Wednesday, July 11, 2012 4:57:36 AM
I was a right-wing child star
A photo of the author at 17
At 13, I gave a speech at CPAC. Four years later, I renounced conservatives -- and they attacked me for it
By Jonathan Krohn
Sunday, Jul 8, 2012 07:00 AM CDT
Four years ago, at the age of 13, I gave a speech at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference). To be honest, I had no idea how big a deal it was to make a two-minute appearance on a B-list panel. But the speech blew up, and I became the child star of the right wing — like the conservative Macauley Culkin, except I’ve never had a drug problem or dated Mila Kunis, unfortunately.
My involvement at such a young age happened for manifold reasons: I always enjoyed writing (I had gotten my first paid writing gig when I was 9), I enjoyed politics (or at least the theory of politics), and I grew up in Georgia, where conservative ideologues dominated the radio and the populace. Mix those things with the naïveté of a kid and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a fresh, right-wing pundit. My star role worked out well for a while. I didn’t have to question any of the talking points I’d made in my speech, and I got to drone on and on about them at numerous Tea Parties and other conservative gatherings. I felt justified in my beliefs if for no other reason than no one actually told me I was wrong. Instead, men like Bill Bennett and Newt Gingrich hailed me as the voice for my generation and a hope for America.
But then, earlier this week, Politico released an interview [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78068.html (first item in the post to which this is a reply)] in which I announced I wasn’t a conservative anymore — and the proverbial crap hit the fan. Since then, I have been treated by the political right with all the maturity of schoolyard bullies. The Daily Caller, for instance, wrote three articles about my shift, topping it off with an opinion piece in which they stated that I deserved criticism because I wear “thick-rimmed glasses” and I like Ludwig Wittgenstein. Why don’t they just call me “four-eyes”? These are not adults leveling serious criticism; these are scorned right-wingers showing all the maturity of a little boy. No wonder I fit in so well when I was 13.
I shouldn’t be too surprised. Political divisiveness in America today is a childish thing anyway. The never-ending war between the left and the right seems to me like a couple of drunken college boys fighting over which one of their fraternities is cooler. Think about it: Once you join a side, you have to obey the house rules, go to all the parties, and defend your status as a member of the greatest club on campus. And this is what drove me away from conservatism to my admittedly center-left position of independent mindedness (if that’s a thing).
I was tired of being a part of the ideological warfare this country is so caught up in. I was tired of the right using me as an example of how young people “get” what they’re talking about — when it’s obvious that I didn’t get what I talking about at all. I mean, come on, I was between 13 and 14 when I was regurgitating these talking points! What does a kid who has never paid a tax bring to the table in a conversation about the burden of taxes? What does a healthy child know about people who can’t afford healthcare because of preexisting conditions? No matter how intelligent a person might be, certain political issues require life experience; they’re much more complicated than the black and white frames imposed by partisan America. (And no, my mother and father didn’t write my material for me. You’d have to be as paranoid as the birthers to think someone’s parents would put them up to all that. Have a bit more faith in the human race, man!) I was just a 13-year-old kid spitting up the nonsense he’d learned. In the future, a good rule of thumb might be: If you’re not old enough to have consensual sex, you’re probably not old enough to make consequential political statements.
My past did me some good, though. If I hadn’t seen this childishness I might never have taken the time to let myself breathe, and read philosophy, and develop a new, better sense of humor, not to mention a more mature writing style. An open mind and critical thought are like a metaphorical AA after a long bender on ideological wine: I’m proud to say that this program has gotten me three years sober.
Now, I’m just another white, comic-book collecting, sci-fi watching, film-obsessing, satirizing, sorta stereotypical Jewish nerd who’s never been laid. And no, that’s not the reason I switched, either. Nor did I switch so that I could fit in at NYU in the fall. If you think that’s the case, you obviously don’t know how this stuff works. See, when someone posts a video on YouTube it’s out there in the global consciousness forever. How do you suppose I’ll fit in anywhere, much less in a school environment, with a clip of my nasal rantings about conservatism’s four “pillars” floating around the Web? Do you seriously think such an easily lambasted clip will disappear because I announced I changed my mind? Have you met the users of the Internet?
And no, I’m not a “publicity whore.” If I was just in it for the publicity, I could have called up any number of far-right groups and written any number of things for them. All I wanted was a chance to stand by my guns and show people that I’m no longer the immature kid the world once saw me as.
