After Johann Hari’s harrowing tale of being the lone liberal journalist on a boat full of uberconservative National Review readers…

…there’s a huge reader comment section. I left off last post recommending that y’all read it.

It’s interesting.

Amongst the many comments expressing predictable disapproval of the cruise-goer’s more outrageous statements (and the even more predictable pot-shots and ad hominems–this is still the Internet, after all)… you’ll find a few personas evincing pride. Or… at least… not disapproval. Not exactly.

Conservative Reaction 1: Condemnation In Quantity, Not Kind:

If you left the echo chamber you would start to see things a bit differently. I agree, these people are a bunch of crusty old farts. But sometimes it takes a bunch of crusty old farts to air the hard truths out there. Islamic fundamentalism is a profound threat, unfettered immigration is lowering living standards, and some people in the modern west need to develop some integrity, values, and ethics.

—Posted by: Bobsays on Jul 17, 2007 6:18 AM

Here, Bobsays defends the more moderate conservative position (”Islamic fundamentalism is a profound threat”) that he sees the extreme views (”The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they’ll have the whole of Europe”) springing from. A liberal could probably find common ground with Bobsays in the vague area of “fundamentalism of any stripe is a threat to peace and freedom,” if only Bobsays would realize that religious fundamentalism comes in all flavors, and opposition to it needn’t take the form of racism.

Conservative Reaction 2: I Know You Are But What Am I (IKYABWAI)

Wow, she discovered that conservatives are serial killer racists…. Here is what you’d learn on a Move On cruise, (and most mainstream liberals would admit it)….[numbered list of morally reprehensible things]

—Posted by: rockyrcoon on Jul 17, 2007 12:12 PM

MoveOn.org is a grass-roots mobilizer, a “usual suspect” in online petitions and lobbying, and surprisingly moderate as far as leftists platforms go–as long as you reject the idea that Fox News is unbiased and everyone left of, say, John McCain, is a raving radical lunatic. Commenter rockyrcoon probably doesn’t. But that’s just a guess.

He/she does not condemn the cruise-goers’ extreme views, but instead asserts that a ship full of extreme liberals (again, MoveOn.org isn’t actually that extreme, but this is rockyrcoon’s straw man, not mine) would be Just As Bad. The IKYABWAI “defense” isn’t a defense at all. It’s just mudslinging. And, in this case, it’s worse than that: it’s attempting to balance the portrait painted by direct observation of National Review readers with speculation about MoveOn.org supporters. Hari was engaged in data compilation. This commenter is engaged in… imagining.

Still with me? I’ve got a point. I’m getting to it.

One more example, though:

Conservative Reactions 3 and 4: Casting Doubt On The Data, Rejecting the Sample Set

Did the Johann Hari even go on this cruise and if so, did he find the thirty nutballs out of 3000 normals and miss attribute quotes incessantly? …Come on, if any of this is true, they certainly aren’t representative of the average conservative person[.]

—Posted by: gormly on Jul 17, 2007 12:31 PM

Reaction 3 needs no explanation: Faced with an unpalatable portrayal of his/her compatriots, gormly suggests the mean old journalist had an agenda and made up some lies to support it.

Reaction 4, however, is a bit meatier.

Rejection of a particularly unpalatable sample set–that has legs. Yes, there’s no doubt that the quotes Hari has collected represent extreme views voiced more strongly than most politicians on the right would ever think to do in public. Granted, gormly merges the two reactions: Hari explicitly claims to represent the entire cruise (for instance, he reports on the main events of the cruise, describing the audience’s whole reaction to panel discussions), but gormly suggests Hari cherry-picked and “miss attributed” quotes in order to stand a tiny handful of fruitcakes in for the majority of normal passengers. But for the sake of making a useful argument, I’m going to treat the Reaction 4 component of gormly’s comment as if it stood alone.

Let’s say that Hari is not lying, and all 500-ish (not 3000) passengers were nutbars (with the exception of the National Review’s founder, William Buckley, who is presented here as a tragic figure, a lone voice of semi-realism amongst rabid wolves who won’t hear his warnings). Thus, Hari’s entire article can be dismissed as depicting only the laughable extremists rather than the effective arm of the conservative/Republican movement.

Can it?

If these extremists are so risible, why are gormly, rockyrcoon, and Bobsays avoiding condemn them? The IKYABWAI reaction comes closest to disapproval, in that it admits the cruise-goers’ views aren’t reasonable–but it points this out not to say that that’s bad, but rather that liberals are just as bad, which balances and thus excuses the badness in the neo-con arena. And at least gormly tries to distance himself from the extreme views, but…

Look, someone else said it better than I:

[M]any self-declared “conservatives” would rather attack the credibility of the author or try to set up obvious “left equivalent” forgeries than simply 1) vociferously attack the kind of attitudes expressed by the far-right on that ship; 2) completely repudiate any relation to them whatsoever; and 3) seek common ground with those on the left on this issue. I think we can all safely agree that recommending gas chambers for anyone based on their political beliefs (indeed, based on anything) is a bit outside of the mainstream, but conservatives here start ranting about hypothetical Moveon ships instead of yelling out the obvious: ANYBODY WHO BELIEVES THAT IS A FUCKING NAZI!

Any other response is a bit questionable, to put it mildly. Even your otherwise thoughtful piece descends into a bit of this defensivess, implying Hari had to look far and wide to find Fascist views on a National Review cruise, when anybody’s who ever read National Review knows such views are pretty damn predictable. It’s not like Hari had to make up anything. This should be the point. When did a large circulation, “mainstream” political magazine like National Review become a mouthpiece for blathering Hitler wannabes?! Is this really the state of the right these days? If not, why not separate yourselves from such views rather than implicitly associate yourself with them by your self-identification as a “conservative?” Come on, from your own description you have nothing in common with these people. Why not just say so, instead of attacking “liberals” who have nothing to do with it?

—Posted by: Graeme on Jul 17, 2007 8:44 PM

I hope Graeme will forgive me for quoting his comment in near full. He/she makes my point for me: if the cruise-goers really aren’t representative of mainstream conservatives, why are self-described mainstream conservatives not condemning their views? And this is the National Review, not some whacked-out militia group. I thought the right embraced the NR as its mouthpiece…? But there I go, repeating what Graeme said already.

I’ll end with just a few more quotes, and I’ll leave it to you to figure out which came from Hari’s sojourn amongst what gormly would like to dismiss as extremists, and which came from celebrated neo-con celebrity Ann Coulter:

My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.

You must live near the UN building…. They should suicide-bomb that place.

We need to execute people like (John Walker Lindh) in order to physically intimidate liberals.

Of course, we need to execute some of these people…. A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country. Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that’s what you’ll get.

But then, Ann Coulter, like these cruise-goers, is also roundly ridiculed as an extreme lunatic by every mainstream conservative voice in America, up to and including the President, so it’s not like these parallel quotes prove anything.

…Wait. What?

Reality check in 3… 2….