What FOX News might have been ...

politicalprof

What FOX News might have been ...

For brief moments, when FOX News’ moderators went after the Republican candidates they had been ordered to bring down (e.g., Megyn Kelly’s upbraiding of Donald Trump), I saw a vision of what FOX might have been for the conservative movement: an agent of growth, maturation, and evolution for their ideas and values in the face of changed circumstance.

See, one of the remarkable things about conservatism today is that it is a staggeringly incoherent political movement. It hates government … unless government is buying (and using) weapons in wars, unless it is killing Americans in prison murders (the death penalty), or unless it is making sure women don’t use their vaginas in ways that conservatives don’t approve of (birth control and abortion). It hates welfare, but only so long as it is support for the poor: corporations feel free to pony up to the tax code trough for vast subsidies and handouts (think the bank bailout). It venerates St. Ronald Reagan despite the fact that he likely was nowhere near conservative enough for this group of Republicans to vote for. (Reagan, for example, raised taxes multiple times in his term, and created the tax code exemptions that let the poor avoid INCOME taxes … what Mitt Romney attacked as the 47% of “takers” in American society.) And, oh yeah: Iraq was good! We won! Obama lost the war Bush had so obviously won! Anyone who says anything else hates America!

The thing is, the circumstances which led to Reagan’s rise to power (along with his ideological ally, Margaret Thatcher, in the UK) no longer exist. The top tax rate isn’t 50%, it’s about 35% – and almost no one pays that. Inflation is effectively 0% (if not negative) where it was once in the teens. Unemployment – while persistent and concerning – is improving, not worsening. The Soviet Union no longer exists, and ISIS ain’t the Soviet Union. (Then again, other than its perhaps not really working nukes, neither is my current national neighbor, Russia.) And, like it or not, America’s folly in Iraq strengthened Iran, undermined US power, and will remain an unmitigated disaster for US interests for a long time. And no, we didn’t win it in 2007: we bought a brief peace – literally, with cash payments to lots of warlords – and then put a pro-Iranian government in place and stopped making payments (during the Bush years). Subsequent events speak for themselves.

Now imagine if FOX’s commentators and agents had, well, paid attention to these changes. Imagine that they had pushed conservatives to adapt their ideology to new circumstances and not let those same politicians just keep saying the same silly things over and over and over, regardless of what was actually happening in the world.

Megyn Kelly and her colleagues provided a brief glimpse of such a world – albeit one in which they still soft-pedaled their questions to FOX’s “chosen” candidates (Bush, Rubio, etc.). At the least, were FOX doing its job seriously my guess is that the pool of Republican candidates in 2016 would be much smarter, sharper, and better able to link their values to policies that might convincingly suggest a way forward through our current issues.

Instead, FOX News has let the candidates be lazy. Its endless cheerleading of whoever attacked Democrats or advocated “Reaganesque” values (thank you Sarah Palin …. paging Dr, Carson!), as well as its savaging of anyone who crossed those revealed truths, has left the party flabby and … well, vulnerable to the caustic, toxic blowhard that is Donald Trump.

If you’re a Democrat or Progressive, you really ought to love FOX News. They’ve built a world in which the key to success is stupidity and thoughtlessness. And we shouldn’t kid ourselves:

There is very little in life quite as wonderful as a stupid enemy.