{"id":6820,"date":"2015-11-28T04:34:38","date_gmt":"2015-11-28T04:34:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/11\/28\/the-lefts-hatred-of-conservative-talk-radio\/"},"modified":"2015-11-28T04:34:38","modified_gmt":"2015-11-28T04:34:38","slug":"the-lefts-hatred-of-conservative-talk-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/11\/28\/the-lefts-hatred-of-conservative-talk-radio\/","title":{"rendered":"The Left’s Hatred of Conservative Talk Radio"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the moment the MavPhil<\/em> commentariat includes a couple of sharp young philosophers whose views are to the Right of mine.  My brand of conservatism takes on board what  I consider to be good in the old liberal tradition.  Their brand looks askance at paleo-liberalism and sees it as leading inevitably to the hard leftism of the present day.  So a fruitful intramural debate is in progress, and I thank these gents for their commentary.  Who knows?  Perhaps they will shift me a bit in their direction.<\/span><\/p>\n

I am re-posting the following 2010  entry so that the young guys can tell me what they think, especially with regard to the Horowitz quotation below.  I have bolded<\/strong> the sentence that I expect will be the cynosure of their disapprobation.<\/span><\/p>\n

…………………..<\/span><\/p>\n

The qualifier 'conservative' in my title borders on pleonasm: there is is scarcely any talk radio in the U.S. worth mentioning that is not<\/em> conservative.  This is part of the reason the Left hates the conservative variety so much.  They hate it because of its content, and they hate it because they are incapable of competing with it: their own attempts such as Air America<\/a> have failed miserably. And so, projecting their own hatred, they label conservative talk 'hate radio.'<\/span><\/p>\n

In a 22 March op-ed piece in the NYT<\/a>, Bob Herbert, commenting on the G.O.P., writes, "This is the party that genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating, nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry."<\/span><\/p>\n

I find Herbert's vile outburst fascinating.  There is no insanity, hatred, or bigotry in any of the conservative talk jocks to whom I listen:  Laura Ingraham, Dr. Bill Bennett, Hugh Hewitt, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager or Michael Medved.  There is instead common sense, humanity, excellent advice, warnings against extremism, deep life wisdom, facts, arguments, and a reasonably high level of discourse.  Of the six I have mentioned, Prager and Medved are the best, a fact reflected in their large audiences.  Don't you liberals fancy yourselves open-minded?  Then open your ears!<\/span><\/p>\n

So what is it about Herbert and people  of his ilk that causes them to react routinely in such delusional fashion?<\/span><\/p>\n

It is a long story, of course, but part of it is  that lefties confuse dissent with hate.  They don't seem to realize that if I dissent from your view, it doesn't follow that I hate you.  It's actually a double confusion.  There is first the confusion of dissent with hate, and then the confusion of persons and propositions. If I dissent from your proposition, it does not follow that I hate your proposition; and a fortiori<\/em> it doesn't follow that I hate the person who advances the proposition.  This double confusion goes hand in hand with the strange notion that the Left owns dissent, which I duly refute in a substantial post<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

I leave you with a quotation from David Horowitz, Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey<\/strong> (Spence, 2003), p. 273, emphasis added:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The image of the right that the left has concocted — authoritarian, reactionary, bigoted, mean-spirited — is an absurd caricature that has no relation to modern conservatism or to the reality of the people I have come to know in my decade-long movement along the political spectrum — or to the way I see myself. Except for a lunatic fringe, American conservatism is not about "blood and soil" nostalgia or conspiracy paranoia, which figure so largely in imaginations that call themselves "liberal," but are anything but. Modern American conservatism is a reform movement that seeks to reinvent free markets and limited government and to restore somewhat traditional values. Philosophically, conservatism is more accurately seen as a species of liberalism itself<\/strong> — and would be more often described in this way were it not for the hegemony the left exerts in the political culture and its appropriation of the term "liberal" to obscure its radical agenda.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One more thing.  You can see from Herbert's picture that he is black. So now I will be called a racist for exposing his outburst.  That is right out of the Left's playbook:  if a conservative disagrees with you on any issue, or proffers any sort of criticism, then you heap abuse on him.  He's a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, a 'homophobe,' a bigot, a religious zealot . . . .<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the moment the MavPhil commentariat includes a couple of sharp young philosophers whose views are to the Right of mine.  My brand of conservatism takes on board what  I consider to be good in the old liberal tradition.  Their brand looks askance at paleo-liberalism and sees it as leading inevitably to the hard leftism … Continue reading “The Left’s Hatred of Conservative Talk Radio”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,251,56],"tags":[679],"class_list":["post-6820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism","category-disagreement","category-politics","tag-hate-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6820\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}