Update Jul 25: Some great comments inside on what conservatism actually is, as opposed to the weak and often self-refuting definitions offered by conservative intellectuals. - D.
During Netroots Nation, we are running Golden Oldies plus a few surprises. Regularly Scheduled programming will resume on July 26.
A Daniel De Groot Golden Oldie
From Thu Jan 01, 2009. Original HERE.
As a starting point for defining conservatism, and nailing down what the real atomic core of conservatism is, I started by asking: What do conservatives think it is? How do they answer this question?
It turns out, they don't really know. Their efforts to define it are worth studying though, partly because the answers they provide are revealing, but also because their own failure to find an answer satisfactory even just to themselves points to the need for outsiders to step in and provide the answers conservatives can't or won't face.
It's not that I didn't know it, or even that I had forgotten, but rather obviously this is something that we as country seem not to realize, from Brad DeLong, in a piece about Obama's infamous deficit commission:
Four centuries ago, the consensus, in Western Europe at least, was that good and even adequate government in this fallen world was inevitably a rarity. Democracy always degenerated into mob rule, monarchy into tyranny, and aristocracy into oligarchy. Even when well run, democracy took little interest in the distant future, aristocracy took little interest in the well-being of those whom Simpson calls the "little people," and monarchy took little interest in anything other than legitimate succession.
Then, at the end of the eighteenth century, the founders of the United States of America and their intellectual successors claimed that this pessimism about government was unwarranted. "The science of politics...like most other sciences," claimed Alexander Hamilton, "has received great improvement....The regular distribution of power into distinct departments...legislative balances and checks...judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election...are means, and powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided..."
Perhaps Hamilton was too much the optimist. When I look at Barack Obama's deficit commission - indeed, look at governance worldwide - I see many imperfections, but few or no examples of excellence.
One of the great accomplishments of America is that it showed the possibility of good government at more than local scale, which in turn helped to show that some misfortunes taken to be beyond human reach are in fact avoidable. This, in turn, was directly a product of the development of modern liberalism, which provided both a philosophical foundation and an institutional architecture for the blending of classical and Renaissance republicanism with a new conceptual framework of individual rights, checks and balances and democratic self-governance. Once the possibility of good governance was proven possible, the doors were open to explore different ways of achieving it.
As DeLong properly notes, we're faced with rather grim prospects just now, but given the history of the past 200+ years, the grim prospects now facing us no longer appear as inevitable necessities of nature. If we are headed toward a massive return of evil governance--a distinct possibility, let's not kid ourselves--this is still just an historical/political development pressed forward by specific political/economic forces, and not a metaphysical necessity. The difference between the two is the difference between possibility and impossibility, between rational hope and irrational despair.
Much to my amazement, a post I did on Christianity and conservatives on May 10th has generated as much buzz and reaction as anything I have ever written. I have been quite surprised by this, as it was a post I wrote as much for myself, my family and a few old friends as it was to generate a wider debate. The issues I raised go over well-covered ground by many other writers and preachers: that Jesus identified far more with the poor than the rich, that he treasured the beloved community far more than rugged individualism, that he would be appalled by the Social Darwinist, selfishness-is-a-virtue brand of conservative politics currently in vogue in the modern conservative movement.
But it did get people going. There have been at least a half dozen posts written in response; I have gotten hundreds of email and Facebook responses, many by people I don't know; I have been asked by bloggingheads.tv to do a debate with a conservative minister tomorrow- Bill Shuler- and as of this post, there are more than 2,300 comments on the post at Huffington Post, which blows by my old record for post responses by close to 2,000. Apparently, this post really touched a nerve.
