Within Reason

Over at A Ku Indeed, Chris wrote a post about David Frum’s piece on the need to put some distance between Glenn Beck and the GOP. While Frum’s piece is helpful, it’s hard not to see conservatives-in-exile as lying in the bed made by years of disparaging government. But that’s not the point of this post.

I was reading Josh Marshall’s site the other day when I saw the news item about Cass Sunstein being confirmed more or less along party lines and clicked through to see who had voted against him. With his free-market credentials, I was surprised to see that there was even a problem with cloture. So I googled around and found the particular craziness that Frum was talking about (which, while I am not a utilitarian, is reprehensibly wrong about Peter Singer and utilitarianism in general).

One of the things that made Rush Limbaugh so popular during the 1990s was his railing against “political correctness” that connected with an American public who felt alienated by the technocratic direction government was headed after the Cold War. Charitably, the idea was that a common man’s common sense was actually superior to tolerance and the political calculations of governing. Of course Limbaugh was really just interested in advancing conservative correctness and didn’t mind killing tolerance in the process, but the general idea caught on and he rode it to fame. Later Sean Hannity replicated Limbaugh’s views on TV to good success. Refined anti-political correctness became a dogma of the fledgling conservative “intellectual” movement.

But with Hannity and Limbaugh you could always sort of see the veneer of a lust for ratings on whatever crazy right wing meme they were touting (Limbaugh’s said as much in interviews). Beck is able to create a much better illusion of it not being there. Or maybe it’s not actually there. I can’t even tell sometimes. He doesn’t try to stay within the bounds of political discourse on the right and it could very well be because he doesn’t actually know them. He really is making it up as he goes along, with little to no concern even for consistency. (How else do you get by with railing against both the free-market healthcare system and reform?) This gives his persona a certain innocence that seems to have tapped some audience that no one could hold before. In a way, his ignorance allows him to embody the most authentic form of anti-political correctness. The very words “public”, “czar”, and “tax” are just politically correct doublespeak. All of the people who were left behind when conservativism had tried to become a principled movement found their place again. You don’t need to know that gender-neutral pronouns are a result of feminism or even common sense. You just need your fear (preferably of ACORN) and cable TV.

The new anti-political correctness is why Glenn Beck and the right can now stand against the likes of Cass Sunstein and David Frum. It’s why Sarah Palin had more hardcore supporters than John McCain. It works like raw meat to people who are uncritically hungry for validation of their fear and distrust of President Obama and Washington DC. It should scare the pants off of anyone who’s not thinking with their limbic system. And as far as I can see, no one knows what to do about it.