Timely reflections...

The Hitch on the Tea Party movement.  I agree and disagree in parts.  The Hitch is quite right - and may be the first person I've read to bring in some genuine facts on this subject - that a movement based on a laudable goal of scaling back government and redistributionism is sucking in some rather more questionable types (thank you, Glenn Beck).

   Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his audiences to reread Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him. It’s from Skousen’s demented screed The Five Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen’s posthumously published book on the “end times” and the coming day of rapture was charmingly called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as “pickaninnies.

Wonderful.  You know, it's worth pointing out that Ayn Rand warned about exactly this sort of thing.  Try the following lines: "The plea to preserve tradition as such appeals to the worst elements in man and rejects the best."  Or this: "the means by which the Conservatives correct it [their philosophical flaws] are worse than the disease".  Or this, above all:

One of the worst contradictions, in this context, is the stand of many so-called "conservatives" (not confined exclusively to the South) who claim to be defenders of freedom, of capitalism, of property rights, of the Constitution, yet who advocate racism at the same time. They do not seem to possess enough concern with principles to realize that they are cutting the ground from under their own feet. Men who deny individual rights cannot claim, defend or uphold any rights whatsoever. It is such alleged champions of capitalism who are helping to discredit and destroy it.

  I've written that the serious danger of creationism is not that it will triumph - it can't - but that it tarnishes good causes by association, but creationism will be small potatoes compared to the damage done by this sort of nonsense.

  Hitchens also is quite right about the ability of certain conservatives to manage to make arguments that make their targets look good in comparison, even when the targets deserve to be flayed anyway:

 I didn’t like Bill Clinton: thought he had sold access to the Lincoln Bedroom and lied under oath about sexual harassment and possibly even bombed Sudan on a “wag the dog” basis. But when I sometimes agreed to go on the radio stations of the paranoid right, it was only to be told that this was all irrelevant. Didn’t I understand that Clinton and his wife had murdered Vince Foster and were, even as I spoke, preparing to take advantage of the Y2K millennium crisis—remember that?—in order to seize power for life and become the Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu of our day?

Where I part company is with his Marxist thinking:

But does anybody believe that unemployment would have gone down if the hated bailout had not occurred and GM had been permitted to go bankrupt?  

  Er, no, we don't believe it, we know it.  As regards the bailout, allow me to suggest a simple thought experiment.  What would be said by every liberal in America if it were George Bush who handed the equivalent of the GDPs of the world's hundred poorest nations to corrupt and incompetent businesses to shore them up?  Also the question rests on a false premise.  If you want to cure unemployment, that's easy enough: Hey, all you unemployed people!  You now have a job building a temple to my greater glory.  I didn't say you'd get paid.

  If you think that's a cheap shot, remember that the old Soviet constitution guaranteed everyone work, and remember how well that worked out?  The question isn't about employment fundamentally, it's about production.  This isn't difficult; no production equals no pay.  And government monkeying around in the economy always destroys far more production than it creates.

  That Hitchens doesn't acknowledge that there is a genuine problem here is akin to his seeming inability to understand that there was, indeed, such a thing as a Communist threat.

The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream message—the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United States

  There was indeed such a Communist world system that had enslaved a third of the world, and was busily starving that third to death.  A year ago I had the great pleasure of meeting Jung Chang at our distinguished Union to promote her recent biography of Mao, a man responsible for the death of seventy million people.  That certainly was an enemy worth fighting, and fighting fiercely.  It's fatuous to pretend that this can be ignored or swept aside, and that decent people were willing to indulge the Birchers out of sheer horror of Communism.

  There is a real question of how much contamination a good cause can enjoy.  I have trouble thinking of a single good cause that did not have its very questionable members.  The Civil Rights movement, as the Hitch never ceases to remind us, had strong communist support, not to mention Malcolm X's praise for Islam (you may ask the people of the Sudan how well that's working out) and the psychotic state of Saudi Arabia which practiced slavery at the time of X's visit.  Nelson Mandela is unquestionably a moral hero, but he persists in defending people like Qaddafi and Castro, and the ANC had a very pro-Moscow bent in its time, i.e. it was sympathetic to one of the worst tyrannies in human history.

  The Hitch should be smarter than this.