Litmus test: Picture the words of William F. Buckley (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYlMEVTa-PI) coming out of Rush's or Hannity's or Beck's mouth. You can't (if
you are intellectually honest), and there's a good reason.
True conservatism is more akin to libertarianism, and Bill Buckley, who certainly understood the entertainment value of cat-and-mouse (you can see it frequently in his wry smile) was less an entertainer than a philosopher. I grew up watching him, reading his column, reading The National Review (I was a subscriber to the old-fashioned paper version in college,
http://www.nationalreview.com/, but this too, alas, is more more like FOX News than Barry Goldwater).
Buckley had no agenda but to demonstrate his view of right-thinking (in both a political and semantic sense).
When you see someone with an agenda, they are not primarily concerned with acting out of what is right for a particular purpose (eg, getting to heaven or maintaining order or making money), but what benefits them.
I tend to enjoy political discourse more with self described libertarians than those that describe themselves as republican, conservative, or (shudder) tea partier.
ReplyDeleteIntellectual dishonesty in pundits leads to - what I've experienced as - ignorance in regard to their own rhetoric or unintentional (yet still irresponsible) hypocrisy on the part of "republican" denizens.
Yes, when groups trust intellectual dishonesty, it makes it all the more difficult for the truth to be heard; eventually, both sides stop listening and talking to each other, and resort to only listening and talking to themselves, and within some groups, if they are large enough, there can exist millions of mislead people who don't know any better because they never hear any better, or wish to, or know that they could if they wanted.
ReplyDeleteAnd sometimes they reside inside larger groups that for the most part are harmless, but can harbor streams of discontent that are quietly destructive. Any extreme can be a victim of this, but the GOP seems especially prone to it recently.