What do Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity have in common? That should be an easy one; they are both neo-Conservative commentators, authors, and highly visible personas whose hate for liberals is almost a religion and whose prevailing tactic is to yell louder than and overtop of the person they are talking to until they’ve ‘won’ the debate. See something wrong here? I do. And I don’t like it one bit.
Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity aren’t the only ones using this Brand image in the name of educating and spreading Conservative philosophy, there is a whole class of sensationalists out there, and their only motivation is to generate larger profits and greater fame by shocking their audience. It works, but it also alienates and greatly tarnishes the true Conservative image. I’m tired of Branding. I don’t believe in the Conservative Brand, I believe in a Conservative philosophy, which just so happens to be very different than what the Branders have portrayed.
The Brand no longer educates about Conservative reasoning, it instead chooses absolute positions on a few key issues without ever explaining their position or why their position is Conservative. And if anyone challenges the Brand’s position, they are labeled either liberal or crazy. Liberals get screamed at and yelled over. Crazies get laughed at, smeared, and lied about. Don’t believe me? What happened to the real Conservative Ron Paul? You may or may not remember that Paul was one of the few Republicans to stand behind Reagan from the beginning, it took awhile for Reagan to break the crazy brand.
Whats worse, the Brand doesn’t just fail to educate, it miss-educates. Conservatives aren’t crazy because they are against the Iraq War or rightly believe that actions have consequences, but the Brand teaches that any opposition to its absolute position is not Conservative, leading many to either forget or never learn that Conservatism is honestly about liberty, small government, and a non-interventionist foreign policy. Bush has expanded our government the most since FDR, he has (justifiably) taken us to war against a terrorist regime in Afghanistan that we armed and empowered because we got involved where we shouldn’t have, and he has put us in a war in a foreign nation that had neither attacked us nor supported our enemies because we didn’t want Saddam’s WMDs to fall in the wrong hands: no one from the Brand likes to talk about the WMDs anymore because the only weapons of mass destruction we found were given to Iraq to fight Iran by us. And as long as we are attacking nations who have WMDs and ergo might possibly let a few fall into the wrong hands, we should invade Russia, Pakistan, India, Iran, China, North Korea, Syria, Lybia, Israel, and ourselves (after-all, Clinton sold our Nuclear secrets to the Chinese, who then helped Pakistan, who is now helping Iran and several more countries who might let them fall into the wrong hands).
But the Brand doesn’t tell you this, because the Brand chooses positions and chooses them absolutely. Since the War on Terror was good, so was the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, and warrant-less seizures of Americans.
No more alienation, no more sensationalism, no more branding. Conservatives need to wake up and show the world that they are better than petty fight pickers, more humble than the ‘enlightened’ Brand, more faithful to personal liberty than the Patriot Act or Proposition 8, and more dedicated to limited government than the Bailout and repeated ’stimulus’ packages from the Bush administration have shown.
-James Thoburn
Further Reading:
Austin Bramwell’s ‘a response to Ross’
Ross Douthat – Should Conservatism be a Movement
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James Thoburn is a student at the University of Chicago. He created Backyard Politics to bring together individuals interested in actively participating in the political discussion without giving up their day job. His other interests include running, golf, and music.
Somehow it’s not clear who wrote this. I suppose it is James Thoburn?
I agree with you on Sean Hannity, but Ann is funny in a Don Rickles sort of way. Rush too, has humor which I like. I don’t agree with you on Iraq. All this anti-war talk reminds me of a passage in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in which one of the soldiers says “Lieutenant, why don’t we just go home and then the war would be over?” The lieutenant replies “You sound like a man who has never been conquered and you don’t know what it is like.” The Americans I know have no intension of being conquered so we fight. You obviously forget the 70% approval for the Iraq war. The Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld idea was to bunch as many terrorists in Iraq as possible and then kill them. I would say that has worked pretty good.
Ivan,
You are correct, I wrote the piece. I’ve fixed the author tag to represent this. Your response alone shows the moral apprehension Conservatives should have over the Iraq war.
“The Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld idea was to bunch as many terrorists in Iraq as possible and then kill them. I would say that has worked pretty good.”
Saddam had kept these extremist groups out of Iraq, and they’ve only come because we are there. For us to force the battleground of our war against terrorism onto the Iraqi people is morally wrong. While the philosophy of ‘better there than here’ is not itself wrong, making the battleground ‘there’ Iraq instead of a more culpable nation (for instance Afghanistan) was an ethically wrong decision. While it is true we haven’t left Afghanistan, we didn’t need to spread the violence to Iraq as well.
We can all see that the war on terror is not over, especially in light of the recent attack in India which many believe was carried out by Al Qaeda under a false name. I’m not sure where you got your data saying “70% approve of the Iraq war.” The most recent poll I could find on the fly has about 60% of Americans believing that going to war in Iraq was the wrong decision, and older polls from CNN, USA Today, Rasmussen, and Zogby all reflected that. (there was a more recent CNN poll with 70% opposition to the war, but although the poll purported to be ‘American opinion’ the survey was presented to Canadians, go figure. Typical CNN stunt.)
I would encourage you however not to use poll data as evidence for your opinion. Even if 90% of Americans believed that the Iraq war was right, I would argue against it on the same reasons I’ve espoused here. I agree with you, the Americans I know don’t want to be conquered either, but there is a profound difference between defeatism and opposition to a morally apprehensible war. Lets win the war on terror, but lets not forget our morals in doing so.
-James Thoburn
Who loves my endorsement of Ron Paul in 2012?
hows that for a role reversal?
I’m pretty sure insHannity won’t like that nod
No matter what, you have to admit they have a point… Just don’t let Stephen Colbert get a hold of it.