The responses I enjoyed the most were the foul mouthed, sometimes even threatening, nasty grams from all those "true Christians" who look forward to seeing me in Hell. That's always fun. But I was also touched by the large number of warm, thoughtful responses who wanted me to know that they agreed with me and were glad someone was saying what I said. I got the sense that there are a lot of people who are tired of conservatives loudly quoting the Bible and claiming to speak for all Christians when they really don't know much about the religion they claim to speak for. I also did have some Christians write me who misinterpreted my post, and thought that I was saying that all Christians are conservative-they wanted to assure me that was definitely not true, as they were both a committed Christian and a strong progressive. Since I have a lot of family members and dear friends who are both of those things, I did not think that, but was glad to get the additional reassurance.
The funniest response someone sent me was from a man who, among other things, asked if I was anti-Jewish, because some people when they move to the left go against Jews and Israel. I hadn't heard that one before, but its always refreshing to get some completely new (and utterly off the wall) question or response.
One of the most interesting blog posts published in response was by a conservative writer named Jameson Graber. He contended that I had made two mistakes. The first, he said, was that I viewed economics as a "zero-sum game". The second thing he talked about as a mistake was creating a false dichotomy between rich and poor, because "prosperity comes from all of us".
I respond to these, and talk more about this, in the extended entry.
The first is that Democrats are not Republicans. The modern Republican has become a bizarre and twisted hybrid of Ayn "selfishness is a virtue" Rand economic libertarians and Pat Robertson-style pseudo-Christian conservatives. This new hybrid has taken the worst of each of these two kinds of extremists, and made it more dogmatic and more bizarre in its synthesis. Anti-intellectualism has morphed into being opposed to reality-based policy. Morality has become on what people do in their bedrooms, but never about them stealing money from the public or lying about public policy. Support for the free market has become opposition to any kind of regulation or anti-trust laws or civil rights laws. The conservatism of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush became the cronyism and twisted extremism of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.
The other reason I am a Democrat is that a majority of Democrats are reasonably progressive folks- about 75% of House Democrats, about 60% of Senate Democrats. That doesn't give us enough to pass strong progressive legislation, but I'd certainly rather be with a party that's 60-75% pretty good as opposed to the Republican alternative, which is 95-100% pretty awful. Having said all that, which is extremely obvious to any OpenLefters, let me get to my main point: the Democrats in power make me crazier than any woman the Fine Young Cannibals may have been singing about. Both the policy and the politics of this banking issue could not be clearer: take on the power of the big banks and rein them in. It is as simple as it could be. But Chris Dodd is playing footsie with the bankers, Tom Carper is shilling for them on a full-time basis, and the lobbyists are working their magic. The message is getting muddled, the base is getting pissed, and the clear political edge Democrats have had on this issue is being lost.
The last couple of days have been reformers' worst days since this issue first was brought to the floor. The mess yesterday on the cloture vote was a classic episode. Look, I am very sympathetic to Harry Reid. The Senate rules are a mess, his caucus is very divided between progressives who want to do something and the full-time shills for the Wall Street lobby, and there really is other pressing business the Senate needs to take up: a supplemental appropriations bill and the bill to extend COBRA and unemployment insurance need to be taken up sooner rather than later. And there is legitimate danger here: the longer the bank lobby has to work on members out of the public eye, the more dangerous our odds get for good legislation. But the Democratic Senators like Carper who are working with lobbyists and Republicans to mess up this bill are playing with fire, and they should be exposed and excoriated. The Republicans who won't even let a manger's amendment come to the floor without objection should be attacked and taken on. If that means a little more delay while the defenders of the big banks marinate in the sun for a few more days and good amendments are pushed forward, it's worth the extra time.
Democrats need to keep being aggressive on this issue, and not let the Republican/banker delay tactics win the day.
The Democrats midterm message is easy to understand: we've done things to help you, and Republicans are obstructionists for the sake of politics, want to bring back failed Wall Street friendly ideas, and are increasingly captive to the Tea Party audience. This is a good message for the core of the Obama coalition, but does it work for the midterm electorate -- particularly this midterm electorate?
Obama ran on a fundamental promise to make government work for the better, and Republicans believe they've blocked him from achieving that goal, and that the economy, combined with their own scorched earth strategy, has left voters extremely skeptical of government intervention again.
