Dispatch from the fringe

I spend a lot of time reading and tuning in to the right-wing blogosphere. I’m also a compulsive listener to conservative and Christian radio.

As I’ve written before, I think much of the popular reaction to America’s mostly rural conservative culture is off-base.

For every nutcase, there are ten (or a hundred) interesting thinkers, deeply committed to an idealistic and hopeful view of America.

The fact that their views are no longer mainstream or popular doesn’t make them crazy or radical.

Too often, mainstream or progressive pundits use the nut cases to obscure the broader more nuanced dialogue.

Unfortunately, more and more of the bizarro stuff is pushing its way into the mainstream of the conservative movement — and into the rhetoric of Republican leaders.

I had hoped that political setbacks in 2006 and 2008 would energize moderates and more grounded elements within the conservative movement.

Some of that has happened. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum has campaigned aggressively to drag the Right back from what he calls its “psychotic episode.”

John Henke, an influential blogger at TheNextRight.com has organized a boycott of crazies, arguing that “no respectable organization should support the kind of fringe idiocy…” and adding “those who do are not respectable.”

But the larger trend has been more troubling.

Mainstream conservative websites have joined with more fringe talkers to suggest that President Obama is a Fuhrer-like charismatic dictator.

The massively influential Drudge website is leading today with a story about the President’s plan to address schoolchildren.

Many on the Right view his upcoming speech about the importance of attendance and hard work as a kind of Maoist indoctrination.

(The White House suggestion that students should “help the President” was viewed with something akin to horror.)

Another hugely popular conservative site Worldnetdaily.com is pushing the notion that President Obama is creating camps in the U.S. that could be used as “concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany.”

Fox News has allowed Glen Beck — one of the most popular conservative pundits on television — to describe Mr. Obama as “racist.”

Beck spends show after show outlining the details of a purported conspiracy to remake America into a totalitarian state.

In a recent speech, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Ok) accused the President of deliberately weakening the country’s defenses.

“I don’t know why President Obama is obsessed with turning terrorists loose in America.”

Other senior Republicans — including Iowa Senator Charles Grassley — have embraced the notion that Democratic leaders hope to create “death panels,” designed to kill the elderly or the disabled.

I understand the impulse behind these fears. Rural conservatives are convinced that America is terrifyingly off-track.

Long-established cultural norms and traditions (and, yes, the predominance of white Christians) are slipping away. And they’re right. America is changing at breathtaking speed.

Our racial demographics, our religious identity, our lifestyle and marital choices — they’re all evolving in ways the Founding Fathers could never have envisioned.

Smart conservatives know that there’s no going back. The best they can hope for is to shape the wave, to nudge it and influence it where possible.

But the fringe doesn’t see it that way.

They insist that we can turn back the clock on everything from women working to the exclusion of Christian education from our public schools to the availability of contraception and the growth of America’s Hispanic community.

More and more talk openly of achieving their goals through violence or dissolution of the U.S.

Every political party — especially in our big-tent system — has fringe-crazies. But as Republican ranks have dwindled, this kind of nastiness has spread to a frightening degree into the core of the GOP.

A lot of the rhetoric these days is about healthcare, townhall meetings and the political future of President Obama.

I think a much more immediate question involves the Republican leadership’s ability to distance itself from this stuff.

Our country can survive a while longer without healthcare reform. But we desperately need a healthy, vibrant and sane Republican Party.

In the past, the GOP has managed to purge itself.

In the 1950s, Conservative William Buckley famously launched an attack against the John Birch Society, a rightist fringe movement that claimed Republican Dwight Eisenhower was a closet communist.

It was Loony Tunes stuff. Buckley wrote, “There are bounds to the dictum, Anyone on the right is my ally.”

Republicans have a real opportunity to re-emerge as a political force in 2010.

But unless they first heed Buckley’s warning, its hard to see how that will be good for America.