vanden Heuval with the greatest of ease:

Prior to hearing the Wisconsin congressman at CPAC, I didn’t know much about the guy. Michael Barone notes in The Almanac of American Politics that Ryan is pretty much a mainstream Republican, although more of a foreign policy centrist. He is a reliable conservative on fiscal matters and toes a pretty conservative line on social issues.

But this fellow is a thinker - a rarity among all politicians and especially among many legislators who call themselves conservatives today.

An example from his CPAC speech:

Our greatest leaders - from Lincoln to Reagan - succeeded because they anchored conservative thinking and policies in the founding principles of our nation. They did so not because of mere “history” or “tradition” - but because they understood the need to revitalize the unchanging truths that inspired the birth of America.

Let those truths inspire us again! Let them re-ignite the sparks of hope for a new generation of Americans who love freedom!

Without enduring principles we get “change” but no direction.

Guided by the founding principles we can direct “change” toward the ends that have made America the envy of the world: Individual freedom … growing prosperity … and equal rights secured by constitutional self-government.

America’s Founders did not discover ideas no one ever heard of. Their great achievement was to build a constitution of equality and liberty upon a foundation of self-evident truths as old as the beginning of mankind and as new as tomorrow.

What are those truths?

First is that the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” are the only sure touchstone of right and wrong … for individuals as well as societies.

A second is that all human beings are created with equal natural rights - the rights to live … to be free … to acquire property - and other means to fulfill our God-given potential for happiness.

Third, and most important for conservatives: The great purpose of government is to secure these natural rights: protecting every person’s life, liberty, and freedom to pursue happiness is the great and only mission of a government true to our founding.

There are very few congressmen who speak so eloquently of First Principles. Now, he frames those principles in a quasi-religious context, which is acceptable to me as long as it goes to fundamental truths espoused by the Founders who, like all natural rights supporters at the time, believed man was created by God and that these rights were simply self-evident manifestations of God’s desires.

His CPAC speech was necessarily more political than philosphical. But read this speech he gave at a Hudson Institute symposium on “Making Conservatism Credible Again:”

“Conservatism” at its best, defends the standards and qualities which define “people of character.” The original source for these standards is the Western tradition of civilization, rooted in reason and faith, stretching back thousands of years. The tradition as a whole affirms the high dignity, rights, and obligations of the individual human person. One of the glories of Western civilization was to break out of the mythological past which saw only groups and classes, ranked and organized by collectivist governments. Before the Western tradition began in ancient Israel and classical Greece, the individual person as a subject of rights was simply unknown.

Nowhere was the Western tradition epitomized more memorably than in our Declaration of Independence. By “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” all human beings are created equal, not in height, or skills, or knowledge, or color, or other nonessentials, but equal in certain inalienable rights – to live, to be free, and to fulfill their best individual potential, including the right to the “material” such as property needed to do this. Each individual is unique and possesses rights and dignity. There are no group or collective rights in the Declaration. Nor does basic human equality imply “equal result.” It means “equal opportunity”: every person has a right not to be prevented from pursuing happiness, from developing his or her potential. The results should differ from one to another because “justice” or “fairness” is giving each individual what each has earned or merited. That’s what fairness is.

The great conservative purpose of government is to secure these natural rights under popular consent. Protecting every person’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness should be the great and only mission of legitimate government.

After a stirring defense of the Adam Smith “invisible hand,” Ryan make a thoughtful attempt to unite libertarian and social conservatives by pointing to common ground:

A “libertarian” who wants limited government should embrace the means to his freedom: thriving mediating institutions that create the moral preconditions for economic markets and choice. A “social issues” conservative with a zeal for righteousness should insist on a free market economy to supply the material needs for families, schools, and churches that inspire moral and spiritual life. In a nutshell, the notion of separating the social from the economic issues is a false choice. They stem from the same root.

Take that Huckabee and all of you “crunchy cons.”

I tried to think of some other elected conservative who is making this kind of honest attempt to bring the factions back together and came up empty. Nor can I think of too many conservative legislators who quote Hayek, Mises, and Adam Smith, while speaking the language of social conservatives and espousing a decidedly libertarian economic viewpoint.

But he voted for TARP I which makes him poison to many in the base of the Republican party. I was disappointed so many conservatives voted for the execrable legislation except we have to understand the context. Everyone was being told that if this money didn’t get to the banks right away, there would be a financial meltdown that could lead to a panic which would plunge us into a worldwide, catastrophic depression. They were being told this by a president and Treasury secretary of their own party. They had no clue that the money would be used for everything but buying up those bad assets that were weighing down the balance sheets of the big banks. In my book, they were acting as responsible lawmakers.

