The Dish

In a really smart post, Ross Douthat considers whether conservatism benefits from Fox News. It seems clear to me (and Ross) that the rise of the FNC/Talk Radio machine has led to great political success in some respects for a rump right in dominating the discourse, but has led to concomitant and substantive shifts toward liberalism in actual policy. This is rather mischievously put here:

If you were feeling particularly unfair, you could probably make a chart linking Fox’s rising ratings to the renewed growth of government spending under Bush and Obama.

I don't think that's particularly unfair. Under Bush, the conservative media machine's partisan loyalty enabled the GOP to put domestic spending on steroids, launch two enormously expensive unending wars, drastically increase the power of the executive to trample on civil liberties, and added a huge unfunded entitlement, Medicare D. So while Fox was giddily celebrating power, conservatism was busy abandoning whatever policy principles it once had.

I also think the recession was far more brutal on the debt than it might have been because Bush et al had left the US no margin of error on deficits. They spent in the good times (like Blair and Brown in Britain) making the sudden downturn fiscally disastrous, and a stimulus more necessary and more damaging to the fiscal future. I have long believed that the knee jerk support for Bush from Fox, talk radio, National Review, the Weekly Standard, et al made government bigger, more wasteful, more utopian and less effective in the last decade. And that's why I can't quite take them seriously now that they are posing as small government absolutists as soon as a Democrat reaches the White House to clean up the mess.

By the way, I find Bush's lurch to the big spending left much more offensive than Obama's attempt to keep the ship afloat after the Great Recession. I don't believe it would have been better for the US and the world economy to spiral downward with massive bank failures in late 2008 and 2009. So sue me. I also believe that the health insurance reform was about as centrist a bill for universal care as you could get (but needs improvement and cost-vigilance) and that a winning party gets to pass what it ran on. For a Democrat, Obama is as moderate as it comes. So the powerful policy successes of the new president really do matter more than Glenn Beck's ratings. Back to Ross:

[G]iven the trajectory of conservatism across the last thirty years, I think the burden of proof here is on the partisans of Fox News and talk radio: It may be that conservative politics have benefited dramatically from the rise of a right-wing media-industrial complex, but there’s plenty of evidence pointing the other way. (The elite journals are another matter: It’s easy to point to major policy successes that were made possible by National Review, Commentary, The Public Interest, etc. But it’s much harder to do the same with Fox News.)

Really? Which policy successes came from these organs since 2000? I can think of only one issue they truly pioneered in that decade: the Iraq war. Everything else – rounding up illegals, barring gay marriage, and ending abortion, to name three – ended in horrible failure and long-term poisoning of the conservative brand. So name some policy successes that emanated from the conservative elite magazines, Ross. Not from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – from the new millennium, when Rovian cynicism bested all policy comers. And Ross was far more cagey in his criticism of the right.

(Photo: Evan Agostini/Getty.)

British philosopher John Gray (he helped introduce me to Oakeshott yonks ago) knocks A.C. Grayling's book:

When Grayling condemns religion on the grounds that “a theory that explains everything, and can be falsified by nothing, is empty,” he takes for granted that religions are primitive theories, now rendered obsolete by science. Such was the position of J. G. Frazer, the Victorian evangelist for positivism and author of the once-celebrated survey of myth, The Golden Bough (1890). In this view, religion is chiefly a product of intellectual error, and will fade away along with continuing scientific advance.

But what if science were to show that religion serves needs that do not change with the growth of knowledge—the need for meaning, for example? In that case, it would not be religion and science that were at odds, but science and atheism. The upshot of scientific inquiry would be that religion is an ineradicable part of human life. Atheism—at least of the evangelical variety that Grayling promotes, which aims to convert humankind from religion—would be a supremely pointless exercise.

John Gray is one of the most provocative thinkers around. I recommend his somewhat repetitive but refreshing screed against liberal delusions of "progress", Straw Dogs.

(Hat tip: Stuttaford)

Josh Green defends himself.

A glimpse of how the pols are downplaying the necessary fiscal pain ahead.

Basically, opinion of Obama’s job performance (sans Rasmussen) has not changed in months:

Gideon Rachman sees some illuminating parallels between Britain and Israel as US allies pushed by an American president to make real concessions for peace:

The Israelis’ furious reaction to the pressure they are under from the Obama administration is reminiscent of the British rage early in the Northern Irish peace process, when it became clear that our American allies were intent on “talking to the terrorists” of the Irish Republican Army. But, as it turned out, the Americans were right to insist that there was a peace deal to be made with the IRA. They are right again on the Middle East peace process. There is still a deal to be had – and if Israel does not take it soon, the long-term survival of the Jewish state will be imperilled.

This is a very sharp analysis of the core question, it seems to me:

For all their long-term concerns, the Israelis have failed to make

vital concessions, because the status quo still feels more comfortable.

Israel’s assaults on Lebanon and Gaza have, for the moment, largely stopped the threat of rocket fire into Israel. The wall the Israelis have built around the West Bank has helped to prevent suicide bombings. The economy has done well in recent years. Things look good – if you do not look too far into the future. By contrast, calling a complete halt to illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land – as Mr Obama has demanded – entails risks and pain. There are members of the Israeli cabinet who still cling to the idea of a Greater Israel, incorporating all of the West Bank. If Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, delivered the settlement freeze the Americans want, his rightwing coalition would probably collapse. Many Israelis also worry that an eventual move to uproot at least 80,000 settlers as part of a peace deal could lead to a revolt in the army – some 30 per cent of whose officers are religious conservatives, presumed to be sympathetic to the settlers. Any such military revolt, one respected commentator told me, “would be the end of the state of Israel”.

Forward Operating Base Todd, Murghab District, Badghis Province, Afghanistan, 12 pm

Glenn Greenwald begs to differ with Ross Douthat.

"Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans?" – Sara and Brian Brandsmeier Tim Wise.