Old Hickory's Weblog

"Satan's Chambermaid Emerges Again", wrote Steve Soto of The Left Coaster, announcing his post on the now-notorious appearance of Mad Annie "Ilsa" Coulter on the Today show on 06/06/06.  Think Progress has excerpts from Mad Annie's interview with Matt Lauer (Coulter on 9/11 Widows: ‘I Have Never Seen People Enjoying their Husbands’ Death So Much’ ).  I was particularly struck by the parts I've bolded here:

LAUER: So if you lose a husband, you no longer have the right to have a political point of view?

COULTER: No, but don’t use the fact that you lost a husband as the basis for being able to talk about, while preventing people from responding. Let Matt Lauer make the point. Let Bill Clinton make the point. Don’t put up someone I am not allowed to respond to without questioning the authenticity of their grief.

LAUER: Well apparently you are allowed to respond to them.

COULTER: Yeah, I did.

LAUER: So, in other words.

COULTER: That is the point of liberal infallibility. Of putting up Cindy Sheehan, of putting out these widows, of putting out Joe Wilson. No, no, no. You can’t respond. It’s their doctrine of infallibility. Have someone else make the argument then.

LAUER: What I’m saying is I don’t think they have ever told you, you can’t respond.

COULTER: Look, you are getting testy with me.

LAUER: No. I think it’s a dramatic statement. “These broads are millionaires stalked by stalked by grief-parazzies”? “I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s deaths so much”?

COULTER: Yes, they are all over the news.

This is actually a very common conservative schtick, repeated over and over and over again, that The Liberals are tryingto suppress conservatives from expressing themselves.  This may seem a strange kind of charge when we have conservatives expressing themselves, often in the most outrageous ways, from Republican hate radio to cable TV news (expecially FOX) and all over the mainstream media.

It also may seem odd coming from a woman like Mad Annie who wrote a book accusing The Liberals of being traitors to America and who suggested poisoning a Supreme Court Justice of whom she disapproves.

David Neiwert, who has been a keen observer of the ways in which hardcore white-supremacist and other radical-right notions get mainstreamed into the Republican Party through willing transmitters like Mad Annie, linked to this little piece of her recent history, specifically a lecture at Loyola Univeristy in Chicago:

I went to my seat and prepared myself mentally to take in Ms. Coulter objectively. The Loyola Anti-War Network protested her appearance by forming a chain in the back of the auditorium and facing the other way. As soon as Ms. Coulter came out she said, "Since you are feminists, standing makes your butts look really big." I was a little upset by this comment, but I held my cool. I was stupid and had the college republicans seat me up close so I could get good pictures. Needless to say I was sitting next to some Coulter-lovers who were practically foaming at the mouth in ecstacy with all of Coulter's comments. All of the protestors were taken out by security. This elevated the level of joy in the Coulter-supporters sitting around me. ...

The protesting from the balcony only increased with time with shouts of "ANN IS A RACIST" to even an immature, yet mildly amusing, call for "Show us your tits."

Ann addressed her supporters in the crowd with this statement. "You're men. You're heterosexuals. Take 'em out." She chided them further when they did not rise. Before you knew it there was about 25 students marching to the balcony to supposedly "take out" the protestors above. I saw a priest holding students back and deans and security warning the students to go back to their seats. Chaos erupted. Ann left after taking one question.  (my emphasis)

Given our current environment, where someone like Mad Annie can pull stuff like this and go on the Today show with its nationwide audience and whine that The Liberals are " preventing people from responding" to criticism of her Dear Leader Bush, it makes me think again about what tolerance actually means in a society like ours.

Michelle Goldberg's recent work on the Christian Right also brings up another important aspect of tolerance, which is its role in providing a way to come up with useful public policies based on a realistic appreciation of the facts.  She explained at the TPM Cafe Book Club in her post of 05/22/06, What is Christian nationalism?, what was the main question she sat out to explore in writing Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006).  In that post she writes:

I began the book that would become "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism," shortly before the 2004 election. It was born out of my sense that large swaths of right-wing America were living in what seemed like an all-encompassing alternate reality, and that that reality was slowly, subtlety but inexorably crowding out truth and empirical fact in our national life. As a reporter for Salon, I'd written about the way religious fundamentalists who reject the very notion of secular science were given authority over things like international population policy and domestic sex education. I'd looked into the prevalent end-times beliefs that undergird Christian Zionism and lead some American evangelicals to support the most irredentist Israeli settlers. At conservative conferences where Republican leaders gathered, I would hear the most paranoid John Birch-style conspiracy theories passed off as conventional wisdom. Increasingly, the central cultural divide in America seemed not just political or religious but epistemological.

