Erick Erickson was recently hired to fill the late Rush Limbaugh’s seat on the radio, but he’s keeping up his blog postings as well. This one caught my attention:
The problem here is Conservative, Inc. is largely broken. Too many grifters have invaded the movement and too many conservative organizations are beholden to the Fortune 500. Likewise, too many supposedly principled organizations are now all about one man’s bidding in Florida and a vocal group of conservatives is all about nihilistic destruction of the American way of life convinced the left has already destroyed the country.
I’m not sure unity can be found.
The problem is that unity doesn’t solve brokenness.
Erickson’s almost right, the conservative movement is broken. Its base has been trained by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and many others to believe the liberals, their fellow Americans, are evil: They’re socialists, that abortion is evil, that anyone other than the white Christian nationalist community are lazy slugs, compromise is evil, our enemies can’t possibly be right, God is with us, etc. They’re given incomplete, even false, information and then try to operate on that.
Doubt it?
More than two-thirds of Republicans say the 2020 presidential election was invalid, according to a new survey.
The poll from the R Street Institute, a free markets group, found that 67 percent of Republicans view the past election as invalid, compared to 23 percent who believe it was valid.
About half of all Republicans said they believe their votes were counted, while 42 percent said the system is corrupt and that their vote “probably doesn’t get counted anyway.”
“President Trump’s rhetoric seems to have had a profound impact on his base’s outlook on the election,” said a memo from the Tyson Group, which conducted the survey. “Across all regions, our participants by and large opposed alternative voting methods, believed that those methods opened the election process to fraud, and felt that the 2020 election result was invalid.” [The Hill]
Everyone else knows, as group epistemologists, that Biden won. Not this crew.
Unity might help the conservatives win elections, but it doesn’t fix the movement. The problem with the movement isn’t that Too many grifters have invaded the movement, it’s that the movement is systemically vulnerable to grifting. President Trump is probably the best grifter I’ve ever seen, and the vulnerability to his lying, the lack of rational thinking, and the perversion and moral depravity exhibited by the conservative movement isn’t illustrative of a fractured movement, but of a deathly sick movement.
And that’s what Erickson doesn’t recognize, outside of occasional flashes of insight. He thinks there’s still fundamental and overwhelming goodness, but there’s little evidence of it.
We’ve seen rational conservatives leaving the Republican Party in droves, while the leaders that are left are, quite frankly, less than impressive. Former Speaker and supposed policy wonk Ryan (R-WI)? Not very bright, as he didn’t understand how insurance works. Alleged candidate for the Supreme Court and current Senator Mike Lee (R-UT)? Doesn’t connect a well-regulated democracy to prosperity, having suggested on more than one occasion that democracy isn’t that important. Senate GOP leader McConnell (R-KY)? Hasn’t passed a single impressive piece of legislation. It doesn’t take much skill to rubber-stamp judiciary nominees and refuse to bring Democratic legislation to the floor. Representatives McCarthy, Gaetz, Gohmert, Gosar, Jordan, Greene, Cawthorn?
Not a legitimate leader in the bunch.
The Republicans are turning into a brittle husk of anti-abortion polka dancers, anti-gun control jiggers, and the single-issue voters that worship those positions. That’s the product of the culture that Erickson, Gingrich, the clerics White, Copeland, etc (see Friendly Atheist for acrid tastes of that crowd) have, together, engendered.
I wish Erickson could understand that being forced to go around armed because of danger from members of his own Party is a symptom of a deep rot in their moral positions.
But Erickson is speaking a little truth to his audience, and that is what may get him fired from his job. The longer he tells them they’re broken, the most disconsolate and angry they’ll become.
I’m thinking Erickson may not last long in Limbaugh’s old seat. A lack of advertising dollars will shoot him down.