In what universe does it make sense for a party to seek political power on the open and avowed basis of preventing others from fixing dire problems? Not just refusing to help solve problems, mind you. That would be irresponsible enough. But actively working to block any solutions whatsoever? In what universe does that make sense?
That is not a rhetorical question. Because the answer, obviously, is "ours." But why is our universe the way it is? Understanding the "logic" to our universe is the key to changing it--or at least, in the short term, surviving long enough to have a chance to change it.
Over the past few weeks, the Catholic Church has found itself mired in controversy, plagued by an ever-growing sexual abuse scandal unfolding in Europe. The pope himself has come under substantial criticism, to such an extent that a leading German magazine titled a report, "The Failed Papacy of Benedict XVI."
Yet the media's growing chorus of criticism reveals as much about itself as it does about the mishaps of Pope Benedict XVI. It reveals much about how the media thinks about itself, and about the media's worldview of what society ought to be like.
Historically, the Catholic Church and the Western media have always had moments of tension. The two are almost naturally at odds; their philosophical foundations constitute polar opposites. The church is fundamentally a conservative institution, hierarchy-bound and traditional. It embodies a force - religion - which often works in a conservative direction.
The modern Western media could not be more different from this.
The Washington Post has a great article today about the Arkansas Governor and Attorney General saying they won't join in the lawsuits against the new health care reform bill.
"They tried it here in Arkansas in '57 and it didn't work," Gov. Mike Beebe (D) told reporters recently. "I think you got to tell people the truth. And if I understand the law, the truth is the federal government can't just be defied by the state governments."
The analogy to the Little Rock school segregation case in 1957 was on target, and it is no surprise at all that the current resurgence in talk about states' rights comes at a time when we have just passed the biggest change in federal legislation since the civil rights victories of the 1960s.
I know Glenn Beck is an easy target for ridicule, and others including Keith Olbermann and Stewart himself have done great send-ups on him before, but this extended Jon Stewart throw-down last night may be the funniest piece of satire I have ever seen:
I have to give Glen Beck credit. Yes, I will grant you that he is a nativist, race-baiting, neo-fascist, Social Darwinist, 9/11-victim-hating, not-very-good-at-figuring-out-the-meaning-of-obvious-lyrics, apparently-has-never-read-the-actual-Bible kind of guy, but I do admire his willingness to openly make the case for the far-right wing historical worldview- the worldview of the truly out there conservatives like John C. Calhoun and Robert Welch and Ayn Rand. When I see his attacks on progressivism, I kind of feel like he read my book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, and felt like he identified with all the goats in my narrative and is attacking all the heroes. He seems to want to glorify all the pro-slavery, anti-democracy, anti-women's rights, Social Darwinists, pro-big business, anti-worker people I mention, and attack all the reformers, Bill-of-Rights agitators, abolitionists, suffragists, labor organizers, pro-national parks, anti-child labor, anti-big trust, pro-regulation of Wall Street I like. It is truly fascinating to see him trash people like Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, who did so much to advance progress in this country, and glorify a President like Calvin Coolidge, whose policies led us directly into the Great Depression. I haven't yet heard him do a history lesson praising John C. Calhoun for standing up for slavery as a part of the states' rights doctrine, or hear him approvingly quote Social Darwinist William Graham Sumner talking about how it's best for society if poor people are allowed to die, but I eagerly await for this to happen.
I could write another long post like this one analyzing Beck's rather stunning philosophy, but I have to admit that Jon Stewart's send-up is far more fun, so I will leave it at that.
I have done a lot of writing, in my blog posts and my book, about the historic differences between conservatives and progressives in political battles, but almost equally fascinating to me is that between conservative and progressive religious traditions. The exact same fault lines, most importantly in terms of individualism vs. community, play themselves out in theological debates which sound very much like our political debates- and indeed, a lot of the same people operate in both realms.
