Just so

Scott Carson laments:

Today, as I look through the sources of “conservative thought” available on the Internet, TV, and radio, I find that the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Andrew Breitbart make the John Birch Society look like Plato’s Academy by comparison. The capacity to communicate the conservative stance by means of intellectual disquisition and rational argumentation has vanished, only to be replaced by the same sort of shrill, knee-jerk bigotry that characterizes so much of the left. While it is true that even Glenn Beck will, on occasion, say something that I find congenial, one must sadly note that even a broken clock is right twice a day, and as any reader of Plato’s Theaetetus will know (hence, none of the current “conservative” pundits), getting something right once in a while is not a sufficient condition for knowledge or even intelligence.

This is unfortunate for many reasons, not the least of them being that (a) genuine conservative values will stand less of a chance of making any headway in the public square and (b) our culture, as a whole, is now “slouching towards Gomorrah” at twice the rate it was when this sort of behavior was largely confined to the left. Among these reasons, however, the genuine conservative must surely include the painful irony of a movement in which the noble and the good, construed as the end of man, are at the heart of what it means to be a member of that movement, winds up pillorying itself by stooping to the very tactics of its opposition in an appeal to the vulgar prejudices and bigotries of populism.

This astonishing collapse of alleged “conservative” engagement with the western intellectual tradition is why I wrote this. Catholics who have an unparalleled legacy of thought on every subject we could care to name are choosing, of their own free will, to get almost all their intellectual formation from dolts like Beck, Olbermann, Palin, and Pelosi.