In Michael Lind’s view, liberals and progressives spend too much time mocking the likes of Glenn Beck. Last Tuesday, he explained this view in his weekly piece at Salon.
We think he made some very good points. Then too, we think he sometimes made those points rather poorly.
Who is mocking the Beck types too much? At the start of his piece, Lind named two names. We think he got one name wrong:
There’s no question about it! Nightly mockery of Palin/Beck/Bachmann is a key part of the MSBNC play book. (Limbaugh/Sean/BillO are regulars too.) That said, it seems to us that Rachel Maddow pushes this button less often than the channel’s other major hosts. Chris Matthews does love playing such cards, in the most simple-minded way possible; where once he mocked and trashed Hillary Clinton, he now delights in mocking and trashing those two conservative women. And O’Reilly-bashing was a foundation of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown program. Now that Lawrence O’Donnell has inherited Olbermann’s 8 PM slot, he too makes this sort of thing a nightly treat for viewers. And Big Ed Schultz relentlessly pounds these reliable bozos too.
If you watch an evening of liberal cable, you’ll surely see these familiar types getting mocked and pounded. Is something “wrong” with this sort of segment? Not necessarily, no. But Lind lists four major drawbacks to the drumbeat of Beck/Palin/Bachmann-bashing. We think one or two of his points are weak—but several of his points are quite strong.
Does the constant bashing of Beck/Palin/Bachmann “make other far-right Republican conservatives [like Paul Ryan] look moderate?” Possibly, though that doesn’t seem like the major problem to us. Does it “make liberals look like snobs?” Given the way these segments tend to get done, you can bet your sweet bippy it does! (More below.) Is the nightly bashing of Palin “a reactive strategy that gives the initiative to the right?” Not necessarily, but we think Lind’s presentation of this claim is worth reading:
We agree with Lind; Palin-bashing “is no substitute for a liberalism that tells its own story, on its own timeline.” As he continues, he makes his fourth complaint about these attacks. Some of his references are somewhat obscure; some of his claims are hard to establish. But we think this passage moves us toward the target:
Is Palin-bashing done in bad faith? You can bet your bippy again! Olbermann constantly embellished the things he claimed that BillO had said—though he never mentioned BillO’s attacks on “Tiller the baby killer” until after Tiller was murdered. And O’Donnell’s attacks on the Beck/Palin crowd have often been a study in silly, rube-running bad faith. Last week, he used the ugly attack on Lara Logan as the latest excuse to gin up a pleasing complaint against BillO (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/17/11). Just last night, he played his viewers for semi-fools when he started his bashing of Beck:
The progressive world badly needs explanations; if those narratives ever emerge, they will involve the endless dissembling driven by major figures like Limbaugh. We have often urged progressives to look for ways to tell average voters that they’re being deceived by trusted figures like Rush; that can’t be achieved by the silly vamping presented on cable each night. Anyone with an ounce of sense can see that cable’s nightly bashing is really an entertainment function. And make no mistake: When simpering figures like Gail Collins devote so much time to bashing Bristol Palin, the world will see that conduct for what it is—for the simpering snobbery of an upper-class pseudo-liberal world.
Please give us narratives, Lind was saying. Give us frameworks of understanding! This is how he ended his piece, which made good sense overall:
The snickering won’t get us real far. As the phenomenologists might exclaim: On to the things in themselves!
We think he made some very good points. Then too, we think he sometimes made those points rather poorly.
Who is mocking the Beck types too much? At the start of his piece, Lind named two names. We think he got one name wrong:
LIND (2/15/11): What dumb thing did Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann or Glenn Beck just say? You don’t need to watch Fox News to find out. The progressive media will tell you. The economy is still in a coma, revolution is rocking the Middle East—but you can be sure that Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews will take time to snicker at something silly that Palin or Bachmann or Beck said in the last 48 hours.In the rest of his piece, Lind explains why he thinks this constant mockery isn’t the best use of center-left time. We think his views are well worth noting. But let’s start with the names he called out.
Is the constant mockery of these bloviating right-wing demagogues really the best use of precious center-left media time? I think it’s likely to backfire on liberals, for several reasons.
There’s no question about it! Nightly mockery of Palin/Beck/Bachmann is a key part of the MSBNC play book. (Limbaugh/Sean/BillO are regulars too.) That said, it seems to us that Rachel Maddow pushes this button less often than the channel’s other major hosts. Chris Matthews does love playing such cards, in the most simple-minded way possible; where once he mocked and trashed Hillary Clinton, he now delights in mocking and trashing those two conservative women. And O’Reilly-bashing was a foundation of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown program. Now that Lawrence O’Donnell has inherited Olbermann’s 8 PM slot, he too makes this sort of thing a nightly treat for viewers. And Big Ed Schultz relentlessly pounds these reliable bozos too.
If you watch an evening of liberal cable, you’ll surely see these familiar types getting mocked and pounded. Is something “wrong” with this sort of segment? Not necessarily, no. But Lind lists four major drawbacks to the drumbeat of Beck/Palin/Bachmann-bashing. We think one or two of his points are weak—but several of his points are quite strong.
