Winehole23
12-15-2010, 11:22 AM
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs_v3//douthat/douthat_post.png (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/)
December 14, 2010, 11:48 am
Hitchens and the Paranoid Center (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/hitchens-and-the-paranoid-center/)
I see that Christopher Hitchens (http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/01/hitchens-201101) has followed in Ron Rosenbaum’s footsteps (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/liberals-and-buckley-nostalgia/) and angrily denounced “rational conservatives” (namely, me) for failing to offer adequate resistance to Tea Party paranoia and conspiracy theorizing, and for daring to hope that some good — i.e. a renewed seriousness about deficit spending — might come of the right-wing uprising. After a whirlwind tour of Glenn Beck’s more lunatic forays, Hitchens concludes:
… the people who really curl my lip are the ones who willingly accept such supporters for the sake of a Republican victory, and then try to write them off as not all that important, or not all that extreme, or not all that insane in wanting to repeal several amendments to a Constitution that they also think is unalterable because it’s divine! It may be true that the Tea Party’s role in November’s vote was less than some people feared, and it’s certainly true that several of the movement’s elected representatives will very soon learn the arts of compromise and the pork barrel. But then what happens at the next downturn? A large, volatile constituency has been created that believes darkly in betrayal and conspiracy. A mass “literature” has been disseminated, to push the mad ideas of exploded crackpots and bigots. It would be no surprise if those who now adore Beck and his acolytes were to call them sellouts and traitors a few years from now. But, alas, they would not be the only victims of the poisonous propaganda that’s been uncorked. Some of the gun brandishing next time might be for real. There was no need for this offense to come, but woe all the same to those by whom it came, and woe above all to those who whitewashed and rationalized it.
Hitchens is absolutely right that paranoia can lead to disastrous follies, and crackpottery to violence. But do you know what else has often led to folly, disaster, violence and human misery? The “moderation” and “centrism” of the Western governing class. It wasn’t Glenn Beck who mired the United States in two neverending overseas occupations, where “gun brandishing” is the least of the everyday horrors (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html?scp=1&sq=Iraq%20Christians&st=cse) that flow from our policy failures. It wasn’t the Tea Party that decided to create two new health care entitlements (Medicare Part D and Obamacare) just as America was about to go over a fiscal waterfall. It wasn’t kooks and reactionaries who got the European Union into its current mess (http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/euro-trashed_522123.html). It wasn’t the radicals of the left and right who risked the global economy on a series of disastrous real estate bets, or locked our government into a permanently symbiotic relationship (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/12/an-unfortunate-decision-by-peter-orszag/67822/) with the banking and financial sectors, or created a vast labyrinth of unaccountable bureaucracies (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/gov-orgs/dhs-hq/) in the hopeless quest for perfect security from terror attacks. And to bring things up the present day, it wasn’t the more “extreme” members of the Senate — be they Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn on the right, or Bernie Sanders on the left — who just voted for more short-term spending and tax cuts (http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/tax-deal-passes-senate-83-15_522251.html) without any plan to pay for it.
The point, again, is not to justify paranoia or conspiracy theorizing. But an outsize paranoia about paranoia (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/opinion/06douthat.html) — what Jesse Walker has dubbed the “the paranoid style in center-left politics” (http://reason.com/archives/2009/09/15/the-paranoid-center)— seems like a rather odd response to a political moment in which nearly all of our overlapping crises are the result of disastrous misgovernment at the center, not “gun brandishing” and violence at the extremes. The Tea Party’s politics are not my politics, but the movement has virtues as well as vices, and at the very least it represented a possible alternative force at a time when our politics desperately needs alternatives, whether right-wing or left-wing or something else entirely, to the policies that have led us to our present pass. Nothing good may come of it, but an awful lot more ill has come from politics-as-usual of late than from grassroots populism.
