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People bear responsibility for the media they consume. Voters ultimately own the politicians they elevate. But if you’re wondering to which “thought leaders” his rise can be attributed, best to ask, “Whose approach to politics produces, as its logical conclusion, a candidacy like Gingrich 2012?” Surveying the centrality of attacks on the mainstream media, the casting of President Obama as a radical other, and the trick where you shrewdly repeat a racially provocative line, get accused of racism, and cast yourself as an aggrieved victim for political advantage, Gingrich ‘12 is modeled after the successful tactics of movement conservatism’s demagogues. Is there any candidate in memory whose persona so closely resembles an egomaniacal talk-radio host? The rank-and-file in South Carolina accept a would-be president behaving that way because they’re used to their “thought leaders” talking like that. They aren’t in on the reality that a lot of what they hear on talk radio resembles performance art; they don’t presume that the rhetoric and arguments employed daily on Fox News are often contrived or disingenuous. What a political movement gets when it spends years marshaling more demagoguery than sound arguments against its opponents, what it gets when its intellectuals are deposed by its entertainers, what it gets when Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh are its agenda-setting personalities; what it gets when all these factors and more prevail, is a Newt Gingrich victory in South Carolina, where the voters, having been trained to elevate emotion and style over substance, didn’t even realize that they’ve chosen as their champion a man who is neither conservative nor capable of leading anyone.
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Conor Friedersdorf (via azspot)
and the same could be said of Al Franken, George Stephanopoulos, Carville and the majority of the mainstream media.
Only difference is that globally ”liberalism” has the upper hand.
(via azspot)