Does the constant bashing of Beck/Palin/Bachmann “make other far-right Republican conservatives [like Paul Ryan] look moderate?” Possibly, though that doesn’t seem like the major problem to us. Does it “make liberals look like snobs?” Given the way these segments tend to get done, you can bet your sweet bippy it does! (More below.) Is the nightly bashing of Palin “a reactive strategy that gives the initiative to the right?” Not necessarily, but we think Lind’s presentation of this claim is worth reading:
LIND: It’s a reactive strategy that gives the initiative to the right. When progressive opinion leaders wait for conservatives to say something stupid and then pounce on it, they cede the choice of topics in national debate to their enemies. No doubt this drives ratings, attracting hyper-partisan Democrats whose greatest pleasure in life is the rather low one of picking apart the statements of Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck: "Nyah, nyah, Glenn Beck is wrong again!" But it’s no substitute for a liberalism that tells its own story, on its own timeline, and lets the right react.Does MSNBC’s nightly Palin-bashing provide a certain kind of viewer with his or her “greatest pleasure in life?” Presumably, this helps explain why this is such an integral part of the channel’s game plan. But at the end of that passage, Lind begins to make the strongest part of his argument.
We agree with Lind; Palin-bashing “is no substitute for a liberalism that tells its own story, on its own timeline.” As he continues, he makes his fourth complaint about these attacks. Some of his references are somewhat obscure; some of his claims are hard to establish. But we think this passage moves us toward the target:
LIND: It’s a waste of effort and attention. We are mired down in two wars in the Muslim world and suffering from the greatest global economic crisis since the Great Depression. The last time things were this bad, in the 1930s, American liberals and leftists were debating the nature of capitalism and government and world politics and putting forth their own, often contradictory plans. Liberal politicians and journalists devoted little, if any, time to dissecting the errors of right-wing crackpots of the period, like the radio priest Father Coughlin.
Of Ezra Pound, the American poet who became an apologist for Mussolini and Hitler by way of monetary theory (which has a way of driving people mad), Gertrude Stein observed: "He was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not." The populist right has cornered the market for village explainers in the American media in part because liberals have abandoned it. The relatively poor ratings of liberal media pundits reflect their decision to follow a strategy of narrowcasting aimed at the minority of Americans who have graduated from four-year colleges and the even smaller minority with graduate and professional degrees.Have liberal pundits—has MSNBC—decided to narrowcast to college grads? We have no idea. But Lind is certainly right on one point—the populist right has done a lot of “explaining” in the past forty years, while the left has been hapless and silent. In almost every area of American life, the public discourse is substantially driven by the ludicrous claims and misleading narratives which have been aggressively pushed by the think-tanks of the right. Plainly, the left does need its own “village explainers”—the left needs narratives and understandings that will help average people make better sense of the political wars around them. With our side so much in need of such tools, it can be disheartening to watch the cable warriors burn so much time on the latest silly statement—especially when so much of this work is done in such blatant bad faith.
Is Palin-bashing done in bad faith? You can bet your bippy again! Olbermann constantly embellished the things he claimed that BillO had said—though he never mentioned BillO’s attacks on “Tiller the baby killer” until after Tiller was murdered. And O’Donnell’s attacks on the Beck/Palin crowd have often been a study in silly, rube-running bad faith. Last week, he used the ugly attack on Lara Logan as the latest excuse to gin up a pleasing complaint against BillO (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/17/11). Just last night, he played his viewers for semi-fools when he started his bashing of Beck:
O’DONNELL (2/24/11): Time for tonight’s “rewrite.” Glenn Beck occupied this space last night for something that he said that was idiotic and untrue. Today, he has bent to the pressure of my criticism and apologized. Here he is on his radio show today.
BECK (videotape): With that being said, I think it was on Tuesday that I was making a point about political activists and I started to talk about the difference in rabbis. Somebody has called me ignorant for what I—what I said on Tuesday. And I think that’s a pretty good description of my—what I said.In just a few short months on the air, O’Donnell has become a master of feigned outrage—and a master of slick self-promotion. In fact, there is no sign that Beck had “bent to the pressure of [O’Donnell’s] criticism;” as O’Donnell later semi-noted, it was really ADL chief Abraham Foxman whose criticism Beck had addressed. But of one thing you can be sure: If you watch O’Donnell’s show each night, you’ll get a nightly dose (or three) of Palin/Bachman/Beck/Sean-bashing—often about some trivial matter. You will rarely see any real attempt at any real “village explaining.”
The progressive world badly needs explanations; if those narratives ever emerge, they will involve the endless dissembling driven by major figures like Limbaugh. We have often urged progressives to look for ways to tell average voters that they’re being deceived by trusted figures like Rush; that can’t be achieved by the silly vamping presented on cable each night. Anyone with an ounce of sense can see that cable’s nightly bashing is really an entertainment function. And make no mistake: When simpering figures like Gail Collins devote so much time to bashing Bristol Palin, the world will see that conduct for what it is—for the simpering snobbery of an upper-class pseudo-liberal world.
Please give us narratives, Lind was saying. Give us frameworks of understanding! This is how he ended his piece, which made good sense overall:
LIND: The center-left needs its own village explainers, with their own charts and their own blackboards. In the plain language used by FDR for his Fireside Chats, they could show how liberalism is rooted in American values and history, instead of being an alien transplant from socialist Europe. They could sketch the relations between today’s radical right, with its loony theories about a Muslim-leftist world revolution, and the similar conspiracy theories of the Liberty Lobby in the 1930s and the John Birch Society in the 1950s. They could put up diagrams on the screen to explain elementary Keynesian concepts and show the need for public spending, or exports, or both to make up for depressed private consumption in a near-depression like the present. They could...
Oh, never mind. It’s easier to run a clip of Palin, Bachmann or Beck, and then roll your eyes and ask a fellow pundit to join you in snickering at those idiots.We might not make Lind our program director, but he makes very good overall sense. What narratives might connect across tribal lines? Isn’t it time we all asked?
The snickering won’t get us real far. As the phenomenologists might exclaim: On to the things in themselves!