So this is what this story boils down to: A 17-year-old has different opinions than he did at 13. People may be disappointed by how underwhelming that is, but it’s how the world works. Some people move on with life, mature, and realize that they don’t know everything nor will they ever know everything. Then again, some don’t.
I would love it if a bunch of angry right-wingers stopped saying stupid things about me. I also want a six-pack, a mansion in the Hamptons and a beautiful woman with cans the size of my head. None of these things will happen, and I’m pretty comfortable with that. More accurately, I’m comfortable with who I am, which is all I can ever hope for anyway.
Close
Jonathan Krohn is a former conservative, pundit and purveyor of strange speeches. He is a current writer, college student and nerd. His father calls him a "flaming liberal."
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/08/i_was_a_right_wing_child_star/ [with comments]
===
Right wing attacks one of its own -- again
Ted Frier
JULY 6, 2012 3:49PM
Jonathan Krohn, the precocious 13 year-old who wowed attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference four years ago, is older, wiser and feeling the heat from his one-time admirers now that he's disavowed the revanchist prejudices he absorbed through conservative talk radio.
Krohn admits his speech to the CPAC convention about the "principles of conservatism" (respect for life and the Constitution, personal responsibility and less government) was "naïve," but also "something that a 13-year-old does" when he lives in a place like Georgia where people are "inundated with conservative talk" even before they've had a chance to form opinions of their own.
"One of the first things that changed was that I stopped being a social conservative," said Krohn, explaining his turnaround. "It just didn't seem right to me anymore."
I know just how Jonathan feels. One of the reasons I abandoned conservatism myself is that however logical or meritorious its arguments might be in the abstract, when you added real people into the mix the thought of ordering an entire society around such stark and unbending beliefs was horrifying.
One example: while I might disagree with their conclusions, I do respect on philosophical and theological grounds those people who think abortion is evil and a sin, even from the moment of conception. I can even admire someone doing the hard, time-consuming missionary work of winning over hearts and minds one at a time to their pro-life position. It's behavior inspired by moral conviction but which still respects individual free will, dignity and personal choice.
Yet, within the anti-abortion movement itself is the fertilized egg of fascism.
Imagine for a moment a new cabinet-level department -- call it the Ministry for the Protection of Life -- created when some future President Sarah Palin and Tea Party Congress finally disenfranchise enough blacks, Hispanics, elderly, college students and non-Christians to gain power. This new ministry is empowered to register all women who become pregnant. It then follows them with its army of MPL field agents throughout their term and to the moment of birth. And these agents are equipped with portable trans-vaginal, ultra-sound probes which agents are authorized to use during surprise inspections at a moment's notice.
That's the sort of epiphany Jonathan might have had as he "thought about it more" and realized the consequences of his abstract right wing principles becoming real.
Since life is complex, he said, "you can't just go with some ideological mantra for each substantive issue."
And so what had once looked "fresh and insightful" back when he was 13 now seemed like spam in a can: "A lot of what I said was ideological blather that really wasn't meaningful. It wasn't me thinking. It was just me saying things I had heard so long from people I thought were interesting and just came to believe for some reason, without really understanding it. I understood it enough to talk about it but not really enough to have a conversation about it."
A little learning is a dangerous thing. And once people start thinking for themselves, and demanding more than slogans and talking points, they are ruined forever as foot soldiers for the conservative movement.
"I have to explain to people over and over and over again that I'm not a conservative and I have my own ideas and I'm not just agreeing to everything that every conservative said, Krohn says.
Krohn now says he supports gay marriage, President Obama, Obamacare, and a woman's right to choose. And so, as Politico reports, Jonathan has been pilloried by the far right as a traitor to the cause.
"There have been a lot of people on the right who have attacked me viciously," Krohn told Politico. One commentator even went so far as to suggest that if he had been Krohn's father he would have left him in the woods as a baby to die.
David Frum, himself a prominent conservative apostate who has felt the sting of the right's scorpion tail, says the piling on against the 17 year-old has been "pretty ugly" but not surprising.
Frum points to Gregg Re of Daily Caller who, in a snark-filled screed, portrays the "self-styled child actor" as a political opportunist, whose "conformist embrace of non-conformism won him fast new friends" as he headed off to pursue a film-making and screenwriting career at New York University - "an institution known almost as much for its progressive slant and weed culture as its nationally-recognized film program."
