Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Imposters

Tunku Varadarajan at The Daily Beast has become one of my “must-reads”. In this brief article on David Frum, he coins the expression “polite-company conservative” (PCC) to describe those self-styled conservatives who are obviously more at home among the inside-the-beltway crowd than among what David Brooks once had the immortal rind to call the “unwashed” (i.e., you and me). Among many fine observations, this is one of my favorites:
I come to my biggest personal beef with David’s piece, his sermonizing about rhetoric. David acknowledges that he has been on a soapbox for a while, arguing that “hysterical” talk radio, etc., has “overheated” the debate and done harm to the conservative health-care cause. Nonsense, I say. Passionate "extremism" is part of any political debate, and the more of it the better.
Amen to that! (H/T: Hot Air)

2 comments:

Robert of Ottawa said...

I've yet to read this work but I, as a Canadian, agree. David Frum is a Politically Correct Conservative (and Canadian). The federal party here used to be called the "Progressive Conservatives" and pretend to be liberals, a la David Cameron in the UK today.

Mr. Frum goes to dinner parties where to utter a Conservative or Libertarian thought is considered as shocking as farting out loud and smelly.

It is the likes of Palin, Limbaugh and the Tea Partiers that are putting spine, life and hope into the Republican party and conservative movement these days; not the RNC and political hacks.

TimT said...

It's a western thing. And probably an Anglo-Saxon-post-Victorian-era thing: people over here complain about 'shock jocks' and 'extremist tabloid media' all the time, associating them with horrid right-wing thoughts. Never mind that if you actually listen to the shock jocks, and read the tabloid media, you'll find that they're often no worse, and frequently better and more thought provoking, than the preferred left-wing media outlets (broadsheets and publicly-funded radio).

I think it relates to the diminishment of media sources in recent decades, and the struggle by lefties and righties to get the political advantage, and to make the other's views seem marginal and distasteful. It's disappointing that some conservatives like to encourage these stereotypes, but what can you do?