BLAME THE TEA PARTY ON THE TRUTHERS!

A letter published in the November 8, 2010 New Yorker. The letter:

While Sean Wilentz provides a deft history of the extremist origins of contemporary conservative opinion, I would argue that the political left shares at least some responsibility for the dumbing down of dissent that we see today in Glenn Beck and the Tea Party (“Confounding Fathers,” October 18th). Wilentz describes how “extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party have exploded anew,” shifting our public discourse, in the words of David Klinghoffer, toward “demagoguery and hucksterism.” During the George W. Bush Presidency, some of Bush’s critics asserted that 9/11 was an inside job plotted by a neoconservative cabal, that the American press was wholly in thrall to corporate and political power, and that the elections of 2000 and 2004 were won by foul means. Such rhetoric then was hardly less corrosive, or less supported by scholarly reasoning, than the crackpot vitriol now spewed by Beck and his ilk. The parallels between these two attitudes—their insistence on governments’ hidden agendas, on a compliant or propagandizing media, and above all on the brave iconoclasm of those who make up the movements themselves—tell us more about a general debasing of protest and logical argument than about any important political divide or intellectual tradition. In each case, the real problems have to do not with the left versus the right but, rather, with serious versus shallow.

George Case
Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

"Brave iconoclasm" indeed. I'm hiding under the bed like the rest of you. (But wait--there's a bedbug! Ack!)

Seriously, if the author of this screed wants "serious versus shallow" he can chat about physics with the other administrator of this site. Clever reframing of the Hegelian Dialectic, though. Gotta love these brainy shills from up north.