Ross Douthat responds to Christopher Hitchens' takedown of the Tea Party and Glenn Beck:
But do you know what else has often led to folly, disaster, violence and human misery? The “moderation” and “centrism” of the Western governing class. It wasn't Glenn Beck who mired the United States in two neverending overseas occupations, where “gun brandishing” is the least of the everyday horrors that flow from our policy failures. It wasn't the Tea Party that decided to create two new health care entitlements (Medicare Part D and Obamacare) just as America was about to go over a fiscal waterfall. It wasn't kooks and reactionaries who got the European Union into its current mess. It wasn't the radicals of the left and right who risked the global economy on a series of disastrous real estate bets, or locked our government into a permanently symbiotic relationship with the banking and financial sectors, or created a vast labyrinth of unaccountable bureaucracies in the hopeless quest for perfect security from terror attacks. And to bring things up the present day, it wasn't the more “extreme” members of the Senate — be they Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn on the right, or Bernie Sanders on the left — who just voted for more short-term spending and tax cuts without any plan to pay for it.
Sure. And by the same token, it was radicals who pushed ideas like abolition, women's suffrage, and federal civil-rights protections into the mainstream. That an argument is radical is not, in and of itself, discrediting. The reverse is also true -- "misgovernment at the center" may have given us the war in Iraq, but that doesn't mean we should listen to radicals who want to invade Mexico. Sometimes the radicals are right, sometimes their ideas are even worse than the polite, established "center."
Douthat's larger point is sound, though.There is a distinct difference between what is socially acceptable and what is right, and we often fail to distinguish one from the other. Our political present contains plenty of morally repugnant ideas that fall into the former, although Douthat and I would probably disagree on exactly what those are.
I'm less sympathetic to Douthat's argument that the ends justify the means and that Beck implicitly cheerleading a violent uprising or telling his audience that the Obama administration is pursuing a vendetta against white people is OK if it means a few cuts in entitlement programs that Douthat doesn't like. These kinds of arguments have implications for far more people than the immediate political targets.
