http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/03/13/coulter/index1.html
By Gary Kamiya
If the right's culture war is almost entirely a fraud, and is one of
the major factors behind the unraveling of the American polity, it
paid big political dividends.
The right's embrace of "values" allowed it to stave off what should
have been its inexorable decline.
If the price is obeisance to an increasingly vulgar, bigoted,
nativist, know-nothing and theocratic ideology -- well, apparently it
is better to survive as a slimy Gollum hungering after the Ring of
Power than not to survive at all.
By rights, American conservatism should be dead or on life support by
now.
The ideology has always been incoherent, deeply divided between its
libertarian, free-market wing and its traditionalist, "values" wing.
As George H. Nash noted in his 1976 book "The Conservative
Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945," a shared anti-communism
and political convenience temporarily concealed these profound
differences.
Ronald Reagan's anti-communism, and his sunny personality, allowed
free-market conservatives to overlook the fact that government
actually grew enormously on his watch.
With a majority of Americans continuing to believe in Democratic
social policies and programs, and demographic trends running in the
Democrats' favor, the right was facing disaster after Reagan's exit
and the fall of communism.
It desperately needed a boogeyman to unify its unruly factions.
Fortunately, conjuring up boogeymen has been a right-wing specialty
since the days of the Know-Nothing movement.
First the right launched the culture war, a key part of which was
demonizing the Clintons.
This and a disgraceful Supreme Court decision sufficed to get a
featherweight named George W. Bush named president.
But Bush lived down to his résumé, and after his first year his
approval ratings were tanking.
The old culture-war tricks weren't working anymore; the magic was
wearing off.
And then a miracle literally fell from the skies: 9/11.
The terror attacks were just what the right needed.
It allowed it to fold "national security" into its culture war
portfolio -- a potent mixture, especially with Congress and the
mainstream media drugged by patriotic fervor.
Islamic terrorism was hastily dressed up as the new Red Menace,
liberals were painted as Chamberlain-like appeasers, and all was well
for a while.
In 2004, Bush's strategy of appealing to his base proved successful,
despite his disastrous war on Iraq, and inspired GOP hopes that Rove's
dream of a decades-long realignment might prove true.
But the "Islamofascist" solution to the right's woes proved to be
short-lived.
Bush's bungled war on Iraq angered not just the old-style
traditionalists, who tended to be isolationist, but the free-marketers
and libertarians, who seethed as Bush busted the budget and squandered
trillions of dollars on his war of choice.
As for the neoconservatives, who dominated Bush's administration, they
never established themselves as a dominant political force to begin
with, and they lost all credibility after the Iraq debacle.
That left only the base -- the culture warriors for whom the battle
over "values" trumps everything else, the zealots who brook no
compromise.
The problem is, no political movement led by its most extreme elements
can win.
The right's culture warriors are too manifestly unhinged; their
obsessive mean-spiritedness, more than their actual positions, leaves
them out of the American mainstream, even out of the mainstream of the
Republican Party.
A movement figuratively led by the likes of Ann Coulter (or literally
by Newt Gingrich, who is lurking on the sidelines, ready to run)
cannot win a general election in this country.
A red, white and blue banner inscribed with "*****!" may rally the
hardcore, but most Americans will reject a politics based on hate and
fear.
And they will do so in large part because they've been there and done
that.
The disastrous Bush presidency, which is certain to be recorded as one
of the worst in American history, managed to stay politically afloat
by making primal appeals to fear, revenge and patriotism.
But like the boy who cried "wolf" -- or, in this case, "terrorism!" --
once too often, it has used up its fearmongering capital.
Episodes like the Coulter debacle make it all too clear, especially to
the swing and independent voters and pragmatic Republicans who will
decide the election, that the GOP's base (which, by the way, is what
"al-Qaida" means in Arabic) is a rather scary group.
The GOP is reaping what it has sown.
It preached hatred, fear and resentment for years, it whipped up the
troops with apocalyptic rhetoric, and now it has created a core
constituency that only too obviously reflects that negativity.
Indeed, the Republican base increasingly defines itself not by
positive values, which a true conservatism would affirm and which
could hold broad appeal, but only by its partisan hatreds.
The sorry state of contemporary conservatism shows that there is an
innate danger to civil society in letting loose the dogs of "values"
-- especially right-wing values.
Because conservatives tend to believe more than liberals in good and
evil, in a clear-cut, transcendental morality, a values-based politics
for them quickly acquires not just an authoritarian cast, but an
almost religious one.
As we learned on 9/11, and observe every day in Iraq, religious
zealotry is not conducive to reasoned discussions.
When you have God, right and patriarchal authority on your side,
anything goes.
The result, among other things, is ugly psychosexual mudslinging like
Coulter's.
As my Salon colleague Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the right's
strategy is "to feminize ... all male Democratic or liberal political
leaders. For multiple reasons, nobody does that more effectively or
audaciously than Coulter, which is why they need her so desperately
and will never jettison her."
Yet despite their supposed beliefs, a kind of nihilism, an
intellectual sterility, emanates from the Coulters and Limbaughs of
the world.
This is in part due to the fact that they are, at bottom,
entertainers, stand-up comedians of resentment.
Their riffs are so facile and endless that they devour whatever actual
beliefs supposedly stand behind them.
Incapable of compromise or nuance, lashing out robotically, never
finding common ground or examining their own ideas, they are shills of
negativity, forever battling cartoonish monsters in a lurid,
increasingly unrecognizable world.
And most Americans, even conservative ones who may share some of their
putative positions, are tired of their glib, empty paranoia.
If these are the messengers, there must be something wrong with the
message.
The GOP brain trust presumably knows this -- but it doesn't have any
other cards to play.
And as the feebleness of the right's agenda becomes more and more
apparent, we can expect the noise from figures like Coulter and
Limbaugh to get louder and louder.
But the tactic will not work -- in fact, it is likely to backfire.
And if the Republicans go down big in 2008, conservatives will finally
be forced to confront the Frankenstein monster they created -- and
decide whether they dare get rid of it before it consigns their
movement to oblivion.
Based on their recent history, I don't think they have the common
sense to take out the garbage.
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Harry
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