Yet, says Re, in an effort to "make the right look bad," Politico "deliberately portrayed Krohn's shift from staunch 'tween' conservative to teenage liberal college-bound idealist as a brave and unusual move."
Re goes on to quote one attendee of the 2009 CPAC conference as exclaiming after being told about Krohn's political conversion: "Holy fucking shit. The kid was the most annoying 13-year-old I have ever met."
Re even threw Krohn's mother under the bus, calling her "an aspiring actress and middle-school drama teacher" who coached her son for the publicity it got them.
"Krohn was smug, condescending, and obviously completely ignorant of what he was saying," Re quotes another attendee as saying. "When I spoke with him, I got the impression he was merely repackaging what someone else had told him. He was smart, but almost Stepford Wife-like in how it seemed like he was being used. It was creepy. ... He kept talking about the book he had written and how many radio shows he had been on."
After a pause, wrote Re, the source added: "To be clear, the fact that he was being used did not make the kid any less of a douche."
Jonathan Krohn is now in good company.
The attacks against him now that he has betrayed right wing orthodoxy remind me of when William F. Buckley Jr.'s son, Christopher, endorsed Barack Obama for president back in 2008.
After Buckley broke ranks, the editor of the National Review magazine that Bill Buckley co-founded in 1955 called Buckley's son Chris "cretinous" and canned him on the spot. This led the younger Buckley to say: "I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal."
A year later, David Frum learned the hard way the price of diverging from the right wing conservative party line when he was let go as a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for challenging Republicans on their obstructionist strategy on health care reform.
And then there is shock jock Michael Savage. Savage went on the air after Chief Justice John Roberts surprised conservatives last week by joining the Supreme Court's liberals to rule Obamacare constitutional and said: "Let's talk about Roberts. I'm going to tell you something that you're not going to hear anywhere else, that you must pay attention to. It's well known that Roberts, unfortunately for him, has suffered from epileptic seizures. Therefore he has been on medication. Therefore neurologists will tell you that medication used for seizure disorders, such as epilepsy, can introduce mental slowing, forgetfulness and other cognitive problems. And if you look at Roberts' writings you can the cognitive disassociation in what he is saying."
Savage reminds me of those old Soviets who used to send dissidents to mental hospitals since opposing communism was obviously crazy.
And when, as Paul Krugman notes, the presidential nominee of the Republican Party is forced by his conservative base to "bitterly denounce the Supreme Court for upholding the constitutionality of his own health care plan," you can understand why someone like Frum would say Republicans are prisoners of a "mindset of subordination and conformity."
It's a mindset that reveals itself whenever conservatives lash out in frustration and rage at liberal critics who they denounce as being hypocrites for not living up to their own liberal principles of tolerance and open-mindedness -- by unconditionally surrendering to right wing orthodoxy.
Recently, for example, the Washington Examiner's Senior Political Columnist, Timothy P. Carney, wrote about the "closed-minded dismissal of opposing views" that he says is now "a core strategy of the Left" as liberals "ignore, dismiss and ridicule conservative and free-market views."
What is telling about Carney's remarks is that as thin-skinned as conservatives seem to be about criticism of their ideas, Carney does not have much faith in either the veracity or efficacy of those ideas or else he would have put up a better fight for them against liberal criticism. Instead, again and again, Carney cites the mere fact of a liberal criticism against a conservative "idea" as being its own refutation, as if disagreement of any kind is uncivil and out of bounds. Conformity in the name of open-mindedness?
We all know the game being played here. Carney doesn't defend conservative ideas. He defends the conservative groups that embrace them. Carney isn't interested in promoting a genuine, good-faith debate between liberals and conservatives. His aim is to promote conservative group solidarity by stoking resentments through the age-old tactic of picking a fight and telling people that they --- or their intelligence, their honor, their dignity, or the good name of their mamas -- are under attack by some targeted "outsider."
Convince enough conservatives that liberals despise them just for who they are, and disrespect their ideas -- well, just because -- and you never, ever have to engage with liberal arguments or refute them on their merits.
Bottom line: It would be a whole lot easier to take conservative ideas seriously if conservatives took ideas seriously themselves.
