The only reason David Frum feels free to speak the truth about a few things is because he has been so thoroughly ostracized from the Republican Party and its wingnut welfare system that he has nothing left to lose. He can’t get on Fox News anymore, so it’s easy for him to denounce it. There’s no chance that any major think tank will ever employ him again, so he can denounce the think tanks. He’s suddenly liberated.
We have a term for what concerns David Frum. We call it “The Stupid.” There is a small cadre of conservatives (e.g., Frum, Kathleen Parker) who are trying to address the collective turn of the right towards something that truly resembles severe retardation. But, honestly, they don’t have a chance.
Frum explains why, even if he still holds out hope:
Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.
But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.
The Stupid is a moneymaker. The Stupid is a market.
And The Stupid makes people behave as if they’ve had a lobotomy. How do you fix something like that?