Glenn Beck and Jim Wallis got into this debate over the last few days, and because Jim actually knows something about the Bible, he easily won the debate. Beck's classic conspiracy-minded starting point- that because both Nazis and Communists have used the phrase "social justice", that any religion that uses the term must be bad too- has a similar logic to saying that if a really bad teacher said two plus two equals four, because he or she was a bad teacher it must be false. Or saying that if a politician you don't like says "God Bless America", then any politician who says that is terrible. But leaving aside Beck's incredibly stupid logic, the point he makes about "social justice" is in keeping with conservative ideology: it is all about a self-focused view of religion and politics that, like Beck's ideological hero Ayn Rand, proclaims selfishness as the ultimate virtue.
Conservative Christians manage to ignore the literally many hundreds of Biblical quotes about social justice by making Christianity a religion solely focused on one very selfish goal: whether they get into heaven or not. That's it, that is the entire goal and purpose and meaning of their faith. And because St. Paul argued that faith is more important than "works" (what you do good in the world), they think that believing a certain doctrine is the only thing that matters in terms of whether you make it into heaven or not. Since everything is about getting themselves to heaven, and the Earth will be destroyed soon in Armageddon anyway, nothing that happens here matters very much. The one thing that matters to their God is having more people worship Him, so they try to convert people, but all that other stuff Jesus and the Old Testament prophets and Moses and James and all those other folks in the Bible talked about in terms of kindness, mercy, forgiving debts, being your brother's keeper, helping the poor, and all that other liberal socialistic stuff just isn't much of a priority to them compared to: me getting to heaven, and (second most important) converting others to my God. These so-called "Christian" conservatives live in a state of paranoia that somewhere, somehow some dollar of their taxes might go to some undeserving poor person, ignoring the fact that Jesus' entire ministry was targeted to the "undeserving" poor.
Not all Christians think this way, of course. There is another kind of thinking about the Christian faith: one that actually takes what's written in the Bible (beyond the Book of Revelations) seriously. The Jewish Torah (for Christians, that's their Old Testament) and the Christian New Testament have a wide variety of ideas and voices in their pages. Written by scores of authors over a span of probably a couple thousand years, one of the things I love about the Bible is the wide range of beliefs and perspectives within it. A lot of fundamentalists are desperate to find ways to explain away the contradictions in the Bible, because they believe every word is inspired by God and it's all literally true, but in fact the authors of the Bible disagree on both the details of what actually happened and the interpretation and philosophy behind the events they write about. If you take the Bible seriously, you see the debates and differing perspectives. Some Biblical writers were more conservative in their thinking, and some were more progressive. But the most consistent and enduring theme that runs through virtually every book in the Bible is that we are expected to love and be kind to our neighbors, especially the poor, hurting, and oppressed of the earth.
From the God of Genesis punishing Cain for not being his brother's keeper to Nathan the prophet rebuking King David for taking from the poor; from the Psalms that over and over proclaim the need to help the poor, and condemn those who judges, government officials, and wealthy people who mistreat them, from the prophets like Isaiah and Amos who deride those who engage in ritual sacrifice while refusing to help the oppressed (Isaiah I: "Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow.") to Jesus very first sermon proclaiming that he had come to "bring good news to the poor" and "liberty to the captives"- virtually every book of the Bible demands justice and mercy and community.
People who take the Bible seriously and respect its words, as opposed to being obsessed with whether they personally will get into heaven by following a certain kind of dogma, understand that community and compassion are in fact far more central to it than any specific metaphysical belief system. And that is what the Pat Robertsons, Glenn Becks, Sarah Palins, and the other false prophets of conservatism don't understand.
Glenn Beck's CPAC speech was a rare gem of political discourse. I encourage everyone to read it so that they really understand where modern conservatism is going. Some of my friends are quite accurately comparing his "progressivism is cancer" screed to fascist rhetoric by people like Mussolini and Franco, because the parallels are striking, but I want to focus more on how the speech's philosophy is a template for the conservative cause right now.
