Mark Levin, a True Conservative

I put a version of this comment on FB a few days ago....

I just went into the kitchen to put a shaker of Beefeater's and Noilly Prat into the freezer. I thought just for a change I'd turn on some radio news. After about three seconds of NPR, I felt my IQ level going into a nosedive and my will to live oozing away. They are as ignorant and inarticulate as a New York Times editorial writer trying to explain Global Warming or justify the violent thugs, who are burning, and looting their own cities because cops in Minneapolis may have overreacted in arresting a drunken five-times loser felon.

So I switched to the local talk radio channel. A treacly voice with a New York nasal accent was gushing about battlefields.  I recognized the repulsive voice.  What, it can't be!  Mark Levin having something nice to say about Confederate war heroes?  Not at all.  What a relief, when he explained that the Democratic Party was the party of evil, the party of slavery, and thank the almighty for the Union heroes who crushed the Southern Democrats, whose children would go on to join the Klan, impose Jim Crow, and lynch completely innocent black  men for crimes they would never commit.  

I remember when even Northern leftists would have guffawed at such nonsense, when a genuine Marxist historian like my late friend Gene Genovese stood as a tower of truth in the lying academy of the 1970's and 1980s.  Come to think of it, I have never known a serious Communist or leftist of the old school who hated the real America as much as "conservatives" today. Eugene Debbs and Big Bill Haywood were tough men who hated the Robber Barons and the politicians they owned, but they were as American  as cowboys, vigilantes, and lightning rod salesmen.

When a nice lady politely asks what constituted "the real America," I replied:

It is the flesh and blood people living and dying in their homes, villages, and states, toughing it out for good and ill, whether we like them or not. John Smith, the Pilgrims, the Southern slave-owners, the Yankee slavers, the benevolent Southerners who did their best in an ambiguous  cause,--prserving order and decency after the war--and the bigots of Illinois and Minnesota that enacted vicious Black Codes. blacks, whites, Indians, immigrants..... Everyone grateful for a chance to start a new life after failing in the Old World.

Some well-intentioned conservative suggested that Levin was guilty of painting history with a broad brush.  I wrote but did not post this response:

A well-intentioned comment on my last post suggests that Levin is only guilty of painting history with a broad brush.  If that is true, why are the colors on the palette restricted to various shades of red and pink?  Someone who enjoys beating up on the defeated South has no understanding of American history and no affection for the real men and women who settled this country.  He is in the same camp with James Carville, who draws the line between Left and Right between those who think America is just a place and those who, in Lincoln’s language, regard it as a proposition.  However the Left has stood on other issues, they are united in agreeing with Lincoln:  Tom Paine and his Jacobin followers, the editors of the New Republic from the beginning,  John Dewey, the Clintons.  The difference between Carville and Levin is simple:  Carville is an intelligent and able man who clawed his way to the top, while Levin failed in his attempt to become a Republican Party strategist.

To paint history with a broad brush is the privilege reserved to serious scholars and good writers.  The only alternative is to be a shill for the interests who pay you.  Since Levin cannot write and gives no evidence of being a reader--much less a scholar--where does that put him?  

I have at least a dozen reasons for despising the conservative movement, some of them connected with what they did to Sam Francis, Murray Rothbard, Mel Bradford, and many others, but even worse is the adulation paid to absolutely worthless celebrities like Mark Levin, Ann Coulter, George Will, Sean Hannity, the Kristols and Podhoretzes, Charles Krauthammer,  and so many others it is better not to soil the fingers by typing their names  .So long as self-styled conservatives continue to treat the painted prostitutes and monkey-boys at FOX as voices of authority, they will continue to be the helots of the American political system.  

In fact they are far worse than helots, who occasionally rose up against the Spartans.  They are the capos in the concentration camp, selling out their fellow-prisoners for an extra bowl of soup.  At least mainstream liberals get to run the country according to their ideology, and serious leftists can at least make angry noises and point the finger at some of the serious wounds inflicted by this national-socialist state I used to call the USSA.  Apart from the dozen or so good men and women I knew on the right, lefties like Erwin Knoll and Paolo Piccone had a much better grasp of political reality.   Whenever they crossed the line into liberal-conservative territory, however, they became, objectively speaking, lackeys of the regime.