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A Vast Right-Wing Cry of TreasonIn her new book, Ann Coulter gets McCarthy right—and makes conservatives mad.

By Sam TanenhausPosted Thursday, July 24, 2003, at 2:13 PM ET

Book cover Ann Coulter, the right wing's dial-900 girl—a rail-thin, chain-smoking, hard-drinking, big-eyed leggy blonde who winkingly serves up X-rated ideological smut on liberals—is at it again. "Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy," Coulter writes—or sneers—in Treason, her follow-up effort to the best-selling Slander. Like its predecessor, Treason sits atop the best-seller charts, riding higher than one of Coulter's signature miniskirts.

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But this time around, it isn't the liberals who are up in arms; it's the conservatives. Coulter's slurring of Democrats—from Harry Truman (soft on communism) to Tom Daschle (soft on Iraq) —has set off a howling chorus on the right. David Horowitz, Andrew Sullivan, and Dorothy Rabinowitz, among others, have been sternly giving Coulter history lessons, dredging up (once more) the anti-Communist credentials of Cold War liberals like Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey.

Horowitz et al. are right, of course. But why are they so worked up? And why reach back so far to single out a few "good" liberals? This just reinforces Coulter's argument that today's breed can be dismissed as a single lumpen mass. In other words, they agree with her. So, why the outrage? Here's a guess: Coulter's conservative critics fear that her legions of fans—and lots of others, too—see no appreciable difference between her ill-informed comic diatribes and their high-brow ultraserious ones, particularly since Coulter's previous performances were praised by some now on the attack.

But this is yet another case where the dumb public is right. Coulter's shocking book is not shocking at all. Nor is it novel. It is merely the latest in a long line of name-calling, right-wing conspiracist tracts, a successor to Elizabeth Dilling's Red Network, Fred C. Schwarz's You Can Trust the Communists (To Be Communists), and—a personal favorite—John A. Stormer's None Dare Call It Treason. This last, which sold 2 million copies in 1964, "explained" how the U.S. military had consciously served "the long-range political advantage of the communist conspiracy" in World War II. You can laugh, but by the time the 25^th-anniversary updated edition was published, it had sold 7 million copies and Stormer was holding weekly Bible meetings for Missouri state legislators.

Coulter's cheerleading on behalf of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and "his brief fiery ride across the landscape," as she puts it, is what has her critics most exercised. Doesn't she understand, they ask, that McCarthy wasn't an anti-Communist at all but a dangerous outrider who harmed a noble cause by defaming and giving ammunition to the left? Again they're right—but only on rather drearily familiar grounds. Coulter is closer to the truth on the big question, McCarthy's actual place in the conservative pantheon. For many years he was precisely the GOP folk hero she says—a pivotal figure who invented the inside-the-Beltway insurgency that has been the party's staple for half a century now, currently embodied by flame-throwers like Tom DeLay.

During McCarthy's peak years, he was a GOP heavyweight egged on by the likes of Senate leaders Robert Taft and William Knowland. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower, the GOP presidential nominee, shared a platform with McCarthy even though McCarthy had smeared Ike's mentor, George Marshall, by calling him a Communist dupe. And as Coulter says, the people—a lot of them, anyway—loved him, too. More than 1 million signed a petition supporting him during the censure debate of 1954, and half the Republican senators (22 out of 44) voted against the measure. A year after McCarthy's death in 1957 Robert Welch, another conspiracy-monger, founded the John Birch Society to pick up the cudgel and continue the "fight for America." Today, Birchers are remembered as kooks (and were often dismissed as such at the time). But these "little old ladies in sneakers" got a big hug from the conservative movement. Ronald Reagan for one—though mistily depicted of late as the ideological heir of the Democratic "traitors" Truman and JFK—made his political debut stumping for Congressman John Rousselot, a top California Bircher, in 1962.

And the McCarthy legacy lives on. Remember the attack ad used in the last election against Georgia Democrat Max Cleland—the one that spliced in videotape of Osama and Saddam? The McCarthyites used the same ruse to destroy Maryland Democrat Millard Tydings in 1950, only then it was a composite picture juxtaposing photos of Tydings and Earl Browder, the onetime leader of the American Communist Party.

Of course, using dirty tricks isn't news in politics—and their use is not limited to the right. Nor, for that matter, is the cry of treason. Woodrow Wilson dusted off the Sedition Act in order to jail critics of World War I. Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the indictments of more than two dozen isolationists in 1942 on the sham charge that they were Nazi agents. A judge threw the case out, but conservatives didn't forget.

