Still More on Juan Williams

The decision by NPR to fire Juan Williams continues to churn the waters, and I find myself thinking more about the trajectory of American liberalism (and conservatism too).

On the Guardian website, Michael Tomasky has a blog, and he steps up to defend the folks at NPR .

As was the case in my analysis , he thinks that the deeper issue concerns the role Williams played at Fox News, itself an intolerable fact that legitimates the (to his mind) intrinsically illegitimate network.

Here is how Tomasky assesses Juan Williams’ moral character:

If you’re any kind of liberal at all, even in the softest and most non-political possible sense, it’s basically an indefensible thing to do. Fox News wants liberalism to perish from the face of the earth. Going on their air on a regular basis and lending your name and reputation to their ideological razzle-dazzle is like agreeing to be the regular kulak guest columnist at Pravda in 1929.”

Wow. Juan Williams is akin to someone giving cover to the mass murder of the Soviet system?

Tomasky is surely right about aspects of the conservative movement, which is shrill and traffics in denunciations. Last year I heard a speaker announce: “Barack Obama hates America.” Last month Forbes magazine published a nasty smear by Dinesh D’Souza that tried to link Obama to African anti-colonialist diatribes.

There are many other examples of conservative ardor that turns into a Jihad against liberalism, as in the notion that Obama wants socialism. At present, nobody of political significance in the West wants “socialism,” and to say so seems to me little more than political hyperventilation.

I rarely watch Fox News, in large part because I do not have a TV. But what little I have watched leads me to believe that some of the shows are shrill, participating in the sort of hyperventilation that has more to do with the animal spirits of politics than social reality.

All true. Yet after twenty years in academic life, I’ve been struck by the fact that so many liberals take it as given that conservatism involves racism, stupidity, and mean-spirited selfishness.

As a result, I’m increasingly convinced that American liberalism is in trouble. No conglomeration of elite opinion can govern a democracy if it demonizes a significant portion of the population. Something like 40 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservatives, the largest group by a significant margin (the rest are split between liberal and undecided).

Of course, the same may end up being true of American conservatism, which cannot govern if it blacklists people because they had liberal beliefs and sentiments.

But I don’t think conservatism is in trouble, at least not yet. Tomasky denounces Juan Williams for his role on Fox. At this point, I haven’t read any conservatives denouncing Ross Douthat for his role at the New York Times , which certainly lends credence to their claims to be fair and balanced. Come to think of it, the criticism comes from the Left. And it sounds a lot like Tomasky’s criticism of Williams: the NYT shouldn’t give legitimacy to the sorts of views Douthat represents by allowing him onto their pages.