I always knew Mark Levin was a piece of shit, but maybe that's an insult to shit?
How the Conservative Movement Enabled the Rise of Drumpf
For years, I’ve argued that talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and websites like Breitbart.com pose a significant threat to movement conservatism. All movements are vulnerable to populist excesses and the self-destructive impulses of their core supporters. Good leaders can help to mitigate those pathologies. Bad leaders magnify them.
Within movement conservatism, hugely popular intellectual leaders abandoned the most basic norms of decency, as when Mark Levin screamed at a caller that her husband should shoot himself; stoked racial tensions, as when Rush Limbaugh avowed that in President Obama’s America folks think white kids deserve to get beat up by black kids on busses; and indulged paranoid conspiracy theories, as when Roger Ailes aired month-after-month of Glenn Beck's chalk-board monologues.
Erick Erickson now complains that many Republicans are supporting “a man of mountainous ego” who “preys on nationalistic, tribal tendencies.” But this is what happens when millions of people spend a decade with Bill O’Reilly in their living rooms each evening and Ann Coulter books on their nightstands for bedtime reading. Let’s not treat it as a mystery that their notion of what’s credible is out of whack.
For years, I’ve complained about egregious displays of misinformation, as when Andrew Breitbart published a video purporting to show a Hispanic Acorn worker willing to engage in human trafficking, but neglected to mention that he only indulged James O’Keefe’s hidden video sting until the amateur filmmaker left, when he called police.
I’ve lamented efforts to portray Democratic leaders as conspirators in a plot to deliberately destroy the country, as when Andrew McCarthy posited that Barack Obama is allied with our Islamist enemy in a “grand jihad” against America. And I warned against the cry-bully ressentiment tapped by Sarah Palin and indulged by her apologists. They accelerated the transformation of the American right away from anything resembling conservatism and toward aggrievement-driven tribalism.
*snip*
Drumpf could not succeed but for a large faction that grins at indecency; cheers attacks on Mexicans; sees no need for governing experience; has lost its immunity against populist misinformation and manipulation; believes that establishment officials are trying to destroy the country; elevates cultural cues over substance; and dismisses the possibility of improvement through compromise.
As movement conservatism reaps the pathologies that it sowed (even as its more responsible arms try to kill a monster that they were institutionally complicit in creating), I return once more to the talk radio host who first proved that the base could fall for a polarizing egomaniac with a penchant for crudely insulting women. Rush Limbaugh still purports to be a conservative. Yet he is still engaged in rhetoric so perfectly suited to fueling Trumpism that it is hard to believe he is unaware.
Here is the top of his Web site as I write this article:
The attendant segment was broadcast Tuesday. In it, Limbaugh led his listeners to believe that the Republican and Democratic establishments are conspiring to destroy the last remnants of the America that was born at the Founding—that these elites have nearly completed their plot to have illegal aliens overrun the nation, steal elections for corrupt Democrats, and treat conservatives as state enemies.
*snip*
How the Conservative Movement Enabled the Rise of Drumpf
For years, I’ve argued that talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and websites like Breitbart.com pose a significant threat to movement conservatism. All movements are vulnerable to populist excesses and the self-destructive impulses of their core supporters. Good leaders can help to mitigate those pathologies. Bad leaders magnify them.
Within movement conservatism, hugely popular intellectual leaders abandoned the most basic norms of decency, as when Mark Levin screamed at a caller that her husband should shoot himself; stoked racial tensions, as when Rush Limbaugh avowed that in President Obama’s America folks think white kids deserve to get beat up by black kids on busses; and indulged paranoid conspiracy theories, as when Roger Ailes aired month-after-month of Glenn Beck's chalk-board monologues.
Erick Erickson now complains that many Republicans are supporting “a man of mountainous ego” who “preys on nationalistic, tribal tendencies.” But this is what happens when millions of people spend a decade with Bill O’Reilly in their living rooms each evening and Ann Coulter books on their nightstands for bedtime reading. Let’s not treat it as a mystery that their notion of what’s credible is out of whack.
For years, I’ve complained about egregious displays of misinformation, as when Andrew Breitbart published a video purporting to show a Hispanic Acorn worker willing to engage in human trafficking, but neglected to mention that he only indulged James O’Keefe’s hidden video sting until the amateur filmmaker left, when he called police.
I’ve lamented efforts to portray Democratic leaders as conspirators in a plot to deliberately destroy the country, as when Andrew McCarthy posited that Barack Obama is allied with our Islamist enemy in a “grand jihad” against America. And I warned against the cry-bully ressentiment tapped by Sarah Palin and indulged by her apologists. They accelerated the transformation of the American right away from anything resembling conservatism and toward aggrievement-driven tribalism.
*snip*
Drumpf could not succeed but for a large faction that grins at indecency; cheers attacks on Mexicans; sees no need for governing experience; has lost its immunity against populist misinformation and manipulation; believes that establishment officials are trying to destroy the country; elevates cultural cues over substance; and dismisses the possibility of improvement through compromise.
As movement conservatism reaps the pathologies that it sowed (even as its more responsible arms try to kill a monster that they were institutionally complicit in creating), I return once more to the talk radio host who first proved that the base could fall for a polarizing egomaniac with a penchant for crudely insulting women. Rush Limbaugh still purports to be a conservative. Yet he is still engaged in rhetoric so perfectly suited to fueling Trumpism that it is hard to believe he is unaware.
Here is the top of his Web site as I write this article:
The attendant segment was broadcast Tuesday. In it, Limbaugh led his listeners to believe that the Republican and Democratic establishments are conspiring to destroy the last remnants of the America that was born at the Founding—that these elites have nearly completed their plot to have illegal aliens overrun the nation, steal elections for corrupt Democrats, and treat conservatives as state enemies.
*snip*