© 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://open.salon.com/blog/ted_frier/2012/07/06/right_wing_attacks_one_of_its_own_--_again [with comments]
A photo of the author at 17
At 13, I gave a speech at CPAC. Four years later, I renounced conservatives -- and they attacked me for it
By Jonathan Krohn
Sunday, Jul 8, 2012 07:00 AM CDT
Four years ago, at the age of 13, I gave a speech at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference). To be honest, I had no idea how big a deal it was to make a two-minute appearance on a B-list panel. But the speech blew up, and I became the child star of the right wing — like the conservative Macauley Culkin, except I’ve never had a drug problem or dated Mila Kunis, unfortunately.
My involvement at such a young age happened for manifold reasons: I always enjoyed writing (I had gotten my first paid writing gig when I was 9), I enjoyed politics (or at least the theory of politics), and I grew up in Georgia, where conservative ideologues dominated the radio and the populace. Mix those things with the naïveté of a kid and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a fresh, right-wing pundit. My star role worked out well for a while. I didn’t have to question any of the talking points I’d made in my speech, and I got to drone on and on about them at numerous Tea Parties and other conservative gatherings. I felt justified in my beliefs if for no other reason than no one actually told me I was wrong. Instead, men like Bill Bennett and Newt Gingrich hailed me as the voice for my generation and a hope for America.
But then, earlier this week, Politico released an interview [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78068.html (first item in the post to which this is a reply)] in which I announced I wasn’t a conservative anymore — and the proverbial crap hit the fan. Since then, I have been treated by the political right with all the maturity of schoolyard bullies. The Daily Caller, for instance, wrote three articles about my shift, topping it off with an opinion piece in which they stated that I deserved criticism because I wear “thick-rimmed glasses” and I like Ludwig Wittgenstein. Why don’t they just call me “four-eyes”? These are not adults leveling serious criticism; these are scorned right-wingers showing all the maturity of a little boy. No wonder I fit in so well when I was 13.
I shouldn’t be too surprised. Political divisiveness in America today is a childish thing anyway. The never-ending war between the left and the right seems to me like a couple of drunken college boys fighting over which one of their fraternities is cooler. Think about it: Once you join a side, you have to obey the house rules, go to all the parties, and defend your status as a member of the greatest club on campus. And this is what drove me away from conservatism to my admittedly center-left position of independent mindedness (if that’s a thing).
I was tired of being a part of the ideological warfare this country is so caught up in. I was tired of the right using me as an example of how young people “get” what they’re talking about — when it’s obvious that I didn’t get what I talking about at all. I mean, come on, I was between 13 and 14 when I was regurgitating these talking points! What does a kid who has never paid a tax bring to the table in a conversation about the burden of taxes? What does a healthy child know about people who can’t afford healthcare because of preexisting conditions? No matter how intelligent a person might be, certain political issues require life experience; they’re much more complicated than the black and white frames imposed by partisan America. (And no, my mother and father didn’t write my material for me. You’d have to be as paranoid as the birthers to think someone’s parents would put them up to all that. Have a bit more faith in the human race, man!) I was just a 13-year-old kid spitting up the nonsense he’d learned. In the future, a good rule of thumb might be: If you’re not old enough to have consensual sex, you’re probably not old enough to make consequential political statements.
My past did me some good, though. If I hadn’t seen this childishness I might never have taken the time to let myself breathe, and read philosophy, and develop a new, better sense of humor, not to mention a more mature writing style. An open mind and critical thought are like a metaphorical AA after a long bender on ideological wine: I’m proud to say that this program has gotten me three years sober.
Now, I’m just another white, comic-book collecting, sci-fi watching, film-obsessing, satirizing, sorta stereotypical Jewish nerd who’s never been laid. And no, that’s not the reason I switched, either. Nor did I switch so that I could fit in at NYU in the fall. If you think that’s the case, you obviously don’t know how this stuff works. See, when someone posts a video on YouTube it’s out there in the global consciousness forever. How do you suppose I’ll fit in anywhere, much less in a school environment, with a clip of my nasal rantings about conservatism’s four “pillars” floating around the Web? Do you seriously think such an easily lambasted clip will disappear because I announced I changed my mind? Have you met the users of the Internet?
And no, I’m not a “publicity whore.” If I was just in it for the publicity, I could have called up any number of far-right groups and written any number of things for them. All I wanted was a chance to stand by my guns and show people that I’m no longer the immature kid the world once saw me as.
