Yesterday I wrote at Greg's place that "Republicans don't really mean that Obama is a tyrannical socialist trying to destroy America." By that I meant elected Republicans, but I'd also extend that observation to the conservative political elite. Conor Friedersdorf eloquently expresses what I was trying to say
If all of these charges were true, a radicalized citizenry would be an appropriate response. But even the conservatives who defend Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, D'Souza, McCarthy, and so many others don't behave as if they believe all the nonsense they assert. The strongest case against these people isn't that their rhetoric inspires political violence. It's that they frequently utter indefensible nonsense. The problem isn't their tone. It's that the substance of what they're saying is so blinkered that it isn't even taken seriously by their ideological allies (even if they're too cowardly, mercenary or team driven to admit as much).
They're in a tough spot these days partly because it's impossible for them to mount the defense of their rhetoric that is true: “I am a frivolous person, and I don't choose my words based on their meaning. Rather, I behave like the worst caricature of a politician. If you think my rhetoric logically implies that people should behave violently, you're mistaken – neither my audience nor my peers in the conservative movement are engaged in a logical enterprise, and it's unfair of you to imply that people take what I say so seriously that I can be blamed for a real world event. Don't you see that this is all a big game? This is how politics works. Stop pretending you're not in on the joke.”
If people really believed 90 percent of what the conservative media were telling them, violence would almost be justified. If conservatives really believed, as Andrew McCarthy claims to, that the president is secretly and unaccountably doing the bidding of the Muslim Brotherhood, if you took seriously Glenn Beck's warning that George Soros (who controls everything) was formenting a "communist revolution" in the U.S., if you agreed with Rush Limbaugh that "secession" was no longer kooky and might even be necessary, then I'd submit we'd actually have seen a lot more violence than we've actually seen. "The president is an Islamist, communist traitor who wants to destroy you, but by the way express your disapproval nonviolently at the ballot box?"
We haven't, because, as Friedersdorf notes, it's a sick joke that they're all in on. These people traffic in providing to their audience elaborate revenge fantasies against liberals, positing circumstances in which violence might be justified but never actually really justifying it. Because their audience, like them, is supposed to understand that it's not really true -- that they're just expressions of symbolic belief and rituals of positive ideological reinforcement. The point is that at some point, someone may not really be in on the joke.
