Wingnuts Getting Restless

by digby

This week Newsweek published an essay by Rick Perlstein on the current state of the Republican Party. They chose him for the task for obvious reasons: he’s the foremost historian of the modern conservative movement. And the point he makes is an important one: the rift between the elites and the grassroots in the party — as represented by Sarah Palin — is very significant:

For decades it has remained a Republican article of faith: white, lower-middle-class, “heartland” masses, fundamentally socially conservative, were an inexhaustible electoral resource. So much so that Bill Clinton made re-earning their trust—he called them the Americans who “worked hard and played by the rules”—the central challenge in rebuilding Democratic fortunes in the 1990s. And in 2008 the somewhat aristocratic John McCain seemed to regard bringing these folks back into the Republican fold so imperative that he was moved to make the election’s most exciting strategic move: drafting churchgoing, gun-toting unknown Sarah Palin onto the GOP ticket.

But beneath the surface, some Republicans have been chafing at the ideological wages of right-wing populism. In intellectual circles, writers like David Brooks and Richard Brookhiser have argued for a conservatism inspired by Alexander Hamilton, the least democratic of the Founding Fathers, over one spiritually rooted in Thomas Jefferson, the most democratic. After Barack Obama’s victory, you heard thinkers like author and federal judge Richard Posner lamenting on his blog that “the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.”

Such discomfort has been dormant for some time. Under the influence of philosophical gurus like Leo Strauss and Irving Kristol, the sotto voce tradition arose of flattering the sort of voter who drove a pickup truck even if he wasn’t the sort you might want to socialize with. (Take, for example, “jes’ folks” Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Long before his jet-setting affair, after all, he met the jet-setting, Georgetown-educated Yankee investment banker who became Mrs. Sanford at a Hamptons beach party.) But Palin has raised the “class” question publicly among conservatives as seldom before.

He’s not making this up. You can read guys like Richard Posner, David Frum, Michael Barone and others’ writing on the subject all over the place. But for some reason, despite the fact that Perlstein is simply observing a phenomenon and putting it into historical context, the Falafel King and his little dog Bernie had had a complete meltdown over it:

So, the problem is that Newsweek didn’t reveal that Perlstein is a “far-left zealot.” Now there are those about whom who one might make such a claim, but Perlstein isn’t one of them. In fact, he has more friends on the intellectual right than Sarah Palin does.

Perlstein has always had a unique relationship with the conservative movement. They know he’s a liberal, but they respect his historical work because it’s very fair and accurate. And he’s always had respect for them as well — indeed, he has a rather strange kind of affinity for movement conservative intellectuals and a genuine affection for the rank and file on many levels — far more than most liberals do, including me. It’s a testament to the robotic, empty headedness of Billo and Goldberg that they don’t know this — and that they are unable to have a decent discussion of the phenomenon Perlstein describes without attacking the messenger and accusing Newsweek of palling around with far-left zealots.

O’Reilly is angry because Perlstein says in his piece that the conservative intellectuals have left the stage to the O’Reillys, Becks and Limbaughs, who were once confined to the far right fringe. (I’m sure O’Reilly likes to think of himself as one of the elite intellectuals, when he’s actually a highly paid sideshow act for the rubes.) But I suspect this truth is what got him (and Rupert Murdoch, I’m sure) fuming:

Why the change? For one thing, populism has never been an entirely comfortable fit for elite conservatives. Majorities of middle-class Americans can be persuaded to support tax cuts for the rich—even repeal of the estate tax—out of an optimism that they may eventually become rich themselves. But they are also susceptible to appeals like the one George Wallace made in the recession year of 1976. He built his campaign on both hellfire-and-brimstone moralism and a pledge of soak-the-rich tax policies. The elite conservative fears that the temptation to woo working-class voters will, you know, shade into policies that actually advantage the working class. That fear surfaced recently when Rush Limbaugh—whom Frum himself has singled out as one of the dangerous populists dragging the Republicans down—dismissed those who criticized the AIG bonuses as “peasants with their pitchforks” who must be silenced for the sake of conservative orthodoxy. But it’s harder to persuade the economically less fortunate to respect conservative orthodoxy during a recession. That’s starting to make some conservatives nervous.

Teabag parties are good fun and all as long as they stick to calling Obama Hitler and ranting about capntradetortreformsecretballot nonsense. But if the grassroots start to get really restless, they might just begin to question why they are following millionaire gasbags like O’Reilly, Limbaugh and Goldberg over a cliff in service of Goldman Sachs and Newscorp. Can’t have that. It’s very important that anyone who brings up this topic be relegated immediately to the category of far-left zealot, regardless of their academic standing or respect among conservative intellectuals. If O’Reilly’s avid listeners ever figured out who is actually screwing them, things could really get ugly. And he and his owners know it.

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