So this is what this story boils down to: A 17-year-old has different opinions than he did at 13. People may be disappointed by how underwhelming that is, but it’s how the world works. Some people move on with life, mature, and realize that they don’t know everything nor will they ever know everything. Then again, some don’t.
I would love it if a bunch of angry right-wingers stopped saying stupid things about me. I also want a six-pack, a mansion in the Hamptons and a beautiful woman with cans the size of my head. None of these things will happen, and I’m pretty comfortable with that. More accurately, I’m comfortable with who I am, which is all I can ever hope for anyway.
Close
Jonathan Krohn is a former conservative, pundit and purveyor of strange speeches. He is a current writer, college student and nerd. His father calls him a "flaming liberal."
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/08/i_was_a_right_wing_child_star/ [with comments]
===
Right wing attacks one of its own -- again
Ted Frier
JULY 6, 2012 3:49PM
Jonathan Krohn, the precocious 13 year-old who wowed attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference four years ago, is older, wiser and feeling the heat from his one-time admirers now that he's disavowed the revanchist prejudices he absorbed through conservative talk radio.
Krohn admits his speech to the CPAC convention about the "principles of conservatism" (respect for life and the Constitution, personal responsibility and less government) was "naïve," but also "something that a 13-year-old does" when he lives in a place like Georgia where people are "inundated with conservative talk" even before they've had a chance to form opinions of their own.
"One of the first things that changed was that I stopped being a social conservative," said Krohn, explaining his turnaround. "It just didn't seem right to me anymore."
I know just how Jonathan feels. One of the reasons I abandoned conservatism myself is that however logical or meritorious its arguments might be in the abstract, when you added real people into the mix the thought of ordering an entire society around such stark and unbending beliefs was horrifying.
One example: while I might disagree with their conclusions, I do respect on philosophical and theological grounds those people who think abortion is evil and a sin, even from the moment of conception. I can even admire someone doing the hard, time-consuming missionary work of winning over hearts and minds one at a time to their pro-life position. It's behavior inspired by moral conviction but which still respects individual free will, dignity and personal choice.
Yet, within the anti-abortion movement itself is the fertilized egg of fascism.
Imagine for a moment a new cabinet-level department -- call it the Ministry for the Protection of Life -- created when some future President Sarah Palin and Tea Party Congress finally disenfranchise enough blacks, Hispanics, elderly, college students and non-Christians to gain power. This new ministry is empowered to register all women who become pregnant. It then follows them with its army of MPL field agents throughout their term and to the moment of birth. And these agents are equipped with portable trans-vaginal, ultra-sound probes which agents are authorized to use during surprise inspections at a moment's notice.
That's the sort of epiphany Jonathan might have had as he "thought about it more" and realized the consequences of his abstract right wing principles becoming real.
Since life is complex, he said, "you can't just go with some ideological mantra for each substantive issue."
And so what had once looked "fresh and insightful" back when he was 13 now seemed like spam in a can: "A lot of what I said was ideological blather that really wasn't meaningful. It wasn't me thinking. It was just me saying things I had heard so long from people I thought were interesting and just came to believe for some reason, without really understanding it. I understood it enough to talk about it but not really enough to have a conversation about it."
A little learning is a dangerous thing. And once people start thinking for themselves, and demanding more than slogans and talking points, they are ruined forever as foot soldiers for the conservative movement.
"I have to explain to people over and over and over again that I'm not a conservative and I have my own ideas and I'm not just agreeing to everything that every conservative said, Krohn says.
Krohn now says he supports gay marriage, President Obama, Obamacare, and a woman's right to choose. And so, as Politico reports, Jonathan has been pilloried by the far right as a traitor to the cause.
"There have been a lot of people on the right who have attacked me viciously," Krohn told Politico. One commentator even went so far as to suggest that if he had been Krohn's father he would have left him in the woods as a baby to die.
David Frum, himself a prominent conservative apostate who has felt the sting of the right's scorpion tail, says the piling on against the 17 year-old has been "pretty ugly" but not surprising.
Frum points to Gregg Re of Daily Caller who, in a snark-filled screed, portrays the "self-styled child actor" as a political opportunist, whose "conformist embrace of non-conformism won him fast new friends" as he headed off to pursue a film-making and screenwriting career at New York University - "an institution known almost as much for its progressive slant and weed culture as its nationally-recognized film program."
