What Ailes Democracy in America

Nate Silver, delving into the cross tabs of the NYT/CBS Tea Party poll and noting that 59% of partiers have a positive impression of Glenn Beck (compared with 18% of the population as a whole), draws this conclusion:

Academic studies have found that FOX News in fact has quite a bit of ability to persuade voters and reformulate public opinion. That Beck (whose program debuted one day before Barack Obama's inauguration) has become one of its prominent voices may help to explain why the tea-parties have become so influential, and why public opinion appears to have shifted so dramatically within the past 18 months. FOX may, or may not, have a role in directly promoting the tea-parties. But its opinion programming has become the water-cooler around which the tea-partiers gather.

Perhaps there will always be a Father Coughlin (or a passel of them) to channel the rage of the paranoid and the ignorant, particularly in times of 10% unemployment, but I still find this disturbing.  Fox, like the Palins and Bachmanns it empowers, is a danger to democracy, a relentless amplifier of lies. And while I guess the U.S. had ample capacity to home-grow toxic political media, it still strikes me that Rupert Murdoch has managed to degrade political discourse on three continents (I assume he's done it in Australia as well as the UK and US). 

Owens' win in NY 23: bad for Democrats, good for the country?

After basking a bit in the tea partiers' election-night shock when their insurgent darling Doug Hoffman went down in NY District 23, Frank Rich cautions:

The Democrats’ celebration was also premature: Hoffman’s defeat is potentially more harmful to them than to the Republicans....it increases the odds that the Republicans will not do Democrats the great favor of committing suicide between now and the next Election Day.

Quite so. But what may be bad for Democrats in the short term is good for the country.

The country needs the Republican party to step back from the brink. Other mature democracies have fringe parties that play primarily to voters' fears and fantasies, but those parties exist within multiparty systems. In times of stress their vote may approach or crack 20% of the total, and everyone draws a breath and notes the electorate's anger.

We have only two national parties. If one of them shrinks to attract the affiliation of less than 30% of the electorate and retreats entirely into fringe party thinking and tactics, that's dangerous. The tea partiers' lies and paranoid fantasies; their demonization of a reform effort as incremental, cautious, and indeed historically Republican in its genesis as the pending health care bills; their glorification of the willful ignorance of Palin and Bachmann and their rapt attention to transparent demagogues like Beck and Limbaugh, is all fringe party behavior. Those who equate health insurance mandates or voluntary end of life counseling with fascism are themselves potential fascists -- demonizers of opposition, rabid advocates of torture, paranoid fantasists.

If that fringe entirely captures one of our two parties, the next big shock -- a world market collapse like that predicted by Roubini, a major terrorist attack -- could push such people into power. If, meanwhile, new Republican governors in purple states go to work with even a modicum of pragmatism -as Christie at least will have to do -- that could have a powerful demonstration effect for Republican decision-makers.

David Brooks lambastes Democrats for agreeing with him

Never one for logical rigor, David Brooks ignores himself to a breathtaking degree in today's column.

He begins with an intriguing hypothesis: our latter day Father Coughlins -- Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity & co. -- command plenty of attention but virtually no votes. His evidence is probably selective, but it's an intriguing hypothesis. They are puffed up by enablers. True enough. But...

They are enabled by cynical Democrats, who love to claim that Rush Limbaugh controls the G.O.P.

Just another politically expedient lie, right? Oh, wait --

And the saddest thing is that even Republican politicians come to believe it [that the shock jocks have real power]. They mistake media for reality. They pre-emptively surrender to armies that don’t exist.

They pay more attention to Rush’s imaginary millions than to the real voters down the street. The Republican Party is unpopular because it’s more interested in pleasing Rush’s ghosts than actual people. The party is leaderless right now because nobody has the guts to step outside the rigid parameters enforced by the radio jocks and create a new party identity. The party is losing because it has adopted a radio entertainer’s niche-building strategy, while abandoning the politician’s coalition-building strategy.

The rise of Beck, Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and the rest has correlated almost perfectly with the decline of the G.O.P. But it’s not because the talk jocks have real power. It’s because they have illusory power, because Republicans hear the media mythology and fall for it every time.

To anyone who believes that democracy can't function without viable choices, it was a sad and shocking spectacle to witness a parade of Republican leaders first calling out and then kow-towing to Rush Limbaugh earlier this year. Democrats would rather have an opposition they can work with; as Paul Starr demonstrated recently, their health care bills are comprised almost entirely of Republican ideas past, but there's no one on the other side negotiating in good faith.

But in David Brooks' still partisan mind, Democrats who agree with him that the Republican party is entirely in the grip of media demagogues are "cynical." And what is Brooks? Pure-minded?