In the Fever Swamp of the Radical Wingnuts

By Gavin McNett, AlterNet. Posted September 26, 2007.

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.

A wonderful example of the genre is Brooks's July 24 New York Times column, "A Realty-Based Economy," in which he strings together an astonishing chain of economic errors and cherry-picked statistics in order to decide that the Bush economy is -- if you forget partisanship and look at the facts -- perking along famously. Another is Gerson's August 17 Washington Post column, "What History Taught Karl Rove," which struggles to make it seem as though Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter and a consummate White House insider, had only just encountered Rove on Rove's way out of the White House, and was pleasantly surprised to find that his former boss was actually "the opposite of a cynical political operator" and a champion of "the little guy."

Among the many variants of this style is that of the nominally liberal columnist (such as Thomas Friedman or Richard Cohen) who finds himself continually forced by events to repeat conservative talking points and express disdain for his fellow liberals -- message: "This hurts me more than it hurts you." When executed well, this routine can be repeated weekly for an indefinite number of years. The equivalent on the moderate right was until recently epitomized by the Times op-ed columnist John Tierney, a self-identified libertarian who was largely indifferent to the subject of liberty, and instead produced a relentless stream of gee-whiz columns in which he'd happen across something new to deregulate or privatize, such as the space program or Central Park, or would learn of a new argument against environmentalism, women, global warming research, those crazy kids today, non-Republican politicians, or (just in time for the election) the idea of voting. At the end of last year, Tierney moved downstairs to the Times' science section, where his current beat, more or less, is to help champion corporate-sponsored junk science.

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Gavin McNett writes and does graphics in the Boston area, and contributes

to the weblog, Sadly, No!

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