Yet, says Re, in an effort to "make the right look bad," Politico "deliberately portrayed Krohn's shift from staunch 'tween' conservative to teenage liberal college-bound idealist as a brave and unusual move."
Re goes on to quote one attendee of the 2009 CPAC conference as exclaiming after being told about Krohn's political conversion: "Holy fucking shit. The kid was the most annoying 13-year-old I have ever met."
Re even threw Krohn's mother under the bus, calling her "an aspiring actress and middle-school drama teacher" who coached her son for the publicity it got them.
"Krohn was smug, condescending, and obviously completely ignorant of what he was saying," Re quotes another attendee as saying. "When I spoke with him, I got the impression he was merely repackaging what someone else had told him. He was smart, but almost Stepford Wife-like in how it seemed like he was being used. It was creepy. ... He kept talking about the book he had written and how many radio shows he had been on."
After a pause, wrote Re, the source added: "To be clear, the fact that he was being used did not make the kid any less of a douche."
Jonathan Krohn is now in good company.
The attacks against him now that he has betrayed right wing orthodoxy remind me of when William F. Buckley Jr.'s son, Christopher, endorsed Barack Obama for president back in 2008.
After Buckley broke ranks, the editor of the National Review magazine that Bill Buckley co-founded in 1955 called Buckley's son Chris "cretinous" and canned him on the spot. This led the younger Buckley to say: "I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal."
A year later, David Frum learned the hard way the price of diverging from the right wing conservative party line when he was let go as a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for challenging Republicans on their obstructionist strategy on health care reform.
And then there is shock jock Michael Savage. Savage went on the air after Chief Justice John Roberts surprised conservatives last week by joining the Supreme Court's liberals to rule Obamacare constitutional and said: "Let's talk about Roberts. I'm going to tell you something that you're not going to hear anywhere else, that you must pay attention to. It's well known that Roberts, unfortunately for him, has suffered from epileptic seizures. Therefore he has been on medication. Therefore neurologists will tell you that medication used for seizure disorders, such as epilepsy, can introduce mental slowing, forgetfulness and other cognitive problems. And if you look at Roberts' writings you can the cognitive disassociation in what he is saying."
Savage reminds me of those old Soviets who used to send dissidents to mental hospitals since opposing communism was obviously crazy.
And when, as Paul Krugman notes, the presidential nominee of the Republican Party is forced by his conservative base to "bitterly denounce the Supreme Court for upholding the constitutionality of his own health care plan," you can understand why someone like Frum would say Republicans are prisoners of a "mindset of subordination and conformity."
It's a mindset that reveals itself whenever conservatives lash out in frustration and rage at liberal critics who they denounce as being hypocrites for not living up to their own liberal principles of tolerance and open-mindedness -- by unconditionally surrendering to right wing orthodoxy.
Recently, for example, the Washington Examiner's Senior Political Columnist, Timothy P. Carney, wrote about the "closed-minded dismissal of opposing views" that he says is now "a core strategy of the Left" as liberals "ignore, dismiss and ridicule conservative and free-market views."
What is telling about Carney's remarks is that as thin-skinned as conservatives seem to be about criticism of their ideas, Carney does not have much faith in either the veracity or efficacy of those ideas or else he would have put up a better fight for them against liberal criticism. Instead, again and again, Carney cites the mere fact of a liberal criticism against a conservative "idea" as being its own refutation, as if disagreement of any kind is uncivil and out of bounds. Conformity in the name of open-mindedness?
We all know the game being played here. Carney doesn't defend conservative ideas. He defends the conservative groups that embrace them. Carney isn't interested in promoting a genuine, good-faith debate between liberals and conservatives. His aim is to promote conservative group solidarity by stoking resentments through the age-old tactic of picking a fight and telling people that they --- or their intelligence, their honor, their dignity, or the good name of their mamas -- are under attack by some targeted "outsider."
Convince enough conservatives that liberals despise them just for who they are, and disrespect their ideas -- well, just because -- and you never, ever have to engage with liberal arguments or refute them on their merits.
Bottom line: It would be a whole lot easier to take conservative ideas seriously if conservatives took ideas seriously themselves.
© 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://open.salon.com/blog/ted_frier/2012/07/06/right_wing_attacks_one_of_its_own_--_again [with comments]
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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