The Internet Troll Party
Christopher Buckley
Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance. [ Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama ]
He writes this not in his usual magazine, the National Review, because of an experience a conservative colleague of his had when she criticized Sarah Palin:
She has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. [ ... ] I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground.
David Brooks
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect. [ ... ] Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.
The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
If you look in the comments of Buckley’s post, you can see some of that anti-intellectual resentment rearing its head:
Palin doesn’t quite fit, does she? She isn’t of your sort, is she? Well, at the risk of sounding like a Hollywood cliche, I’m grateful your father isn’t alive to witness your betrayal of the principles he spent his life promoting and defending. You’re a disgrace. Go find a rock. Crawl under it. Stay there. [ comment from troyriser ]
And, of course, Kathleen Parker can also speak for herself:
The fierce reaction to my column has been both bracing and enlightening. After 20 years of column writing, I’m familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.
Some of my usual readers feel betrayed because I previously have written favorably of Palin. By changing my mind and saying so, I am viewed as a traitor to the Republican party — not a “true” conservative. [ ... ] Readers have every right to reject my opinion. But when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different than one’s own, then we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk. (I hear you, Dixie Chicks.)
Political rallies have become ugly with death threats (”Kill Him!” “Bomb Obama!”) becoming as common as the accusations of terrorist sympathies and treason. It’s all pretty scary. But it’s not unanticipated, I suppose. At Obsidian Wings, Publius writes:
[T]he GOP has made an unholy alliance with the mob — and now the long-term debt is coming due. And they deserve it. After all, it’s not that the GOP establishment merely tolerated them, or treated them like the crazy uncle you basically nod at but ignore. They’ve been riling them up — feeding the hate. They’ve based campaigns on things like gay marriage and immigration and terrorist appeasing. They go on the Rush Limbaugh show, and validate his venom. They tell people who don’t have time to learn otherwise things like giving mortgages to poor minority families caused the housing crisis. [ The GOP's Sorcerer's Apprentice Problem ]
Since Reagan, the GOP has been leveraging the Conservative Christian votes and running low-information/mis-information propaganda campaigns because they could play off hate, fear, and ignorance and in so doing get people to vote against their economic well-being. But now, with Palin in the Vice President’s slot on the ticket, that used-but-never-rewarded voting bloc has real power — and you know what? It turns out they hate Republican intellectuals, too. The Republicans in charge now are the ones who’ve been listening to Limbaugh for decades, not William F. Buckley. They’ve been listening to Michael Savage and Ann Coulter’s hate speech for years.
The GOP has been taken over by the Internet Trolls they invited in for dinner, and those trolls could care less about David Brooks. Thinking for yourself now is more than wrong. To a significant portion of the electorate, it is treason.
Good luck getting your party back. I sincerely mean that.
Update: McCain’s trying to claw his way back up to the high road — with enough determination that I think he might be genuine about it.
