Matt Yglesias

Beck Capture

Dave Weigel had an interesting post this morning about the problems a political movement runs into when it lets itself be led by charlatan media personalities:

The Democrats are in worse political shape than they were a year ago because unemployment is at 9.8 percent, the war in Afghanistan has grown less popular, and the bailouts of struggling banks are seen as wastes of money that haven’t worked. Republicans benefit when they talk about this stuff. But Beck and the others don’t let them talk about this stuff. For the past few months, they have moved the discussion onto fantasy terrain, accusing the president of reaching for dictatorial powers and surrounding himself with “radicals” who want to destroy capitalism. [...]

And remember, one of the huge political mistakes of 2005 was the Republican decision to do a full-court press on an issue that had come from conservative activists and pundits: the fate of Terri Schiavo.

You can see some of this at work in the very interesting GQR report on “The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans”. Basically they contrast the worldview of self-identified conservative Republicans with that of Obama-skeptical people who don’t self-identify in this way. To cast the distinction in broad terms, the Obama-skeptics worry that Obama is failing—that his efforts to create jobs aren’t working, that his reforms of the health care system won’t improve access to quality care, etc.—whereas the conservative Republicans worry that he’ll succeed. They believe, à la Beck, that the Obama administration is pursuing a secret agenda aimed at the deliberate destruction of the United States. Focusing on this rather outlandish claim makes it difficult to get in touch with the more banal worries of the marginal voter.

The overarching problem, I think, is that while it may be tactically helpful to have allies in the media who’ll lie about your enemies, it’s a big problem when you start believing too many of the lies. Beck and others on the right have, for example, convinced a lot of people that Cass Sunstein is a dangerous wild-eyed in a way that will make it difficult for the Obama administration to elevate him to any higher positions. Given that Sunstein is, in fact, actually pretty conservative for a Democrat and also a plausible Supreme Court justice this campaign has been, objectively speaking, a victory for the left.

Glenn Beck, Goldbug

It seems that Glenn Beck has taken to advising his audience to invest in gold. At the same time, his remaining advertiser base consists primarily of gold merchants. Nice conflict of interest there.

But beyond the conflict of interest, it should be said that the whole idea of investing in gold as a hedge against the possible future decline in the value of the dollar is a bit bizarre. Currencies devalue relative to other currencies. If you think that in the future the dollar will be worth less (not a crazy prediction) the reasonable course of action isn’t to invest in gold, it’s to invest in some other currency. Buy Yen or Australian dollars or Norwegian krone or whatever you like.

Norwegian krone versus dollar and euro

Gold isn’t much of a pure currency play. Its price depends on things like discoveries of new gold, technological improvements in mining, the waxing and waning of demand for gold for industrial applications, etc. I would not, personally, be inclined to become a currency speculator. But if you do think you have special insight into the future movements of currencies, there are much more reasonable ways to put your money where your mouth is.

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.

Conservatives Against Being Against Racism

I think David Frum’s essay in The Week on the dual legacy of Jack Kemp is very good. But while Frum appreciates the merits of Kemp’s attempted outreach to the African-American community and the problematic nature of most conservatives’ failure to follow his lead, I think he winds up understating the extent of the problem. For yet another example of the nature of the problem, consider this clip of Glenn Beck angrily booting from his show an ACORN spokesman. Beck is full of righteous indignation at having been called a racist:

Robert Stacy McCain hails the clip as a great example of “how to deal with cheap liberal accusations of ‘racism.’”

And I should say, if someone called me a racist I’d get pretty indignant about it. Nobody likes that accusation. And I wouldn’t like to see someone I admire get that accusation leveled at them. But at the same time—and this is the crucial difference between progressives and conservatives on this front—I also get indignant about actual racism. Glenn Beck, by contrast, like most conservatives, think that the preeminent racial problem in the United States is that white people are too put upon by political correctness. Conservatives are very very very concerned about this alleged problem of anti-racism run amok. And they’re very concerned about the alleged problem of reverse discrimination. But they don’t seem concerned at all about racism or discrimination and certainly not nearly as concerned as they about helping out the poor, put-upon white man.

And it’s not just a quirk of Beck’s. This attitude goes deep in the DNA of the modern conservative movement. National Review’s position on Civil Rights was that segregation was bad, but the cure of the civil rights movement was worse than the disease of white supremacy. Barry Goldwater campaigned for president on the proposition that Jim Crow might be bad, but not nearly so bad as the Civil Rights Act. As the policy status quo shifted, the precise nature of the conservative position changed with it so that now affirmative action is worse than discrimination against minorities and “political correctness” is worse than racism, but the basic spirit is the same.