The irony is that when it comes to his own personal hobbyhorses (the Vatican and the sex abuse crisis, most notably), Hitchens has something in common with the more paranoid Tea Partiers: He starts with a justifiable sense of outrage, and then proceeds to embrace sweepingly manichaean (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/2010/04/14/correcting-christopher-hitchens/) and essentially fictive narratives (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/2010/04/14/correcting-christopher-hitchens-ii/) about evil in high places. This is deeply human of him, but I’m not sure it makes him the right man to lecture others for believing “darkly in betrayal and conspiracy.” First remove the beam from thine own eye …
December 14, 2010, 11:48 am
Hitchens and the Paranoid Center (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/hitchens-and-the-paranoid-center/)
I see that Christopher Hitchens (http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/01/hitchens-201101) has followed in Ron Rosenbaum’s footsteps (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/liberals-and-buckley-nostalgia/) and angrily denounced “rational conservatives” (namely, me) for failing to offer adequate resistance to Tea Party paranoia and conspiracy theorizing, and for daring to hope that some good — i.e. a renewed seriousness about deficit spending — might come of the right-wing uprising. After a whirlwind tour of Glenn Beck’s more lunatic forays, Hitchens concludes:
… the people who really curl my lip are the ones who willingly accept such supporters for the sake of a Republican victory, and then try to write them off as not all that important, or not all that extreme, or not all that insane in wanting to repeal several amendments to a Constitution that they also think is unalterable because it’s divine! It may be true that the Tea Party’s role in November’s vote was less than some people feared, and it’s certainly true that several of the movement’s elected representatives will very soon learn the arts of compromise and the pork barrel. But then what happens at the next downturn? A large, volatile constituency has been created that believes darkly in betrayal and conspiracy. A mass “literature” has been disseminated, to push the mad ideas of exploded crackpots and bigots. It would be no surprise if those who now adore Beck and his acolytes were to call them sellouts and traitors a few years from now. But, alas, they would not be the only victims of the poisonous propaganda that’s been uncorked. Some of the gun brandishing next time might be for real. There was no need for this offense to come, but woe all the same to those by whom it came, and woe above all to those who whitewashed and rationalized it.
Hitchens is absolutely right that paranoia can lead to disastrous follies, and crackpottery to violence. But do you know what else has often led to folly, disaster, violence and human misery? The “moderation” and “centrism” of the Western governing class. It wasn’t Glenn Beck who mired the United States in two neverending overseas occupations, where “gun brandishing” is the least of the everyday horrors (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html?scp=1&sq=Iraq%20Christians&st=cse) that flow from our policy failures. It wasn’t the Tea Party that decided to create two new health care entitlements (Medicare Part D and Obamacare) just as America was about to go over a fiscal waterfall. It wasn’t kooks and reactionaries who got the European Union into its current mess (http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/euro-trashed_522123.html). It wasn’t the radicals of the left and right who risked the global economy on a series of disastrous real estate bets, or locked our government into a permanently symbiotic relationship (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/12/an-unfortunate-decision-by-peter-orszag/67822/) with the banking and financial sectors, or created a vast labyrinth of unaccountable bureaucracies (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/gov-orgs/dhs-hq/) in the hopeless quest for perfect security from terror attacks. And to bring things up the present day, it wasn’t the more “extreme” members of the Senate — be they Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn on the right, or Bernie Sanders on the left — who just voted for more short-term spending and tax cuts (http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/tax-deal-passes-senate-83-15_522251.html) without any plan to pay for it.
The point, again, is not to justify paranoia or conspiracy theorizing. But an outsize paranoia about paranoia (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/opinion/06douthat.html) — what Jesse Walker has dubbed the “the paranoid style in center-left politics” (http://reason.com/archives/2009/09/15/the-paranoid-center)— seems like a rather odd response to a political moment in which nearly all of our overlapping crises are the result of disastrous misgovernment at the center, not “gun brandishing” and violence at the extremes. The Tea Party’s politics are not my politics, but the movement has virtues as well as vices, and at the very least it represented a possible alternative force at a time when our politics desperately needs alternatives, whether right-wing or left-wing or something else entirely, to the policies that have led us to our present pass. Nothing good may come of it, but an awful lot more ill has come from politics-as-usual of late than from grassroots populism.
The irony is that when it comes to his own personal hobbyhorses (the Vatican and the sex abuse crisis, most notably), Hitchens has something in common with the more paranoid Tea Partiers: He starts with a justifiable sense of outrage, and then proceeds to embrace sweepingly manichaean (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/2010/04/14/correcting-christopher-hitchens/) and essentially fictive narratives (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/2010/04/14/correcting-christopher-hitchens-ii/) about evil in high places. This is deeply human of him, but I’m not sure it makes him the right man to lecture others for believing “darkly in betrayal and conspiracy.” First remove the beam from thine own eye …