"What is conservatism right now other than anti-liberalism? "

Excerpts Of Interview With Conservative Pundit Charlie Sykes

Sean Illing
What does the conservative world look like right now amid all the news about the Mueller investigation? What are they selling?

Charlie Sykes
It’s what I’d call whataboutism on steroids. The narrative is that the Russia investigation is not only a hoax, but that the real story is Hillary Clinton and that we ought to be going back to Hillary Clinton's emails and Hillary Clinton's collusion with Fusion GPS and Hillary Clinton's alleged non-scandal with Uranium One.

These were the tactics used to great effect during the campaign: Trump would face an allegation and deflect it by turning it back on his opponent. That appears to be the playbook right now, and the conservative media is happily complicit in this.

No matter what happens with Trump, no matter how overwhelming the evidence against him, it’s always, “What about Hillary?” or, “What about the liberals?” or, “What about the Dems?” They treat this like a battlefield, and it’s always about defending their side no matter what.

Sean Illing
Is it about getting people to believe things that aren’t true, or is it about overwhelming the conversation with bullshit in order to distract from what’s actually happening?

Charlie Sykes
That's a really good question. The essence of propaganda is not necessarily to convince you of a certain set of facts. It is to overwhelm your critical sensibilities. It's to make you doubt the existence of a knowable truth. The conservative media is a giant fog machine designed to confuse and disorient people.

Which, from Trump's point of view, is a win.

Sean Illing
To borrow a question from John Oliver, does anything matter anymore?

Charlie Sykes
I don’t know. This is what a post-truth culture looks like. This is what post-factual politics mean. I think we're coming to grips with the full implications of that. Now, having said that, we are moving into the realm of the legal process, which does take facts more seriously, which does take lies more seriously. And you wonder whether that's going to start sowing doubts.

To think that it will, however, is to bet against everything we've seen so far.

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Charlie Sykes

What is conservatism right now other than anti-liberalism? People like Rush Limbaugh have essentially acknowledged that. He used to call his show “The Limbaugh Institute for Conservatism” and now it’s “The Limbaugh Institute for Anti-Leftism” — or something like that.

I’m not sure we can identity what’s left of conservatism other than a hatred for leftism.

Sean Illing
I still wonder why the liberal media hasn’t had an equivalent effect on the left. Any theories?

Charlie Sykes
I think the left has had less success in hermetically sealing off their base from other sources of information — that’s a major factor.

And look, this is deeply unfashionable for me to say as a conservative, but I think the education gap is not irrelevant. I used the term Vichy Republican the other day to describe Republicans who are basically collaborators, and I was a little taken aback by the number of people who had no idea what I was talking about.

Sean Illing
David Frum had a great line a while back. I may be butchering it a bit, but it was something to the effect of, “We thought Fox News worked for us, but it turned out that we worked for Fox News.”

I took that to mean that Fox has redefined conservatism by redefining what the base pays attention to, what it cares about. Consequently, you have Republican politicians who now reflect those changes in the base.

Charlie Sykes
That's exactly right. Frum has another line about that. He said something like, “Republicans have a crisis of followership.” The Republican leadership in Congress sees all of this. They’re horrified by it. But they’re not willing to do anything about it because their base won’t allow it.

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Charlie Sykes
Many Trump voters get virtually all of their information from inside the bubble. I mean, there was a time when you would get the conservative point of view, but it was a counterpoint to what you heard elsewhere. Now the conservative media has become a safe space for people who want to be told that they don't have to believe anything that's uncomfortable or negative. A safe space where they're convinced that Hillary Clinton is the real criminal, that the Clinton scandals are what we really ought to be following.

What's remarkable, and what I've never seen before, is the way that Trump sends out the dog-whistle signals to the media, which picks up themes with almost Pavlovian enthusiasm. He'll tweet out, "The real scandal is Hillary," and suddenly you'll see it explode across conservative media, starting with Fox News, but other outlets as well.

I mean, when is the last time you saw a president with that kind of an ability to shape and deflect criticism?

Sean Illing
I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything quite like this. But I want to linger on a point you just made, which is really important. The persecution mania on the right, the victim mentality that conservative media preaches, has engineered a base that is primed to dismiss uncomfortable facts as attacks on their identity. This is something that has been happening long before Trump entered the arena, but it seems like Trump is only possible because of this conditioning.

Charlie Sykes
That’s absolutely right. And again, that suggests that a lot of this is very emotional. It’s a visceral resistance. It’s a visceral loyalty. Mere facts have a hard time penetrating something like that, because it's an attack on a member of your tribe. It's an attack on a member of your family.

The details are less important than the fact that you're being persecuted, you're being victimized by people that you loathe and fear.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-apostates-are-getting-agitated.html