For that reason, I am inclined to cut Ryan and others some slack for their vote on TARP I. And his subsequent statements and actions have shown Ryan to be an innovative and creative legislator. His alternative budget would have cut taxes to stimulate the economy the right way and done it in a revenue neutral manner. Just think where we’d be today if his plan had been followed.

I’m not the first to proclaim Ryan a future conservative leader. But I think he needs more exposure than what he’s been getting from conservatives on the internet as well as the pop-conservatives on talk radio. Elevating his stature would seem to be a smart thing to do given the man’s base intelligence and good ideas on a variety of public concerns. His criticisms of Obama have been reasonable, fact based, and without the hyperbole associated with more rabid conservatives in Congress. That too, is a plus in my book.

At age 39, he will be on the national stage for a long time to come. He may or may not run for higher office some day. But he will be an important voice for conservatives regardless of where his political career takes him.

It is sometimes easy when you live in the virtual world of the internet to look at people like the Birthers or Truthers and dismiss them out of hand as a small minority of lunatics who are best left alone to wallow in their paranoid kookiness.

Such might be good advice for dealing with those who believe we never landed on the moon, or who think that we have dead aliens on ice at Area 51. But, as I warned my fellow conservatives in this post about the Founding Freeper’s call for “revolution” and removal of all elected representatives from the president on down, we ignore some of these groups, including the Birthers, at the peril of having conservatism severely damaged by having their ideas associated with the mainstream right.

Yes, there numbers may be small relative to the whole. But they are actively committed to spreading their lunacy far and wide and are gaining converts and cash as I write this.

The question then becomes do we try and isolate, chastise, and ultimately drive out the paranoid purveyors of utterly fantastical notions of Obama’s origins while they are still a small enough group that a concerted effort could succeed? Or do we wait and see how big they get before acting, thus risking a backlash against the right from the voter?

To prevent many diseases from harming our health, we inoculate ourselves so that an illness will not develop. I propose something similar in dealing with the Birthers. For my part, anyone who leaves a comment on this site, on any post, that advances any birther “theory” will be banned from accessing my writings.

Some might think this a bad idea in that I will forgo “debate” or perhaps not allow a Birther to be convinced otherwise. That’s nonsense. My experience with Birthers has been that they don’t want to hear any contrary evidence, that they have closed their mind so completely to the truth that arguing with a brick wall would be easy by comparison.

Besides, for most Birthers, it’s not about discovering the truth. It is about delegitimizing the president. For months they demanded to see the president’s birth certificate. When the state of Hawaii released a “Certificate of Live Birth,” we heard from the Birthers that it wasn’t good enough, or it was a fake. “All we want is to see the president’s birth certificate,” they innocently ask. And they take the president’s reluctance to do so - indeed, his fight in the courts to prevent the release of it - as “evidence” that there is something amiss.

I don’t blame Obama for fighting it. It is an insult to the presidency, to begin with. And the fact that no other president or presidential candidate in history has been asked to “prove” they are citizens is a personal insult to Obama.

I have little doubt that racism plays a role in this for some, but for most, it is a continuation of a streak of radical paranoia that has afflicted a subset of modern conservatism in the post-World War II era. The anti-Masons, the bugaboos associated with the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, Breton Woods, the Jews, the Catholics — it is a long, inglorious list of people and organizations around which has grown paranoid conspiracies of the most outrageous sort.

I’ve quoted Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” several times on this site. The opening paragraph of that essay applies to our current situation:

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

Hofstadter misread the Goldwater movement entirely, but so did most liberals at the time who failed to appreciate what energies had been released as a result of the Arizona senator’s candidacy. To ascribe Goldwater’s success to the paranoids was an extreme oversimplification but typical of the blindness demonstrated by the left to what was happening to conservatism below the surface. (I wonder what Hofstadter would have made of the unhinged, paranoid and radical nature of opposition to Bush by many lefty bloggers over the previous 8 years?)

The point is that Hofstadter’s description of the Birthers (and others who believe everything from Obama being a communist to his desire to “destroy” America) is spot on. “Heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” are the hallmarks of the Birthers, and even if Obama were to release his birth certificate, they would find it a fake or demand something equally idiotic as “proof” of his citizenship.

