Michael Livingston's Blog

Purple in Pennsylvania

Race, violence, Smerconish

My Smerconish-Specter-Santorum post seems to have hit a nerve: I didn’t think any of the three could do anything to make me return to the subject so quickly. As Ronald Reagan would say, I thought wrong.

The other day I tuned in to Smerconish while waiting for my son’s bus to arrive, and he was on the subject of Obama and racism. Actually, that’s wrong—having exhausted the racism subject, he was now on to the supposed physical threat to the Republic posed by right-wing extremists. It seems that that there is an article in Vanity Fair comparing the current political atmosphere to that in Dallas in 1963, and you know what happened there.

I don’t want to get any further into this kind of speculation, which I think is unseemly as best. But let me say the following:

First, I think the repeated and systematic accusation of racism against Obama’s opponents, on health care and other issues, is the single most corrosive thing that I have seen in 40 years of following American politics. It is corrosive in the literal sense, in that—in addition to being almost entirely false—it precludes the ability to conduct serious debate on any issue once made. It is, if anything, even worse than racism itself, because racism can be recognized and isolated, while false accusations destroy discourse from the inside.

Second, the suggestion that people who oppose Obama are somehow legitimizing violence against him or other targets goes beyond irresponsibility to being positively dangerous. It is, of course, absurs—there is virtually no violence associated with the “tea party” movement, and whatever vitriol there has been comes at least as much from the left as the right. Talk like this does nothing to reduce tensions, but serves only to increase polarization in an ever more desperate, and largely unsuccessful, effort to demonize legitimate opposition to the administration’s policies.

Lastly, the program convinced me, if I needed more convincing, that there is absolutely nothing Michael Smerconish won’t do to pump his ratings.

People seem to like Smerconish because he is a “thinking man’s conservative” as compared to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and so on. This would be more convincing if he ever actually thought about anything before saying it. Apparently shocking people for its own sake it a better way to get listeners.