Right Minded

One of the jobs we'll be taking on here at the Big Con will be to monitor the Obama Hate. Please do send in your ripest examples to me at rperlstein@ourfuture.org. Forthwith, our first plunge.

One of the right-wing listservs I monitor is targeted to conservative academics. (And, may I say, the level of intellectual discourse on it is shockingly low. Right-wingers are always whining about being shut out of academia by a liberal conspiracy. When will they start taking some personal responsibility for too often not deserving to play the intellectual game at the highest level?)

The first response to Obama's election, hitting the inboxes at 7:32 PM on November 4, was this: "Welcome to America's Weimar Era."

Which was curious. Was the point that our nation's turn to liberalism would be followed by a fascist reaction? Not something a conservative should want to admit.

The next guy pleaded for calm: "Regardless of who wins, it is NOT the end of the world. America goes on. It is true that conservative philosophy will finally triumph..."

I haven't heard political chiliasm since the heyday of V.I. Lenin.

Another contributor grounded his hope in experience—the experience of observing a great political mind come to the fore:

Palin will be interesting on just this count. It's a mistake to equate stump speeches for what' going on inside the speaker's head [ed: true, dat; after all what was going on inside Obama's head during his stump speeches was: "how can I manage to get away with giving Bill Ayers a corner office in the West Wing?"] ; her performance at the RN Convention and in debate against Joe Biden showed an awake intelligence.... It's a mistake to disqualify someone from small town Alaska from the august intellectual precincts of power politic.... she is bright. Not Ivy League bright. Not intellectual bright. But bright as in real world bright..... No Peter principle one-step-too-many end-stop with her quite yet, I don't think.

He's seconded by this fellow (whose only published output I can find, despite his presence on a listserv of conservative academics, is comments on right-blogs like, "Some college students went to a frat party dressed as the Jacson 5 - with blackface. Perhaps bad taste, but again they were imitating a group they obviously liked. Racist? Only if they thought the Jackson 5 were inferior people."):

I am totally amused at those elites who trash Palin's experience and intelligence.... Amazing that Democrats trash Palin's intelligence, yet claim there are 'different learning styles" for minorities and others - in other words, IQ tests and school grades mean nothing - except for Republicns. It took some smarts and choice of advisors (? Mr Palin ?) to help her win in Alaska against some heavy hitters, and to arrange a gas pipeline and taxes on big oil.

And she isn't "nerdy", which is apparently essential for "intelligence" if you are a Republican.

He later opined that McCain deserved to lose "because he is more afraid of being called 'racist' than losing an election."

One of the paleocons (I love the guy's Wikipedia entry: "Gottfried has also been a close friend of important political and intellectual figures: Richard Nixon, Pat Buchanan, John Lukacs, Christopher Lasch, Robert Nisbet, and Murray Rothbard....") offered Wednesday-morning quarterbacking—"The strategy of going with the most Democratic-looking Rep[ublican] in order to defeat the most leftist possible Dem was pure idiocy"—while another offered the following sophisticated theory of Tuesday's dynamics:

Us old folks won't be the 'deciders' in this election [ed: I love the presumption that everyone on a listserv of conservative academics must be old—how hopeful. Obama has already loaded this election with first-time voters who identify with him in the following two ways: (1) "Obama is Black like me," and (2) "Obama is cute, polished orator [sic] who promises to save the world from war and Global Warming for us young idealists."... But, lucky for us, this Presidential race was not close, or else there would have [sic] a total lack of faith in our election process.

Same guy also mocked the conciliatory tones of McCain's concesssion—"Unlike you stick-in-the-mud Republicans, I am rejoicing with your standard-bearer John McCain that 'we have overcome the prideful arrogance of our bigotry.' What could be nicer than that?"

And finally, speaking of Weimar, there was the guy (author, most recently, of that towering tome Better in the Poconos: The Story of Pennsylvania's Vacationland who actually develops a theory of the imminent Obama fascist takeover. Who will the storm troopers be? Take a bow. It's you, dear liberal blog afficianado:

My first fear is less a civil liberties issue than one involving the political process. If the Daily Kos crowd has its own way, the verdict on the Bush years will not be left up to history. Instead, there will be massive investigations into the Bush administration's foreign policy that will culminate in criminal indictments. Criminalizing the opposition is something that has never happened before in this country. It is the beginning of a slippery road to dictatorship. At the very least, the Republicans will reciprocate when they eventually return to power. Will this happen? We do not know. Obama is such a blank slate that anything is possible.

Oh, but it will get worse—much worse:

Another danger is that the so-called fairness doctrine is invoked and talk radio is shut down. The issue is not Rush Limbaugh. The issue is simply that the Obama administration will be shutting down the opposition media . The justification that the Limbaughs of the world do not give equal time to dissenting views is specious. The Nation magazine does not publish right-wing rants. Nor does National Review print defenses of liberalism. If either magazine offends us, we are told not to buy it. If one does not like Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, one can do what liberals tell conservatives to do with obscene comedians -- ignore them. Shutting down talk radio means silencing the opposition's strongest media. If this happens, we are living in a soft dictatorship. Have no illusions what the end of talk radio means. Will it happen? Some Democrats have talked of silencing talk radio. Now that they control the presidency and Congress, they can do it.

Still another danger is hate speech legislation modeled on the campus speech codes that for all practical purposes have ended free speech in the academy. Free speech is not only the freedom to attack Christianity, capitalism, the U.S. military, and to proclaim the virtues of socialism. That much was allowed in the Soviet Union. Free speech is saying in public what we have been reduced to saying in private. Free speech means that Larry Summers does not lose the presidency of Harvard because he dared to say that men and women are different. So-called hate speech laws will be written in generic language but in practice they will mean that Louis Farrakhan and his buddy, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, will still mouth off but criticizing them will be a hate crime. Can speech codes become law? We must consider the reality that they are a fact of life on most campuses and the cancer can easily spread. We must also consider that the Europeanization of America may not consist only of having an expanded welfare state. It might also mean laws like the ones that in France forbid the criticism of Islam (although not of Christianity) and in Austria deny idiots the right to deny the Holocaust. Free speech means the freedom to say stupid things.

If Congress and the president do not give us speech codes, the codes might slip into the law through the courts. President Obama will appoint many judges and God knows what they will be like. After all, the constitution is simply what judges say it is.

During the campaign, the Republican focus was on Obama's redistributionist schemes and his inexperience. The real dangers of the Obama presidency might be the havoc done to free speech, which after all is the bedrock of our system.

Tremble, fellow progressives. These are the intellectuals arrayed against us.