You cannot debate them without legitimizing their arguments. They are not rational so logic and reason have no effect on their thinking. Like the 9/11 Truthers who are a cross cultural, equal opportunity fraternity of both left and right nutcases, they must be denounced in as strong language that we can muster. They must be belittled, humiliated, laughed at, raged against, and verbally hammered unmercifully until they are beaten back into the shadows and dark places from which their fantasies emerged.

And now, Rush Limbaugh has joined the Birthers in asking to see the president’s “long form” birth certificate. The “news” site World News Daily - one of the biggest boosters of the Birther movement - reports on Limbaugh’s conversion:

On his show today, Limbaugh told listeners, “As you know, I’m in the midst of another harassing audit from New York State and New York City for the last three years. We’re up to 16 different ways I have to prove to New York City and state tax authorities where I have been every day – not just work week – but every day, for the past three years.”

He continued, “Barack Obama has yet to have to prove that he’s a citizen. All he has to do is show a birth certificate. He has yet to have to prove he’s a citizen. I have to show them 14 different ways where the h— I am every day of the year for three years.”

Do my fellow righties still think this is just a fringe group of paranoids? Whenever I criticize Limbaugh on this site, I get an army of conservatives telling me he is the heart and soul of the conservative movement. If so, what does that say to the rest of us who utterly reject the Birther nonsense? Are we out of step with the mainstream? Or has Limbaugh proved once again that he is a clown, an oaf, and a shallow panderer to the fears and anger of his listeners?

Mark Ambinder offers this in his post, “Should the GOP Take the Birther Threat Seriously?”

That’s the thesis of the First Readers of NBC News, after viewing this astonishing clip from a town hall meeting that Rep. Mike Castle held in Delaware for his constituents. What’s most notable, to me, at least, is not how scared Castle looked or how passionately the woman argued for Barack Obama’s foreign birth. It was the reaction of the audience, a good portion of which erupted into cheers and youbetchas.

[...]

To the extent that one can conclusively prove such things in our postmodern age, this claim has been extremely thoroughly debunked. The birther movement may be premised on a fictional belief, but it is savvy: birthers now wear the term “birther” as badge of honor, as if they were a persecuted minority — which, come to think of it, is one mechanism for solidarity in the face of evidence to the contrary.

[...]

This is, at once, a fringe movement and something greater. It’s fringe because no important Republicans believe it, and most are offended by it. It’s greater because some fairly prominent local lawmakers are beginning to sign birther petitions.

At least nine members of Congress have cosponsored a birther bill that would require prospective presidents to affirm their U.S. citizenship. What we don’t know is how widespread the belief is among Republicans — and even if the belief is confined to a narrow minority, whether the belief will spread as Republicans begin to pay closer attention to electoral politics in 2010 and 2012.

Now that Rush has picked up the Birther standard, expect other Pop-Cons like Hannity, Beck, Coulter, and more to start pushing it. If they do, they are playing with fire. Pandering to paranoids has the historically nasty habit of having their delusions stick to you like glue. Charles Lindbergh found that out to his detriment when he embraced the “America First Committee” before World War II. When the war broke out, he was ignored by Roosevelt and his fame took a permanent hit.

I am open to any and all ideas on how to marginalize these kooks before conservatism itself becomes a victim of the Birthers unbalanced lunacy. We can no longer turn the other way when confronted with Birther blather. Since they won’t listen to reason , shame and humiliation would seem to me to be the best way to closet them with the other nutcases of American politics.

UPDATE

I was right to compare Birtherism with a disease. It seems to be spreading.

First Limbaugh, now Liz Cheney who refused to denounce the Birthers on Larry King:

After King showed video of the crazy birther who disrupted a meeting with poor GOP Rep. Mike Castle, demanding he acknowledge Obama was born in Kenya (that’s one birther claim); and after Carville denounced them as a “poor, pathetic” fringe group, King gave Cheney a chance to distance herself from them. But Cheney demurred, telling King the Birther movement exists because “People are uncomfortable with a president who is reluctant to defend the nation overseas.”

The rarely shocked Carville seemed briefly speechless, and even King, not known to be the most combative interviewer, tried a second time to get an honest reaction from Cheney — which I read as expecting her to separate herself from the crazies. But Cheney repeated her talking point about Obama inadequately defending the nation overseas. Unbelievable. Carville called her on it, accurately: “She refuses to say, ‘This is ludicrous,’ because she actually wants to encourage these people to believe this.”

Absolutely nuts.