Revisionism Never Sleeps

It can't.

Because relentless revisionism -- being the Right's main ideological bilge pump -- cannot be shut down for an instant.

Because the minute it stops is the minute they sink.

And this applies to virtually everyone on the Right, from outright, barking loons like Sarah Palin or Rick Santorum to media-respectable apostates like Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks: the minute they stop obsessively working their revisionism rosaries is the minute the reeking septic tank of actual, factual history backs right up into their lives and sweeps their careers away.

The Big Conservative Ctrl+Alt+Del this time is, once again, the fantasy that the devolution of the Conservative Movement into a cult of bigots, witch doctor, oligarchs and snake oil vendors is a phenomenon of extremely recent vintage.

That is just sort of popped out of nowhere like a Berserker Jack-in-the-Box.

This is, of course, a whopping great lie about which I have written many times, such as here in "Strategic Forgettery" and here in "A Diet of Worms".

This particular whopping great lie is the creaking iron hinge on which turns disgruntled former wingnut employee David Frum's latest, self-absolving "tua culpa" broadside against the people who, until very recently paid his salary (highlights and tints added by me for that fresh-from-the-beach look):

...
Some liberals suspect that the conservative changes of mind since 2008 are opportunistic and cynical. It’s true that cynicism is never entirely absent from politics: I won’t soon forget the lupine smile that played about the lips of the leader of one prominent conservative institution as he told me, “Our donors truly think the apocalypse has arrived.” Yet conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose.
...

And it has been Andrew Sullivan's constant, constant, constant refrain since forever ...

The silver lining is surely that a Gingrich candidacy would put out there in clear and uncompromising terms the reality of today's Jacobin GOP. If a Gingrich candidacy were to give us an Obama landslide re-election, it would underline the death-throes of a "conservatism" reeling since the collapse of the Rove project under Bush and Cheney. It would kill off conservatism as it has been and allow for some kind of reformist brand to put down roots.

(Sure. Just like the silver lining of Katrina was going to be a radical transformation in American views of poverty, race, social justice and malignant neglect.)

It's a little like watching an huge, ugly meth lab going up in the middle of town. Everyone who bothers to stop and look can very clearly see what they are doing. Can watch the excavation. Can watch the frame going up and the wiring going in. Can watch the bullshit being stacked floor by floor.

And, finally, you can watch the tenants who were kicked out of the wingnut meth lab down the block queuing up to get in so they can set up shop and start selling their own brand of Conservative Meth-Lite.

Still, you cant spell "Revisionism" without "vision", and however ineptly designed and sloppily constructed the finished product may be

this setting up of cheap Conservative halfway houses for the excommunicated and the apostate is becoming a very lucrative business, and as Conservatism's death spiral picks up speed, more and more of its lackeys and lickspittles (and their Centrist enablers) who get flicked off of the crazy train by the sheer centrifugal force of its insanity are going to be looking for their next flop.

Preferably in a nice neighborhood where you already know everybody so no one will be asking too many nosy questions about how far up your ass your head had to be to remain a Conservatives for the last 40 years.

So contact Mr. Ken Very Big Liar to reserve your unit today!


They're going like hotcakes and all you have to do to reserve yours is flash the Secret Handshake and agree that everything bad about Conservatism happened as a result of aberrant behavior on the part of Karl Rove during the latter half of the Age of Bush.

Thus collectively coffer-dammed by the mutual nonaggression pact of Revisionism, the exiles and apostates are freed from any need to explain away their otherwise staggering intellectual dishonesty and pulverizing hypocrisy. Free to purloin as much longstanding Liberal critique of the Modern Conservative Movement as they can carry without ever acknowledging that the stinky Hippies were right all along, and that they have been dead wrong about virtually everything all along:

I fear it's just a sign of pathological partisanship and pseudoconservative paranoia about the media - or an opportunity for Limbaugh, Coulter et al. to refresh their media brands. But, hideously, it has gone further than that. The very public attempt by the Cain camp to slime and smear these women, to drag them through a grueling process of public examination and to tell potential other victims that they should "think twice" before coming forward is so neanderthal and vile it belongs to another era.

But this is a fascinating moment. Because it is where denial meets reality, a very dangerous spot for the current GOP. I once believed that the cult of Palin could bring this conflict to a head - her cult vs the reality of her bizarre, disturbed life. But it turns out that Cain could be that catalyst. ...

The current GOP is a circus tent.

...

