Matt Yglesias

Frum on Glenn Beck Conservatism

Glenn Beck

David Frum observes the insanity of conservative attacks on Cass Sunstein:

In other words: Horowitz agrees that Beck’s attack on Sunstein was false. Yet that falsehood does not worry Horowitz. The country is “under assault.” (As the broadcaster Mark Levin has said, President Obama is “literally at war” with the American people.) In a war, truth must yield to the imperatives of victory. Any conservative qualms about the untruth of Beck’s defamation of Sunstein amounts to “appeasement” – an appeasement that will end with the left decapitating the right. This is the language and logic of Leninism. There is no truth or falsehood comrades, there is only service to the revolution or betrayal of the revolution. [...]

… even in Leninist terms, Beck’s attack on Sunstein was stupid and counter-productive. Every legal conservative who cares about the issues of regulation and deregulation agrees that Cass Sunstein is the very best choice for the OIRA job to be hoped from a Democratic president. Had conservative opposition somehow derailed the Sunstein nomination, President Obama’s next appointment would almost certainly have been worse – very possibly, a lot worse.

This doesn’t actually especially remind me of any distinctively Leninist ideas so much as Carl Schmitt’s thought on the primacy of the friend/enemy distinction. Sunstein is “on the other team” so it makes sense to try to destroy him even though his views on the issues covered by the OIRA job aren’t very liberal and some environmentalists regarded his appointment as a betrayal.

The larger issue is that it’s dangerous for political movements to let themselves be led by entertainers whose primary interest is in attracting an audience. Politics is a practical business, about accomplishing concrete goals and winning elections in an environment in which most people don’t care about politics very much. Becoming a successful cable news or talk radio host is about attracting a relatively small audience of die-hard fans and whipping them into various frenzies.

Frum on Conservative Paranoia

David Frum’s Spectator article on the political challenges facing the modern Republican Party has a nice ditty on the tide of extreme paranoia sweeping the conservative mediaverse:

Yet to listen to Fox News and other conservative media, you’d think we were living in Czechoslovakia in the final hours before the 1948 communist coup. Anchors end interviews by solemnly pledging to defend liberty and oppose tyranny. The network’s rising star Glenn Beck has mused about the coming turn to totalitarianism — and warned his audience that he has not been able to ‘debunk’ fears that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is constructing an archipelago of concentration camps for political opponents of the Obama administration.

Now to be fair, during the Bush years more than one person passed me this “14 Characteristics of Fascism” document in order to prove that under George W. Bush the United States had become a fascist regime. Overreaction to policies you don’t like is a pretty understandable human impulse. The difference is that mainstream, prominent outlets usually try to restrain that kind of impulse. But this sort of over-the-top rhetoric isn’t burbling from the grassroots up, it’s being driven the very most prominent figures in conservative media and also by a large number of members of congress.

Here, for example, is Representative Michael McCaul who appears to be calling on the crowd to shed the blood of the tyrannical Obama administration:

It’s about our founding fathers who in 1773 threw a little party called the Boston tea party. And fought against tyranny and oppressive taxes, does that sound familiar? We’re continuing that revolution right here in Austin, TX today. Thomas Jefferson once said that the tree of liberty will be fed with the blood of tyrants and patriots. You are the patriots.

I’m sure that 99.9 percent of the people listening to Rep. McCaul understand that this is just hot air and BS. They understand that he doesn’t really mean what he says, and doesn’t really think that what patriots should do is risk their lives in an effort to kill authority figures. But suppose 5,000 people are conservatives and fans of Michael McCaul and 99.9 percent of them remember not to take him seriously. What do the other five people do? Shoot an IRS agent? Try to kill the President? There’s a real need for people in positions of authority to act more responsibly than this.

What We Could Do for Palestinians

Amjad Atallah, director of the Middle East Task Force at New America and someone who deserves to be more prominent, has a very interesting BloggingHeads appearance alongside David Frum focused on the Gaza situation. In this clip, he offers a concrete suggestion of a helpful gesture the United States could make to show to the world that irrespective of our broader strategic orientation we do care about the suffering of Palestinian civilians:

Much more good stuff if you watch the whole episode.