Beck's essential message was that I crawled my way from the dung pile without any help, and that's what makes America great ,so we shouldn't help anyone in trouble. From his twisted personal story to his twisted vision of American history, Beck took rapturous CPACers on a classic tour of American conservative ideology. From his paranoid delusional ranting about how liberals hate anyone successful to his Social Darwinist view of society and nature, he laid out the conservative line and took it to its logical conclusion. And the audience loved it. The quintessential moment in the speech? When Beck explained why we shouldn't be helping anyone in need: "There's some sort of element of competition to life. Oh that's not natural. Really? Go watch the lions eat the weakest." And the audience burst into laughter and applause- as I wrote the other day, these conservatives really are into cruelty, so the idea of lions eating the weak got them going.
Beyond the celebration of eating the weakest, they money paragraph on the speech was this classic rendition of conservative thought:
We believe in the right of the individual. We believe in the right of the individual. We believe in the right, you can speak out, you can disagree with me, you can make your own path. But I'm not going to pay for your mistakes, and I don't expect you to pay for my mistakes. We're all going to make them, but we all have the right to move down that road. What we don't have a right to is: health care, housing, or handouts. We don't have those rights. Every time the government grows we lose more of who we are. When you give up your right to struggle... you're giving more of your freedom away.
In the conservative world view, each individual is on their own. The best society will be created if each of us goes our own way, with absolutely no help from anyone, and does exactly what we want to do, no matter who it hurts. Because that invisible hand of the marketplace makes individual greed a source of strength, and because if the weak are not "eaten", society itself becomes weaker. Like the Social Darwinists of the post-Civil War era, conservatives such as Beck clearly believe, as William Graham Sumner put it back in 1893, that every society faces only two alternatives: "liberty, survival of the fittest" or "liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest." Beck said, "As I read the Constitution...the only job of the United States government is to save us from bad guys." The way Sumner put it was that government had only one purpose, which was to protect "the property of men and the honor of women."
Conservatives' answer to the question "Am I my brother's keeper?" is a resounding Hell NO. And that is the essential divide between them and the progressivism which Beck describes as a cancer: progressives believe that all of us are in this together. When our child is weakened by a chronic illness, or our parent by old age, we don't abandon them in the wilderness so that the lion can eat them up (and then laugh about it). When our brother stumbles and hits bottom, we don't stand back and see if he can pull himself up by his own bootstraps, we lend him a helping hand. When our sister is abused and treated unfairly by an employer, we don't tell her she's on her own, we work with her to make things fairer. We believe in a community that helps each other survive and prosper, because we don't want to live in a world where only the strongest and wealthiest and - yes - luckiest survive. We don't have fantasies that all our success is of our own making because we know that without good families, good neighbors, good school and libraries and roads and bridges paid for by public dollars, that without all that, we'd be much less likely to make it on our own. In spite of Beck's paranoia, we have no problem with people being successful. I have never once heard any progressive attack Steve Jobs or Eric Schmidt for their success, or attack the local small businessperson making a good living because he or she is supplying products a community wants. But what we do believe is that those lucky enough to be successful have a responsibility to give something back to their fellow citizens.
I will choose the "weakness" of a compassionate society over the brutal kind of "let the lions eat the weak" vision of Glenn Beck's perfect society any day of the week. Am I my brother's keeper? My answer is yes.
I'm still at home here in the D.C. area winter wonderland. Our street did get plowed this morning, which I'm very thankful for, but with the Metro system not running here and everything in D.C. pretty much ground to a halt, I'll take another day at home. I can do some work from here, or course, but like the last few days, won't mind hanging out in front of the fireplace reading good books either. Some of my reading is more work-oriented, like Simon Johnson and James Kawk's really important book, 13 Bankers, a great look at the history and potential future of American financial crises. But I have to admit, I am taking the time at home to read some terrific novels as well.