Free to fearlessly lob as many Molotovs as they can throw over their shiny, new Revisionist Firewall without any fear of the kind of concerted, multimedia, "Hang the Traitors" blowback that has always been visited on Liberals who have been saying exactly the same things for decades:

Republican Intellectual Rigor Mortis

"When the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote Two Cheers for Capitalism, he intentionally held back from giving it a resounding three cheers. He knew there were downsides, and that conservatives had to be honest about these in order to address them adequately. But the conservative message about capitalism today glosses over these facts, proposes no principles of justice, and fails to engage—let alone persuade—our fellow citizens who worry about our economic order. Conservatives writing in defense of democratic capitalism need to spend less energy fighting off communism, and more energy developing a conservative vision of social justice, painting a picture of what a better capitalism could look like. If conservatives don’t, the only alternatives will be coming from the Left. And that would be an injustice," - Ryan T. Anderson, The Witherspoon Institute, in a highly critical review of Pete Wehner's and Arthur Brooks' Democratic Capitalism.

Reading the original, I am struck again in particular by Arthur Brooks' insulation from the actual dilemmas we are now facing: the question of whether one sector, the financial one, has become essentially part of a rentier class with a recklessness problem; the reality of such accelerating economic inequality that the political system itself, rested on a strong middle class and representative (not bought and paid-for) democracy, is at risk; the impact of globalization on the Western countries, and how it too has both relatively impoverished the working classes while heaping massive rewards on the few. I'm not saying the left has the answer on these questions. I am saying these questions are what we need to be grappling with. And the conservative movement has close to nothing to say on them.

In many ways, I regard this contemptible circus of a GOP primary campaign as a reflection of this deeper intellectual collapse. When you are reduced to writing entire books on why capitalism is better than communism - in 2011, for Pete's sake - and believe you are somehow contributing to a debate, rather than reinforcing an irrelevant orthodoxy, you are so deeply part of the problem, you have no way to fix it. Same, I believe, with a GOP front-runner dedicated to increasing "defense" spending regardless of the external threats.

Someone needs to tell these people that it is no longer 1983.

Free to say the wild, stupid things like this:

The lesson here is that today's GOP thinks that resurrecting George Wallace is the key to winning in 2012.

-- without being forced to acknowledge that "today's GOP" thinks that "resurrecting George Wallace is the key to winning in 2012" because resurrecting George Wallace has been the very successful key to GOP electoral victory for the last 40 years or so.

Free to muffle the loud, rattly skeletons of one's embarrassing flirtations with racist pseudoscience under the soft cotton batting of Tina Brown's money (via Gawker with a h/t to Ballon Juice commenter Arundel)

A Reader’s Guide to Andrew Sullivan’s Defense of Race Science

...
A million years ago, when the internet was just a gleam in Tina Brown's eye, Andrew Sullivan edited The New Republic, which was a Serious Magazine that had no time for your Liberal P.C. Dogma, such as "Race Is an Arbitrary and Unscientific Concept" or "Intelligence Is a Difficult Thing to Define, Let Alone Measure." As such, Sullivan gave a cover story to The Bell Curve, a horrendous piece of shoddy sociology about how blacks are not as smart as whites, and neither are as smart as The Chinaman; besides the general philosophical problems with writing a book-length study of the intersection between two variable, difficult-to-define, and scientifically problematic concepts, it was methodologically unsound and its data cherry-picked from a variety of unsavory sources.

It's looked back upon by most people as a profoundly embarrassing episode, even for The New Republic, which thrives on saying silly shit, and yet, Sullivan, who writes as though literally nothing has been written on the subject since, continues to insist on defending not just The Bell Curve but a general investigation into "intelligence." Weirdly, "intelligence," int his case, always seems to mean "the ways that black people are stupid," but I'm sure that's just a coincidence? He's spent the last week telling anyone who will listen that he is totally not a racist, but, look, he's just saying, scientifically, black people are stupider.

...

Setting up a Witless Relocation Program for the Apostate Right where they are guaranteed to be treated as credible sages instead of the used-up Useful Idiots of a movement that no longer wants them and where no one will rudely rub their noses in their own incredibly inconvenient pasts is turning out to be a very profitable enterprise. Which is why the last 20 feet of this New Conservatism have, of course, been heavily soundproofed (from "Only Nixon Can Go To Nixonland"):

...

Conservatives built this monster.

It didn’t just wander out of the woods one day, or land here from another planet. The Wingnut Base -- whatever teabagger, Colonial Williamsburg camouflage they’re sporting this week, and however hard the media tries to pretend they aren't who we know they are -- was manufactured by the Conservative Movement to win elections. Made right here in the U S of A out of spare parts left over from the Segregationist South, Right-wing fundamentalism, Bircher paranoia and general Archie Bunker pig-ignorance.

Conservatives built the unholy thing, programmed it, wounded it up and sent it out to do their bidding.

And everyone knows it. David Brooks knows it. David Gregory. Tom Friedman. David Frum. The goofs at the "No Labels" freakshow. The entire GOP Brain Caste.

Everybody.