Jan

Jealous, Self-Righteous Friedersdorf Attacks Conservatives

OF all the snots that pollute the conservative movement, Conor Friedersdorf hardly stands out. His incessant pleas for civility in political discourse are as petulant as they are naive, accompanied as these things are by a certain willingness to swiftly pass intellectual judgment on fellow conservatives. Talk radio hosts, whose very medium allows for intimate, conversational, and regular communication with audiences, attract special disdain and condescension from the would-be sage of blogging. Fridersdorf confuses panache for ignorance, entertaining rhetoric for simple-mindedness, and high ratings for unsound arguments. Fridersdorf expends nearly half his words paradoxically condemning those on the right who dare present a modicum of principle. Rounding out the triumvirate of Republican “moderates,” along with David Frum and David Brooks, Friedersdorf is as unknown as he is disliked by the majority of those who should constitute his audience – conservatives.

Writing as a guest on the blog of the formerly relevant Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic, who only one short year ago abandoned the Right, Fridersdorf regularly indulges his nasty habit of attacking those conservatives who are smarter, more experienced and accomplished, as well as more popular and adored. The favorite target of Friederdorf is undoubtedly the talk radio host and Constitutional lawyer, best selling author, and tea party advocate Mark Levin, who was recently part of the legal team instrumental in overturning the legality of Obama’s individual mandate. Mr. Levin does not require a defense of his curriculum vitae, especially against an unknown blogger, and thus I will focus on Friedersdorf’s shallow spectacle of snobby populism that passes for criticism in The Atlantic.

Friedersdorf cites in his defense the recent testimony of occasional bomb thrower Jonah Goldberg, Editor-at-Large of National Review Online. Goldberg is probably most famous for his 2008 book Liberal Fascism, which worked up the professional left to such a degree with its revisionist history and provocative title and cover that the generally well-liked and affable Goldberg found himself in the same class of unwashed conservatives as Rush Limbaugh, Levin, etc. Said Goldberg recently in an internet radio interview,

[I]t’s not the best analogy, but if you’ve got to tear down a house and replace it with another one, you need some guys with sledgehammers and earth movers, those are the people like Levin and Glenn Beck, some of those guys. But you also need people who do the fine carpentry and detail work. The way Bill Buckley or George Will or Charles Krauthammer might, or the guys at the Claremont Review of Books. It’s like a symphony. You need the string instruments and you need the percussion.

I agree. Democracy requires powerful rhetoric on both sides of an argument, and honest debate requires frank condemnation of the points one disagrees with. This is true everyday in the streets of a vibrant republic that still pays attention to important political questions, and during election time. Blunt, even insulting, language will be a part of democracy as long as human nature remains fixed. To understand the deep truth of this proposition, all one must do is study ancient Athens, the American colonial experience and history of the early Republic, or visit an American high school in April or May, and realize that cordiality has never been a hallmark of popularity contests.

I also agree that as parliaments are majority-driven institutions, detailed compromise and nuance must enter the equation at the proper time. It is the long-term strategy of the party, perhaps moreso than even the temporal electoral victories, that determine the direction of nation’s politics, and to a certain extent, culture.

Yet I very much disagree with the notion that somebody like Levin is merely a crude wrecking ball, tearing down sensible arguments and compromise with needlessly incendiary attacks on the opposition party. And herein lies the fundamental failure to communicate between movement conservatives and the self-appointed arbiters of conservatism. More on that in a bit.

We must now tackle the baseless contention that talk radio hosts perpetually lie and mislead their audiences. Write Friedersdorf,

Daily factual errors, pathologically outsized egos, and poorly reasoned arguments are not compatible with doing these things well… Even if you believe that politics requires angry shouting against ideological adversaires, consider that it is possible to shout without lying – to forcefully rail against the excesses and errors of your opponents without resorting to bad facts or fallacy-filled arguments.

Here no examples are cited. That’s odd. Levin, who reads verbatim from various news sources, always cites his sources and posts them to his website. Why is it that Fridersdorf, in his attack on somebody who broadcasts 3 hours/day, makes available freely the audio from each show, and posts all his references daily, could not deign his readers a single example of lying? Apparently the hypercritical and carefully distinguishing readers of The Atlantic are content taking Fridersdorf at his word: “Every single day, the people I’ve mentioned broadcast shows that are rife with factual inaccuracies and poorly reasoned if emotionally resonant arguments.” Such as?

Continue Fridersdorf,

The effect is what you’d expect when people of any kind are constantly fed bad information: they become less adept at advancing the valuable insights that they retain, and even worse at identifying and improving the flaws in their belief system.

This paragraph sums up nicely what has become the new trope of the age – that is, conservatives are close minded; they suffer from “epistemic closure.” A close corollary is that anybody who opposes that vast majority of what Obama, Pelosi, and Reid propose are conservatives, and therefore close minded.

This trope is supported by a myth.

In a single generation, the conservative movement has gone from counting William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman as its most effective, popular advocates, to throwing in with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity. It’s time to stand athwart history yelling stop.

In the fantasy world of Friederdorf, Buckley and Friedman were coy and pliant, yet still “effective” advocates of conservatism. I’ve read Buckley and I’ve read Friedman. These men were not given to understatement or mincing of words. They were not grand equivocators, writing in obscurantist language designed to please both Liberals and Conservatives. They spoke and wrote boldly, carefully but forcefully making their own arguments for the preservation of human freedom in all spheres of life. Both were close allies to Reagan, who declared proudly at his inauguration, “Government is the problem.”

More to the point, Buckley and Friedman would have recognized Obama’s agenda for what it was – a massive government expansion and legal overreach by all historical standards, right on par with the New Deal, or worse. The author of Capitalism and Freedom would declare that further government intervention in healthcare would only raise costs, not lower them. The same man who employed as writers Hayek and Mises for his magazine would not have taken to the pen and begun issuing condemnations of those who questioned the constitutionality of the Federal Reserve funneling $3.3 trillion to foreign companies.

No, Buckley and Friedman, we should be very confident in assuming, would have turned their fire to the professional left, the Democrat Party, who has taken a citizenry spooked by depression and told them that only their Federal government offered refuge from the economic scourge.

Mr. Fridersdorf, the conservative movement does not need your help. You are misleading the dupes to a confused and untenable posture of a conservatism that has no guiding principles. Your unenlightening screeds, snide and childish, appeal only to those conservatives who think they are smarter than the average bear, i.e. those among us who would be content to rule on a petty and didactic level, and differ only in detail with the minions of liberals who would rule our lives through endless bureaucracies. You are of course free to do so, but I would ask that you do not do so in the name of Reagan, Buckley, and Friedman, who spent careers defeating your squishy element of the Republican Party.

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