The Autopsy on What Used to Be Called “Conservatism” Begin

Derbyshire applies one of the first scalpels on the corpse where it is badly needed: on the weird and desperate substitution millions of American conservatives have made in replacing serious thought with talk radio chatter:

Did the Limbaughs, Hannitys, Savages, and Ingrahams lead us to this sorry state of affairs?

They surely did. At the very least, by yoking themselves to the clueless George W. Bush and his free-spending administration, they helped create the great debt bubble that has now burst so spectacularly. The big names, too, were all uncritical of the decade-long (at least) efforts to “build democracy” in no-account nations with politically primitive populations. Sean Hannity called the Iraq War a “massive success,” and in January 2008 deemed the U.S. economy “phenomenal.”

In every revolt, you’ve got your serious thinkers and your rabble rousers. God help the movement that can’t tell one from the other or, worse still, prefers the latter to the former.

Limbaugh has sounded frantic and desperate in the few times I’ve happened to catch him since the inauguration. The other day, he was going on (in utter predictable fashion) about our Preferential Option for the Wealthy and how people who use bailout money to immediately send themselves on some luxurious retreat somewhere “should be treated like royalty” (as our Lord clearly teaches). That, and his weird hope that this administration “fail” in an hour when people are scared and desperate and his zany bull of excommunication against anybody critical of Jindal’s idea-free boilerplate… well, let just say that “Party of Ideas” is not the epithet that springs to mind as what used to be called “conservatism” continues it suicidal spiral into the abyss. Derb continues, perceptively:

There is a lowbrow liberalism, too, but the Left hasn’t learned how to market it. Consider again the failure of liberals at the talk-radio format, with the bankruptcy of Air America always put forward as an example. Yet in fact liberals are very successful at talk radio. They are just no good at the lowbrow sort. The “Rush Limbaugh Show” may be first in those current Talkers magazine rankings, but second and third are National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” with 13 million weekly listeners each. It is easy to mock the studied gentility, affectless voices, and reflexive liberalism of NPR, but these are very successful radio programs.

Liberals are getting rather good at talk TV, too. The key to this medium, they have discovered, is irony. I don’t take this political stuff seriously, I assure you, but really, these damn fool Republicans… Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert offer different styles of irony, but none leaves any shadow of doubt where his political sympathies lie. Liberals have done well to master this trick, but it depends too much on facial expressions and body language—the double-take, the arched eyebrow, the knowing smirk—to transfer to radio. It is, in any case, not quite populism, the target audience being mainly the ironic cohort—college-educated Stuff White People Like types.

If liberals can’t do populism, the converse is also true: conservatives are not much good at gentility. We don’t do affectless voices, it seems. There are genteel conservative events—I’ve been to about a million of them and have the NoDoz pharmacy receipts to prove it—but they preach to the converted. If anything, they reinforce the ghettoization of conservatism, of which talk radio’s echo chamber is the major symptom. We don’t know how to speak to that vast segment of the American middle class that lives sensibly—indeed, conservatively—wishes to be thought generous and good, finds everyday politics boring, and has a horror of strong opinions.

Read the whole thing. Derbyshire is a quirky old crank sometimes, but he also has the virtue of being frank in time when conservatives badly need somebody to hit them in the head with a 2 x 4 and awaken them from the trance they have been in. For instance, this is rather tonic:

You might object that the Right didn’t need talk radio to ruin it; it was quite capable of ruining itself. At sea for a uniting cause once the Soviet Union had fallen, buffaloed by master gamers in Congress, outfoxed by Bill Clinton, then seduced by the vapid “compassionate conservatism” of Rove and Bush, the post-Cold War Right cheerfully dug its own grave. And there was some valiant resistance from conservative talk radio to Bush’s crazier initiatives, like “comprehensive immigration reform” and the Medicare prescription-drug extravaganza.

But there was not much confrontation with other deep social and economic problems. The unholy marriage of social engineering and high finance that ended with our present ruin was left largely unanalyzed from reluctance to slight a Republican administration. Plenty of people saw what was coming. There was Ron Paul, for example: “Our present course … is not sustainable. … Our spendthrift ways are going to come to an end one way or another. Politicians won’t even mention the issue, much less face up to it.”

Neither will the GOP pep squad of conservative talk radio. And Ron Paul, you know, has a cousin whose best friend’s daughter was once dog-walker for a member of the John Birch Society. So much for him!

Why engage an opponent when an epithet is in easy reach? Some are crude: rather than debating Jimmy Carter’s views on Mideast peace, Michael Savage dismisses him as a “war criminal.” Others are juvenile: Mark Levin blasts the Washington Compost and New York Slimes.

But for all the bullying bluster of conservative talk-show hosts, their essential attitude is one of apology and submission—the dreary old conservative cringe. Their underlying metaphysic is the same as the liberals’: infinite human potential—Yes, we can!—if only we get society right. To the Left, getting society right involves shoveling us around like truckloads of concrete; to the Right, it means banging on about responsibility, God, and tax cuts while deficits balloon, Congress extrudes yet another social-engineering fiasco, and our armies guard the Fulda Gap. That human beings have limitations and that wise social policy ought to accept the fact—some problems insoluble, some Children Left Behind—is as unsayable on “Hannity” as it is on “All Things Considered.”

Anyhow, read the whole thing.