Being a Midwesterner, I love snow storms and being snowed in. These last few days bring back the joy of being a kid snowed in on school days (although since the Midwest actually knows how to deal with snow, we were never snowed in this long). But I also love how these events bring out the best in everyone. Everyone is helping with the "dig out". The folks with big 4-wheel drive trucks and SUVs are driving around asking people if they need anything from the grocery store. We have a section of the neighborhood that lost power for a while; word quickly spread and neighbors invited folks without electric to stay at their houses.
It's the Golden Rule, neighborhood-wide. And I know it's happened in neighborhood after neighborhood over the last week. These kinds of crises tend to bring out the best in people, as everyone treats their neighbors as they would want to be treated.
The Golden Rule philosophy shouldn't just apply to each person individually, and it isn't only about individual salvation, as religious conservatives insist. The Golden Rule works best when it is neighborhood-wide, society-wide, country-wide: our underlying value in structuring our government should be to foster this sense of mutual aid and respect - to have everyone treat others as they would want to be treated.
From all my debates over the years with family, friends, and those in public life who are religious conservatives, our most fundamental disagreement is this: they see the moral teachings in scripture as relating to individuals alone, each one seeking their own salvation, while progressives from the same faith traditions see those teachings as about what kind of society we want to build. The debate goes beyond religion: as I describe in my book, The Progressive Revolution, this debate goes to the heart of the entire history of American political debate. The question is: will America be a community, all helping each other in times of need, or will we just be a nation of individuals whose selfishness serves the greater good because of some "invisible hand" of the marketplace?
Progressives have always embraced the idea of America as a community that rises or falls together. The Golden Rule works not only for individuals interacting with each other on a daily basis, but as the way our society ought to work. The Biblical admonitions to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, help the least of these, and love mercy and kindness apply to our society, not just to us as individuals. The instinct to shovel the drives of the 85-year-old neighbor in a snowstorm should apply to making sure she is taken care of in terms of her Social Security and Medicare as well. The willingness to take in people without electricity and get groceries for the people who can't get out of their drives should apply to people in this economic crisis with so many Americans out of work.
That sense of community, of treating others as we would want to be treated, of helping those less lucky or healthy than ourselves, should apply to our country as well as to our neighbors in a snow storm. None of us are an island: America rises and falls as a people together. One of my neighbors, when anyone thanks him for lending a hand, likes to say, "That's what neighbors do. We help each other." That should be America's motto as well: "That's what Americans do. We help each other."
Quite a few conservatives don't believe any criminal suspects are entitled to due process.
Many conservatives believe that we should institute an apartheid state against Muslims in America.
If Al Gore had been President on September 11, 2001, there would have been no bi-partisan, United We Stand language coming from conservatives. The aggressive, partisan response we have seen to even this failed attack would have almost certainly meant impeachment proceedings against President Gore sometime in late 2001 or early 2002.
A substantial minority of elected officials in the Democratic Party is willing to go along, or at least keep silent on with #3 and #4, either because they believe it or because they don't have core values and think those positions are electoral winners. For the same reasons, a smaller minority of elected officials the Democratic Party would even be willing to go along with #2 and #5.
Although, since these are not the first examples of these outcomes, beliefs or counterfactuals, I guess all of these are actually reminders, not lessons.
A Daniel De Groot Golden Oldie
From Thu Jan 01, 2009. Original HERE.
As a starting point for defining conservatism, and nailing down what the real atomic core of conservatism is, I started by asking: What do conservatives think it is? How do they answer this question?
It turns out, they don't really know. Their efforts to define it are worth studying though, partly because the answers they provide are revealing, but also because their own failure to find an answer satisfactory even just to themselves points to the need for outsiders to step in and provide the answers conservatives can't or won't face.
A Paul Rosenberg Golden Oldie
From Sat Jul 25, 2009. Original HERE.