All Coulter has done is import this approach—the flat-out accusatory style of hardball politics—into the realm of serious political discourse, ignoring the preferred arts of indirection and innuendo. And that's why her critics are agitated. It all comes down to tact—or tactics. It's OK to denounce a semi-fictional construct: a "Fifth Column" that opposes the Iraq War or "the axis of appeasement" or liberals who "hate" America and wish it ill. Or to imply, as William Safire did this week, that unnamed journalists pressing the WMD case are, "by their investigative and oppositionist nature," unwitting handmaidens of Saddam.

But the indelicate Coulter has crossed the line, stating openly the message others push subliminally. Consider her notorious comment, following 9/11, that the solution to radical Islamists was for the United States to "invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity." This met with an outcry that was, again, loudest from the right. Within days, National Review online dropped her column. (And Horowitz, to his credit, picked it up for FrontPage.) But no one, to my knowledge, has bothered to point out that her formulation was prescient—right up to the eerie moment in April when Ari Fleischer was dodging questions about the evangelicals camped on the Iraqi border, poised to Christianize the Muslim infidels.

Ann Coulter may have committed "treason" against conservative good taste. But she's done the rest of us a favor. She has exposed the often empty semantic difference between the "responsible" right and its supposed "fringe."

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Sam Tanenhaus, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is the author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. He is currently at work on a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

I keep reading Tanenhaus's article, trying to figure out the supposed commonality between the "responsible right" and the "fringe"? I just don't see it. Tanenhaus does make clear that "dirty politics" is practiced by both the left and the right. For example, McCarthy wrongly and wrongfully smeared many innocents with charges that they were communists, and FDR wrongly and wrongfully trumped up criminal charges against some political opponents. How is that relevant to the Cleland race? Cleland wasn't wrongly or wrongfully accused of being a sympathizer with the nation's enemies; he also wasn't wrongly or wrongfully subjected to trumped up criminal charges. What Cleland was subjected to, really, wasn't anything 'dirtier' than the sort of rhetoric that Tanenhaus engages in when he associates Reagan with the John Birch society, or the political opponents of Cleland with McCarthy. Of course, Tanenhaus practices his 'dirty politics' the intellectual way, by "indirection and innuendo." He's tactful. Isn't he, though, still McCarthyite--isn't it enough to be playing the same game? His fundamental point, so far as I can tell, is that his politicial opponents are like McCarthy, and by indulging in this rhetoric--though tactfully--hasn't he outed himself as a McCarthyite?

--Thomas

(To reply, click here)

…it wasn't all that long ago, then, that simply calling someone a conservative wouldn't have ignited a bar brawl. it used to be that a conservative could at least be mistaken for a reasonable human being, one who formulated his positions on the basis of logic and not the feverish whispers of his inner-demons. if you are a liberal, you used to have to work to establish that your opponent was an extremist, a rogue conservative operating at the margins of political thought--and not only that, but an "extremist's extremist!" not any more. no, now it's simply enough to point to ann coulter--who everyone knows is nuts, right? i mean, we can just assume it, can't we?--and say "see? she's just saying what all the others are thinking. there is no 'right' or 'far right' or 'far far right.' there are just those who know the code-speak, who can hide their hatred, and those who cannot." it's an amateurish approach to rhetoric, but it works. after all, if all liberals were, say, cynthia mckinney, i'd never have to listen to anything any of them said. i'd never have to confront them in open debate, and form genuine responses to their positions on the issues--in fact, to do so would be degrading. why demean myself by arguing with such obvious fools?

--locdog

(To reply, click here)

She is being vilified from the left, right, and center. She must be crying hard . . . all the way to the bank. Her schtick is one of the oldest sales techniques in the business. Just like old Joe McCarthy and many others before her, she sells a brand of extremism precisely because it sells. She is to political commentary what the phony faith healers ("out demon spirits") are to evangelism. I'd be willing to bet dollars to donuts (Krispy Kreme, please) that she would change her tune in a heartbeat if could sell more books by doing so. Eventually, she will fade into the background as people grow weary of her brand of outrage and search for new and improved versions to excite and inflame the spirits. And the beat goes on. .

--PubliusToo

(To reply, click here)

The best way to read Ann Coulter: put everything in the voice of Mr. Burns. A lifetime's worth of pleasure awaits you.

--CaptainRonVoyage

(To reply, click here)

(7/25)

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