Engaging in discussions with the far right fringe? Impossible.

But they cannot be totally ignored!

If I have, finally, learned anything by writing political blogs it is that it is impossible to engage in rational discussions with those on the rabid right fringe. Fortunately, all the evidence seems to point to the impotency of their rants. Glenn and Rush and the stalwarts at Fox News spew irrational and inconsistent garbage, but garner only a miniscule proportion of voters and have no real influence in elections.
David Brooks, in a brilliant essay in the New York Times, pointed out how the far right talk radio spokesmen have utterly failed to convince voters as a whole to cast votes as directed.

Over the years, I have asked many politicians what happens when Limbaugh and his colleagues attack. The story is always the same. Hundreds of calls come in. The receptionists are miserable. But the numbers back home do not move. There is no effect on the favorability rating or the re-election prospects. In the media world, he is a giant. In the real world, he’s not.

Glenn Beck responded in due course, arguing in a sarcastic fashion, that if he (and Rush or the others) tell followers to kill someone, it will be done. In other words, Glenn actually agreed with David Brooks! The radio talk jocks have no real ability to garner votes.

However, the lunatic fringe has a long history in this country and it is important because of the way it distracts otherwise intelligent people from real discussion of the issues.

Let me tell you a little about a guy on the Right. A few months ago, a conservative activist in St. Louis named Kenneth Gladney seems to have become something of a cause célèbre in far-right circles. Depending on which version of events you choose to believe, Gladney either initiated or was involved in a scuffle at a town-hall event in July. Again, depending on which news report one reads, he sustained some injuries. In any event, Mr. Gladney reportedly claimed that he had no health insurance to pay for his injuries because he had been laid off from his job (irony– he was protesting a government sponsored plan that would prevent such a loss), was collecting money from whomever would contribute to a fund to pay the bills and had received over $1,000, was, in fact, covered under his wife’s insurance policy through her employer.

It is like shooting the proverbial fish in a barrel to poke fun at the Rabid Right. Its peculiar blend of paranoia, mania and sheer fantasy has been given full rein over the past year. Those who still demand to see President Obama’s real birth certificate (which does exist and which is readily available, seal, folds and all, on the Internet) spent the next while obsessing about “death panels” (which do not). It makes no difference if their claims and allegations are false and are easily proven so. It doesn’t matter that their positions are inconsistent. None of this even slows them down! At one point one of the more prolific bloggers wrote that if scientist Stephen Hawking were British and subject to the National Health Service, he would be dead, even though Hawking is British, is alive and gives credit to the NHS for his care.

So we liberal/progressives could be forgiven for branding the right as stupid and crazy; we would be short-sighted and wrong! For if this is madness, It is well organized and well funded. It has proven effective in creating “controversy” where none exists and disrupting whatever national conversation there is. If it is stupid, then what does it say about us, since time and again it manages to outmaneuver the left? Annoying, bizarre, incoherent, divisive, intolerant, small-minded, misinformed, yes, but not crazy or stupid It takes considerable skill to convince people that something that is clearly good for them–like universal healthcare–is not. Reducing a political strategy or belief to an object of a sickness and to ridicule its proponents may be comforting. It has to be taken seriously – even if it makes no rational sense.

There are a few important things to understand about people like Gladney and Sarah Palin and the folks who follow their nonsense.

First, they are not new.

The cold war in general and McCarthyism in particular was built on outright lies but mostly misinformation and guilt by the scantiest of associations. After Eisenhower defeated Taft at the 1952 GOP convention, the cry was, “This means eight more years of socialism.” In the late 1940s, a chairman of a federal loyalty review board conceded,

“Of course, the fact that a person believes in racial equality doesn’t prove that he’s a communist. But it certainly makes you look twice, doesn’t it? You can’t get away from the fact that racial equality is part of the communist line.”

Today the Internet distributes these crudities faster, and cable TV provides many more outlets. But there have always been a number of people who want or need to dream up their own kind of reality out of imagination. These are the people who believe that civil rights was really about miscegenation, abortion rights is about promiscuity and gay rights is about pedophilia. There are more of them than we’d like to think.

Second, you can’t argue with them.

On this and other sites, I have tried to do so. I couldn’t even begin, with one exception, to change minds. The exception was one soul who acknowledged that Barack Obama was born in the United States. Thank you, Don!

According to the Pew Research staff, three weeks after Hurricane Katrina left bodies floating in the streets and people abandoned on roofs, 35% of the country believed that George W. Bush had done a good or excellent job responding to the crisis. That is roughly the proportion of the country with which there is no real means of engagement. These are the Birthers, Swiftboaters, climate change skeptics, my favorite of whom cleverly blames Al Gore for uttering “Glo-Bull”, the haters of Barack Obama and the admirers of Sarah Palin, that is, “the base”. They live in a isolated world where each of their friends believes the same as they do. They don’t like established facts, so they come armed with their own. We on the left have such people too (i.e., the Gay rights movement), but they are marginal; their views rarely reach the mainstream. I recently wrote about a visit to New Jersey relatives (my wife’s family actually) in which I discussed specifics.

Third, we can beat them, but…

These people, the fringe Base of the conservative movement, gain the kind of power that shifts them from an irritant to an obstacle only when there is a vacuum of leadership and the absence of good alternatives. It is only then that they are able to cast “unreasonable doubt in the reasonable minds” of those who seek clarification, encouragement or a stake in any substantive change. This is precisely what has happened, for one example, with the healthcare debate over the past few months.
The Democrats generally, and President Obama in particular, have failed to explain and educate the substantial majority who acknowledge that the present system of health care is unsatisfactory but who do not have the facts and figures to satisfy doubts created by the Base. Moreover, the Democrats and President have committed a more serious political sin. They have failed to exercise the electoral power that the American people gave them. Americans voted for change, cooperation with other nations, a 180° changed from the unilateral pseudo-macho pose of Bush-Cheney

If progressives do not take that award seriously, then, perhaps, we deserve to lose.

Tags: Birthers, Dick Cheney, far right, GOP policies, healthcare, liberals, obama, Rush Limbaugh, talk radio, Truthers, “Healthcare Reform in the United States."