Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying
So is the problem of Ann Coulter, according to Lileks:
On the Fourth of July I had a big argument with my oldest & dearest friends about Coulter’s book, and it had to do with Joe McCarthy. They appreciated her Stirring Defense. I regarded that as a losing cause and a waste of time. Yes, the point about CPUSA penetration of various elements of American society is valid and needs more attention to set the historical record straight - so why don’t we concentrate on the message instead of spending our time raising the rusted hulk of the USS McCarthy from the Marinas Trench? Every interview Coulter’s done ends up being about Joe Farking McCarthy, and the subsequent points about the actual extent of Communist activity in America in the late 40s and early 50s gets lost, because the host or hostess cannot BELIEVE she is defending him. All heat, no light. All legs, no walking.He's got a damn good point here. Lemme give you an example of what he's talking about.
In Coulter's Independence Day op-ed, she opens with the line that Joe McCarthy was one of the five greatest defenders of freedom in the 20th century. Now, let's stipulate that this is true for a second. Even if it is, she's got a big problem in trying to convince anyone of the fact -- not merely because McCarthy has been stigmatized or demonized -- but because they don't accept the initial premise. That premise being that there was an active effort by many to instill Communist ideology across our country, and that those efforts were a serious threat to our freedom and our way of life. If your audience isn't convinced of that, then obviously: they're going to write McCarthy off as an obsessive, windmill-fighting nutball.
If you're going to bring up McCarthy, you'd better be prepared to discuss the fundamental ideological differences between the Communist Manifesto and the Constitution of the United States. You have to understand that the ideas of latter cannot be upheld if they are trumped by those of the former. You have to know that the Communist Manifesto advocates exactly the opposite of everything this country was founded upon -- that every man, woman, and child is not his own person, but a serf to the government where the highest virtue is serving the state. Antithesis to the ideals of a country that was founded on the primacy of individual liberty.
There is no doubt that the Soviets tried to undermine us from within -- just as we eventually succeeded in doing the same to them. We fought with the tools of capitalism and choice; they fought by influencing people that greater state control was a good idea. (And no, it doesn't matter that their motives are benevolent; they almost always are benevolent -- it doesn't change the fact that the consequences of these ideas end in disaster for all involved.) Those who write McCarthy off, wholesale, either fail to identify that the Cold War was primarily an ideological one or seriously underestimates just how high the stakes of that war really were.
But anyway, back to Coulter. She starts from defending McCarthy, yet fails to realize that probably 90% of the public doesn't get just what the big deal was. So to put it ungracefully, the woman is out of touch. Or if she isn't, she certainly doesn't care about winning over those who currently disagree with her. In which case, I have to ask why she bothers with the articles and the books and the radio show if she isn't going to make a greater effort to use those powerful tools to influence those in the current ideological battles going on today.
Posted by Matt at July 11, 2003 1:08 PM
