In the Fever Swamp of the Radical Wingnuts

The next time you find yourself inhabiting a quiet moment, listen closely and you'll be able to hear a clattery drone off in the distance. That's our right-wing opinion media, hammering and sawing away at another of those weird Trojan-animal contraptions they're always building -- another giant rickety thing with off-square corners and oval wheels, emblazoned with some slogan like "supporting our troops" or "defending marriage." They're planning to wheel it innocently up the hill, whereupon America will open the gates and let it in -- and you know how the story always goes from there.

It's always something new with those people. To switch metaphors abruptly, I cover what you might call the waterfront -- the dank and fishy between-realm that divides life as we know it from the vast sea of unexamined prejudices, of blind enthusiasms and angry yawpings that make up the right-wing urge in America. I write mostly about conservative pundits and bloggers, and mostly about the danker, fishier ones at medium-traffic blogs and at conservative news sites such as Townhall, WorldNetDaily, and Newsmax.

The denizens of these sites are widely read by conservatives, especially by base-type conservatives who also consume products like Rush Limbaugh's show, but they seldom reach a mainstream readership, although they'll occasionally turn up, for instance, as guests on cable news shows, identified by a caption, like "conservative columnist" or "conservative blogger," that avoids any specific claims of expertise. That's because they're mostly howling idiots.

There are two reasons that I follow them. The first is that, being idiots, they're easy to make fun of. The second reason is more practical as well as more personally salutary: Minor right-wing pundits are like what the biologists call an "indicator species": By watching how they react to their environment, you can get a good sense of what's happening in the major conservative media.

Right-wing messaging in America works very differently today than it did in the Reagan era, when the modern conservative movement was fairly new and unseasoned. The obvious change is that it's become more opaque and top-down, more rigorously focused and spin-controlled. But there's also been a more substantive shift in that conservatism since Reagan has learned not to admit to the public what its real policies are.

Rather than, for instance, arguing for the elimination of New Deal social programs, today's message machine will slap together rickety claims of a Social Security crisis and have its yawpers run around scaring people, offering as the cure a "saving Social Security" plan that coincidentally means privatization. Rather than arguing, in time-honored GOP fashion, that the wealthy should pay less taxes, conservative yawpers will run around advocating an "IRS reform" to simplify the complicated tax forms that we all hate filling out -- coincidentally by eliminating graduated tax rates. In short, conservatism now functions by fooling the public with a succession of Trojan horses -- as well as Trojan rabbits, pangolins, tapirs, and whatever other animal serves their aims (including donkeys in the case of Joe Lieberman). The hammering and sawing of their constructions is ceaseless and ever-puzzling.

You can see this in the way today's upper-tier conservative pundits ply their trade. Characters such as David Brooks, and Mike Gerson owe their success to a strange, carefully cultivated Mr. Magoo quality: Instead of coming out and saying what they're trying to say, they make bad-faith, extremist arguments as though continually by accident, making it seem as though they arrive at each new Republican policy prescription by cluelessly walking over see-sawing planks, up freight elevators and along a series of moving girders.