"It sure does sell soap"
Entertain yourself with this story of town-hall lunatics ululating at Rep. Bob Inglis, a conservative Republican from South Carolina. These guys really cast a wide net, it seems. My favorite part — Inglis, recovering from his ordeal, tells a blogger:
The America that Glenn Beck seems to see is a place where we all should be fearful, thinking that our best days are behind us. It sure does sell soap, but it sure does a disservice to America.
The exhausted Congressman hit the nail on the head there, I think: it sells soap. This new hard-right that Beck and Palin and whoever are promoting really isn’t political, in the sense that dorks like us understand politics; it’s a cultural identity mixed with a brand name.
Evidently the guys who run the conservative show, facing blame for the failed economy and Bush administration, decided that the only way to sustain their ideology is to coopt the mass of unfocused anger and paranoia that exists among the alienated parts of the American population, energizing its flagging infrastructure with a blast of high-potency unfiltered crazy. Which is a perfectly sensible business decision, if not an especially innovative one.
But that agitation is necessarily broad and necessarily anti-establishment. You can’t qualify “they’re all a bunch of crooked bums” with “except the Republican half.” So poor Rep. Inglis, too much of a friendly Presbyterian lawyer to breathe Glenn Beck-quality fire, gets trampled just as hard as a comparable Democrat. Not that I have any sympathy for him or the Republican Party, mind you — you can’t have your crazy and eat it too — but it goes to show the extent to which popular anger doesn’t distinguish between “left” and “right” so much as “for us” and “against us.”
…This is also a critical difference between the current hard-right argument and the hard-left arguments of the early Bush years. You remember, “No Blood for Oil” and the pictures of Bush with the Hitler moustache. Both opposition movements might be equally wild-eyed and spittle-emitting, yes, and both might lapse into worthless rants about how the population is being maliciously deceived; but the anti-Bush left was highly ideological and ultimately partisan. For the most part they were high-information voters — public radio listeners, blog readers, people who had the time and energy to seek out alternative discourses while the mainstream was completely caught up in patriotic fervor — who had concrete political arguments.
These wingnuts, by contrast, have no coherent political program beyond “rahhh!! kill the bastards!!”. They are only partisan to the extent that Republicans gesture toward their anger. This is much less valuable from a partisan organizing perspective — which is why I don’t think there will be a conservative Howard Dean in 2012, btw — but much more valuable from a business perspective. All Glenn Beck has to do is wave his arms a lot and he has a dedicated following, which not by coincidence will suck up the talking points about health care reform, thereby providing confidence and the illusion of credibility for the GOP’s industry donors. The circle of life — and soap!
(Via Kevin Drum.)
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Interesting take. I would disagree that the anti-Bush folks were “high-information voters”. After September 11th, I realized I didn't know squat about the middle-east so I set about a course of personal study to learn all I could about the region. I read dozens of books about the culture, the history and the geo-political structure of the region.
When I would engage in debates with many of the “No Blood for Oil” people, it was amazing how many of them didn't know the basics. I quickly tired of arguing with people who kept repeating the arguments that they had heard on Air America without any real knowledge.
Now if someone wants to argue about Iraq, I ask them to first name 3 of the 6 countries that border Iraq. If they can't get at least 3 of them I tell them to go read a book and come back and we can talk.
That said, there are truly a bunch of nut-jobs out there screaming far too loudly about things they know nothing about. They have the right to say whatever they want… but I have the right to make fun of their lack of knowledge!
Oh.. and since when does “blog reading” make you a “high information” person? I find that most blogs have a very low information to opinion ratio.
August 10, 2009 at 9:34 amThis is why Rush Limbaugh doesn't give a shit if his bloviating and hate-mongering destroy the Republican Party; so long as “millions” are tuning in in and he's making sacks full of money as fat as he is, he's happy.
Maybe that's the REAL reason Palin dumped the guv job: the GOP is a sinking ship and there's money to be made pandering to the idiots clinging to its wreckage.
BTW, I just came by here for the first time today and I'm really glad I found it. Keep up the great work, buddy!
August 13, 2009 at 3:39 pmHey Matt! Let me clarify what I mean by “high-information” voters — that's a political science term. It refers to people who are engaged with the basics of politics: i.e. they can identify major political issues and the terms of the debate, they recognize major political actors, they have opinions that aren't random or arbitrary (i.e. they follow a pattern that comes from consistent political observation and reasoning), and most importantly, they pay attention. This is maybe 15-20% of the population, give or take (depends a lot on how you define it), and maybe half of the voting population at most. Blog readers are almost uniformly very high-information voters because they're seeking out detailed or niche sources of political information (beyond just glancing at the front page or the TV news).
It's not, as I think you assumed, a function of having accurate or detailed information. A high-information voter can be utterly misinformed — but they're still engaged and using a bank of political knowledge.
The point of this post is that my sense (and I could be wrong) is that the left of the early 2000s was high-information to a much greater extent than the right of this era; it knew its opponents' political positions in great detail, it voraciously consumed information about them, and it developed complicated and intricate alternative political arguments, while today's hard right is just engaging in formless knee-jerk opposition.
August 14, 2009 at 8:15 amkyle! good to hear from you old friend.
August 14, 2009 at 8:15 amMarkus… thanks for the info. Not being a poli-sci guy I didn't know that!
I am still not sure your analysis is accurate though. Much like the Right wanted to lump all of the Left with the “Bush is Satan” sign holders, I think you want to lump all of the Right with the “Obama is a Kenyan” crowd.
The ones yelling the loudest don't represent the whole but the volume does represent a certain level of unrest. I have often said that President Bush's biggest failure was ignoring the anti-war crowd simply because the loudest ones were the nuttiest.
The same holds for President Obama on the health care debate. Screaming about “death panels” is silly and can be ignored, however he shouldn't lump the entire opposition with these guys. There are plenty of smart people who think that the President's plan is a bad one.
I think it's time we got to a point in this country where we realize that smart people can and do disagree. Knowledge and information are simply ingredients to an opinion. Values and judgment are equally critical elements. You and I disagree but it's not because one of us is stupid and the other is smart. It's because you have a different set of values than I do. That doesn't make me a bad guy… it does however make you evil!
j/k
August 14, 2009 at 8:33 amHave something to add?