This kind of psychological climate - at once utterly credulous and sullenly cynical - gives totalitarian movements space to grow. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, "Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it."

She also talks about the irony that, after years of conservative polemics against postmodernism and related concept.  Such criticism has come from no less an authority than Lynne Cheney, wife of Dark Lord Cheney himself, in a 1996 book called Telling the Truth (no, this is not the fiction one with the lesbian scenes in it).  Goldberg writes:

There's a tremendous irony in the way conservatives have adopted their position on evolution. After all, the right has been complaining about relativism - the idea that there is no absolute truth - for years. Now, challenging the conclusions of science in the name of cultural tolerance, conservatives have created their own version of radical deconstructionism. Aping the Frenchacademicians they once excoriated, they're undermining the very idea of empirical reality, dismissing inconvenient facts as the product of an oppressive ideology. ...

Cheney's book abounds in examples of the havoc postmodern ideas have wrought in American life. At the outset, she wrote of how the "author of a textbook for future teachers urges skepticism for the idea that the people now known as American Indians came to this hemisphere across the Bering land bridge. Indian myths do not tell this story, she writes.  Moreover, she observes, the scientific account has nothing 'except logic' to recommend it."

It would be hard to make up a better analogy to the intelligent design [creationist] movement. Like the guilt-ridden lefties they revile, conservatives are demanding official skepticism for an idea accepted among the vast majority of scientists because it conflicts with religious myth, and attacking those who would uphold traditional standards as anti-Christian bigots.  This pattern doesn't just apply to evolution - it marks the Christian nationalists' entire relationship to reality.  The right has a host of pet pseudoscientific theories that buttress its biblical worldview. They include reparative therapy to "cure" homosexuality; a mythical link between abortion and breast cancer; "post-abortion syndrome," a psychiatric disorder that exists almost exclusively in pro-life lore; and the efficacy of abstinence-only education, an entire cottage industry of scientific distortion.  (my emphasis)

"Guilt-ridden lefties", by the way, is another favorite if generally kooky notion of the radical right.

Goldberg notes that the Christian Right has achieved a convergence of epistolomogical interests with industrial scamsters and lobbyists who throw up smokescreens protesting "junk science" whenever they want to avoid some inconvenient regulation.  She even catches a couple of creationists in a 1999 book (Three Views on Creation and Evolution by John Mark Reynolds and J.P. Moreland) actually embracing postmodernism overtly, writing, "In a postmodern world, we see no reason for traditional  Christians to give up on an idea that intrigues them".

With industry advocacy think-tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Christian Right pseudo-science groups like the Center for Science and Culture and the National Association for Research and Therapy, the rightwing has created a whole infrastructure to manufacture artifical pseudo-scientific claims that actually challenge science itself.

And, of course, what we generously call our "press corps" cooperates:

Cowed by charges of liberal bias, the mainstream media turns to these outfits for balance - and thus creates the perception that there's scientific controversy over issues like global warming or evolution, when in fact there's remarkable consensus.

The present role of the Christian Right has raised questions of what counts as tolerance, what is the function of tolerance and what are its appropriate limits in public debate and public policy.

These questions are inseparable from the question of how our society sorts out the true from the false when it comes to information to shape policies.

And those are the sorts of questions addressed in a 1965 book that periodically comes to my mind, A Critique of Pure Tolerance.  It's mainly known because of the third of the three essays in it, "Repressive Tolerance" by Herbert Marcuse, the "neo-Marxist" philosopher from the Frankfurt School of "critical theory".  But the two preceding essays also help a great deal in putting the most famous of the three into perspective.

I'm going to post separately about each of the three essays that comprise that book to see what light they can throw on our current situation.

Other posts in the series: