It's difficult to do so--in fact, at times, it's a little nauseating--but I'm a big believer in keeping tabs on what the right-wing is thinking and feeling, as well as doing, if for no other reason than my subscription to the old cliche that forwarned is forarmed. Even so, once in a long while, doing so allows you to learn something that is actually useful. And that happened to me this past week, as I was driving home from a document production project I'm currenly working on in Virginia.
On these drives, I set my radio for FM stations, and then set it to scan. If I find something I want to listen to, be it music or politics, I'll stop the scan and do so for a while. Usually, I'll stop it for music. But, as it turns out, "The Mark Levin Show" is on WMAL during the times I'm usually on the road, and, sometimes, I'll steel my stomach to stop and listen. With Levin, if you have any sanity at all, steeling your stomach is a requirement for listening to his show. He's a former low-level bureaucrat in the Reagan Adminstration who's managed to take that minor credential, combine it with the most irritating vocal intonation in the world, and become a low-level success on the right-wing screaming circuit.
But, as I said at the top, you can sometimes learn lessons even from people like Levin. And this past week, I did so. Or, rather, a lesson I had already learned to some extent was reinforced.
Levin had a caller, obviously a Trump man through and through, who was going off on North Korea and its recent provocative displays of military force (provocations that are working, by the way, because they are getting Donald Trump to say and do what Kim Jong-un wants him to say and do). The caller, being a Trump man, was all but parrotting Trump own "fire and fury" words about North Korea, arguing for a surgical use of military power that would take out all of the country's military installations without hurting any of its people.
When you listen to someone like this, especially if you've been in combat (I have not, but have known many people who have), you know right away that you are listing to someone who (a) has never been in combat, perhaps never in uniform, for that matter, and (b) processes all incoming information at the level of an action movie. Wars are not surgical, not even in the operating rooms, a the TV series "M*A*S*H" taught us. It is chaotic, dangerous, bloody, and utterlly unfair in every possible way. Nevertheless, knowing what I knew about Levin's cartoon-version of the world, I expected him to largely agree with the caller.
Only he didn't.
Instead, he took great pains to talk the caller down from his rhetorical heights of fury. He himself made the point that I just made about the unprecise nature of combat. He even added a point that I did not expect to come from someone with a Reagan background: the fact that the U.S. had previously fought a war in Korea against Communist forces, and came away, at great human and financial cost, with little more than a political tie, one that has persisted (also at great cost) for more than 60 years. Beyond that, Levin made the argument for the use of non-military means, e.g., embargoes and diplomacy, in conjunction with the international community, as away of backing North Korea down from the nuclear brink toward which it was pushing the world.
I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. Was he switching sides? Had John Kerry, or Michael Moore, found a way of invading his brain? What was going on?
And then, a few days later, I heard Levin heap praise on Trump's bellicose U.N. speech, a speech which could just have easily been given by the caller he had previously taken to task for his bellicosity. Now I was really confused.
But then, I got it.
Levin liked the speech not because he agreed with Trump's approach to North Korea. He liked it, purely and simply, because it was a finger in the eye of the U.N., an institution he despises (even though he might grudgingly admit a need for it) because it promotes progressive thinking and ideals, and therefore the interests of liberals.
Levin, like his fellow travellers in the vast right-wing conspiracy, hate liberals. They hate liberals more than they love conservatives, or even conservatism itself. They hate liberals even more than they hate liberalism itself; Levin's willingness to argue a liberal position to a conservative caller reflects all of this. In fact, personal hatred of liberals is the only glue that now holds them together. And it is the only thing they like about Trump; he made liberal cry, and that' enough for them, even if he pushes the world to the brink of war in the process.
This reflects, in one sense, the ultimate collapsed of 1950s-style movement conservatism as a governing philosophy. But it also reflects the extent to which the movement that supported it is now a movement completely corrupted by hatred. And hatred, as I have said before, is not a philosophy, a policy or a program. It's just hatred. And it destroys everything it touches.
That's the real danger we face today. So thanks, Mr. Levin, for helping to point it out. And may you and your colleagues get over your hatred in the New Year, before it destroys us all. Shannah Tovah .
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