In early 2006, I began working on a book project that never really worked out. (Got a spare $20k? I'm willing to give it another shot!) I wanted to address the extreme disconnect between the conservative political climate in Washington (remember, this was about six months before the 2006 midterms) and the political attitudes of the American people, which, according to the best social science, had only changed modestly overall since the early Nixon era. During the course of researching and drafting an introductory chapter, the importance of conservative identity politics became blindingly clear as the result of a series of number-driven arguments.
As I've been wrestling with recent manifestations of conservative identity politics that I planned to blog about this weekend--the Birthers, The Family, etc.--I remembered this earlier work, and the hard foundations of data on which it rested. I thought it would make a good companion piece to my contemporary observations to go back and resurrect that argument. So I took a draft chapter, whittled it down a bit, and I'm presenting it after the jump.
There are two overarching points that I hope will clearly emerge from this. The first is that my contemporary focus on conservative identity politics is not just some arbitrary whim. It emerges out of an inquiry that was not originally concerned with it at all. In fact, I was taken by surprise as the logic of it virtually ambushed me. The second point--closely related--is that conservative identity politics cannot simply be ignored, or factored out of other discussions. It lies at the very heart of understanding conservative hostility to liberals, which is the main driving force polarizing our politics today, and interfering with the important work of solving major problems that confront us as a society--such as meeting the challenge of climate change.
This is a long diary, over 4000 words, so feel free to skim the parts that may seem tangential to you. I wanted to preserve enough of the original to accurately reflect the range of factors that I had considered. And I hope that even if this is a bit long for you to read online all at one go, you'll want to bookmark it and return to it again. Heck, maybe even as soon as my next diary posts.
I have no quarrel with TIME magazine devoting a cover to Glenn Beck -- so long as the accompanying story sticks to hard facts and harsh truths. The issue coming tomorrow, online today, sadly fails to do so in an apparent effort to woo the rightwing with a ludicrously "balanced" treatment of equally dangerous and wacko "ranting" coming from left and right.
It starts right away with a first paragraph that claims that only "liberal sources" estimated the protest crowd in D.C. last weekend as about 70,000, while conservatives say up to a million or more. Actually, virtually all mainstream media sources (even some on Fox News) endorse a far lower number. PolitiFact, the nonpartisan fact-checking site, cited an officer for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Department telling a reporter that, unoffically, he thought between 60,000 and 75,000 people had shown up.
If you get your information from liberal sources, the crowd numbered about 70,000, many of them greedy racists. If you get your information from conservative sources, the crowd was hundreds of thousands strong, perhaps as many as a million, and the tenor was peaceful and patriotic.
In this nugget TIME's David Von Drehle revealed his method. The "left" says one thing, the "right" another and, hell, who is to know the truth? He returns to this late in the piece by raising the crowd estimate gap again and explaining it as merely "who do you trust?"
Of course such coverage is anything but responsible. If you're going for "balance" rather than truth, then you only encourage the most unscrupulous to make the most outrageous claims. Then your "balance" will inexorably move the "sensible center" ever further in their fact-free, crazed direction. Any kindergarten teacher can explain this in detail, if necessary.
In sharp contrast to Time's egregious malpractice, Salon ran a deeply significant piece about Beck, exposing the nature of the man who's had the most significant impact on his recent devolution-- Cleon Skousen, described as "a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised." In fact, no less than J. Edgar Hoover and the elders of the Mormon Church regarded him as a dangerous crank. So if Time had wanted to ask the right questions, they could have had Hoover and Mormon elders representing the "left" as "balance" to Beck supporters. This article, "Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life", not only provides a striking contrast with Time's journalist slop, it also provides a valuable complement to Tim Wise's highlighting of Ayn Rand's hero-worship of sociopathic killer, which inspired Part 1 of this diary mini-series.
Together, these two stories, about Rand and Skousen, are not simply stories about the advancement of conservative ideas. Indeed, they are actually the exact opposite-they are about the destruction of conservative ideas by the rightwing lunatic fringe.
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