VOICE OF THE MAJORITY

'Is Dittodom dying?'

By P.M. Carpenter

I've related the rise and fall of my hopes for a riveting weekend of locally produced, right-wing talk radio in the Ozarks. In a word, it was pretty much dead. No fire, no passion, no venom spewed. With their boys in power, who's left to hate? All they now have to keep the radio waters simmering is Rush: foaming, maniacal, drug-addled Rush. I listened to his show briefly on the drive down, and even he had been reduced to agitation over the comparatively mundane issue of No Child Left Behind and blaming all its failures, of course, on the liberally evil NEA -- hashed, rehashed and by now predictably rehearsed to the point of chronic boredom.It reminded me of an earlier drive to the Ozarks while listening to Rush and how talk radio's opportunities for pent-up rage over political goings on are withering away. And in this there is great hope.On the previous drive, George W. Bush had been elected to the presidency more than a year before, and on AM radio Rush and his ditto-callers were analyzing the question of -- what else? -- whether Bill Clinton had an evil political "center" (as in "moral center") or was merely a superficial opportunist. Either way, Clinton was doomed to damnation, and the fact that he no longer held public office concerned neither Rush nor Dittodom. When I first tuned in, Rush was in the midst of a severe lecture on Clinton's commitment to full-fledged, ideological liberalism. A caller soon piled on with a challenging thought. Clinton, he said, was no ideologue. It was clear to all who are holy that every speech Clinton had ever given had been constituted only by "what you want to hear." The former president had no "center," no ideology, no convictions. Rush first stuck to his guns. Then, out of the blue he pronounced the caller correct. Bill was an opportunistic, politically center-less blackguard who speechified only on that which Americans wanted to hear and Clinton had always been that way. Rush then concluded before a commercial break ... warning: whiplash ahead ... that yes, Clinton was indeed a devout ideologue. This muddleheaded, wholesale self-contradiction committed not once, but twice, and framed within the span of no less than two minutes, gave not one listener pause. The show proceeded on the premise of perfect consistency. I hadn't heard Limbaugh's show for a couple years, so its snippets of logic were a real yawner. That Rush was devoting so much time to a powerless ex-enemy, however, was an eye-opening sign of ideological fatigue. And of course any time spent with Rush and his callers provides a valuable refresher course in populist conservatism.It's a brawling conservatism that fascinates. Thought, for instance, is the instrument of a street-fight, insularly bred and antagonistically tribal. The traditionally thoughtful path is that Reason leads to Truth, whereas populist conservatism first establishes Truth and then fights its way to reasoning.The movement thus constantly self-justifies and lacks the potential of growth through internal dissension. Dissenting reason is suppressed so that Mother Ideology may achieve a one-dimensional supremacy. In short, it becomes fat, dumb and happy, reflecting the axiomatic reality of Herbert Marcuse's famous One-Dimensional Man. Filtered through the prism of populist conservatism, all complexities -- be they social, economic or political -- emerge in the singular and simplistic light of capitalism's holiness, the West's nobility and individualism's mythic sacrosanctity. For talking-head conservatives in all media these days, reality is a frightful prospect, and the readily understandable their salvation. The human condition is enormously complex, of course, but they have promoted shallowness largely to gain electorally. That's politics, and so far as that goes, so good. But to remain vibrant a political movement requires an oppositional voice from within. In the long-term absence of opposition, the movement stagnates.Hence populist conservatism has achieved a hopeful milestone for the thoughtful: the beginning of its self-tormented end -- or at least the death of heated talk radio in the Ozarks and Rush's tired rehashing on national airwaves would seem to indicate that. http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/

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Monday, May 09, 2005