America is in deep trouble. And it’s all Sean Hannity’s fault.
So says newly minted GOP presidential candidate and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. Said Senator Graham in an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, as reported here in the Washington Examiner
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, thinks he knows why the country is increasingly divided on ideological lines, and it has a lot to do with MSNBC and Fox News.
In an interview Tuesday with NBC, Graham said the current media environment makes it difficult for lawmakers to accomplish anything. He envisioned what it would be like for the Constitution to be written, had MSNBC's liberal Rachel Maddow and Fox News' conservative Sean Hannity been there for its creation.
"So, you're at Philadelphia Hall, you've got satellite trucks parked outside," Graham said. "You know, Ben Franklin comes outside and Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity jump on him, 'Don't give in, Ben.' Just think how hard it is in today's 24/7 news cycle, talk radio, cable television and money [in politics]. There is a group telling you to say no about everything.”
All of which reveals an amazing thought process - both on the part of Graham and Todd. Where to start?
Todd asked what Graham’s explanation was for why the country was “polarized”. In typical Establishment GOP style Graham accepted Todd’s assumption that not only was the country polarized, there was something unusual or dangerous about it. The Senator quickly blamed talk radio, cable television and “money.” Then he launched into his imagined skit about Ben Franklin encountering Hannity and MSNBC’s left-wing Rachel Maddow.
All of which begs an obvious fact of history. Benjamin Franklin was, but of course, one of the most polarizing figures of his day. According to historian H.W. Brands, a Franklin biographer who wrote The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, Franklin was so polarizing that in British circles - where he spent considerable time leading up to the American Revolution - Franklin was referred to as “this old snake”, “the old veteran of mischief”, a “Judas”, “old Doubleface” and a man of “vindictive subtlety” who was “one of the bitterest and mischievous enemies” in all of British history. Hardly the stuff of the non-polarizing man that Graham tried to portray.
Hannity spent some time on his Thursday radio answering Graham. Running through a litany of public figures who were seen in the day as polarizing, among them Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill, he added another obvious answer. Franklin was a signer of one of the most polarizing episodes in American history - the Declaration of Independence that led to the seven year all-out war known as the American Revolution. It’s hard to top that in the polarizing department.
Why bother to jump on this Todd-Graham conversation?
Because at base the assumption put forth in that conversation between Todd and Graham is the underlying idea that to challenge the liberal media and liberal orthodoxy is to “polarize.” Which in turn is essentially an admission that when the liberal media once held sway without challenge, all was good and non-polarizing in America because there was no opposition to speak of either in the media itself or for that matter in the Republican Party either.
In today’s political world presidential debates are common, a regular feature not only in the run-up to the presidential election itself every fourth autumn but in each party’s primaries as well. But it was the very first television debate in 1960 between Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard Nixon that illustrated just how this “consensus” about American liberalism of the day was expressed. As the debate unfolded, JFK spoke first. Then it was Nixon’s turn, saying this as his very first sentence:
“The things that Senator Kennedy has said many of us can agree with.”
One can only imagine if Sean Hannity had been rocketed back in time to be on the panel of questioners in that debate. In fact, while Hannity would not even make his planetary debut until over a year later (he was born in 1961), it is doubtful, had he been around as an adult that September of 1960 that he would ever even have had a television show of his own, much less be allowed by any of the three networks to participate in the Kennedy-Nixon debates.
Why?
Because as that Nixon statement illustrated, both the media and the GOP Establishment of 1960 had been lulled into the notion that Big Government Was The Answer. There really wasn’t much disagreement to be had in America over this, and all you had to do was look to the American media of the day which was busy every day reaffirming this consensus.
In his 1959 bestseller Up from Liberalism a young William F. Buckley, by then the publisher of the upstart non-consensus National Review - which didn’t even appear on the scene until 1955 - took note of the liberalism in the American media of the day, citing among other institutions The New York Times and The Washington Post. Writing of those who ran these and other major American media outlets, Buckley wrote:
“These men and women and institutions share premises and attitudes, show common reactions, enthusiasms and aversions, and display an empirical solidarity in thought and action, on the strength of which society has come to know them as ‘liberals.’ They are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all peoples and societies should strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.”
Buckley added that “heroes of liberalism are shielded from criticism” by the media and that “it is fair to generalize that American liberals are reluctant to co-exist with anyone on their Right.”
In short? This is the recipe that is used to paint conservatives as guilty of being “polarizing” - as in fact was William F. Buckley himself in the day. When Buckley’s very first book - the groundbreaking God and Man at Yale - was published he was assailed repeatedly not just for being polarizing but for being the author of a book that “has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face.” To wit: Buckley was an adherent of the Ku Klux Klan. Another review compared the young conservative to - really - Fascists, Nazis and Communists. You can’t get much more polarizing than that.
And at his death, decades later? The liberal New York Times had a different view of Buckley the polarizer. Wrote the Times in its Buckley obit:
“William F. Buckley, Jr. who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn.”
Or in other words? Death for Buckley, as for Franklin, brought a change from being a major-league polarizer to being a beloved American original.
The point being here that both Todd and Graham seem to, well, miss the point. Not all polarizers are American originals much less well-meaning. Some of the worst villains in world history -- the Hitlers, the Stalins and Maos -- were certainly polarizers.
But without question being a leader - a real leader like a Ronald Reagan or Winston Churchill - decidedly means challenging the status quo. And inevitably in doing so, this polarizes.
Which is precisely, to get back to Graham’s attack on Sean Hannity, what Hannity is all about every day on every TV and radio show show that bears his name. When one follows Graham’s discussion with Todd he also talks about his conception of leadership in the White House, saying he’s good at getting opposite sides in a room and asking each side what they need to achieve the end of the moment, bringing up Reagan and his relationship with Tip O’Neill. (The latter a much pleasantly revised story, but another point for another time.)
What Graham ignores completely is that, exactly as Hannity pointed out, Reagan spent an entire career in politics being “polarizing.” As late as 1980, the year he was elected president in a landslide, Reagan’s old Republican moderate/Lindsey Graham-style ex-rival and ex-president Gerald Ford was telling the New York Times that Reagan could never be elected president because he was too extreme and too simple - aka polarizing - in his views. Not coincidentally, as Buckley had discussed years earlier, the Times - famously the home of liberalism in journalism - loved the Ford story of painting Reagan as some sort of polarizing extremist so much it splashed it on the front page.
Is the Todd-Graham interview, with its slam at Sean Hannity, just a passing blip in the media? No. In fact, in it’s own way it gets straight to the view that both liberals in the media and Establishment Republicans have of conservatives. Conservatives in the media like Sean Hannity (or Mark Levin or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Laura Ingraham or Ann Coulter or fill-in-the-blank conservative.) Not to mention conservatives in office or running for office - including but not limited to Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Rand Paul and so-on through the list of GOP 2016 potentials.
The Graham targeting of Hannity and talk radio and cable is one more illustration of the reality that William F. Buckley observed all the way back there in 1959, long before any of the three existed.
When it comes to discussing the issues of the day, said Buckley?
“The tools of controversy are tough, as necessarily they must be. But I wonder when else, in the history of controversy, there has been such consistent intemperance, insularity and irascibility as the custodians of the liberal orthodoxy have shown toward conservatives who question some of the orthodoxy’s premises? The liberals’ implicit premise is that intercredal dialogues are what one has with Communists, not conservatives, in relationship with whom normal laws of civilized discourse are suspended.”
Or in other words?
All this polarizing going on in America is Sean Hannity’s fault.
Just ask Lindsey Graham.
