I remember back when Glenn Beck was a big star with his hugely successful Fox News show. At the time, my father’s girlfriend was dying, and she was addicted to the show. It was obvious that there was a religious aspect to it. She tuned in each day and it was like a gnostic experience to her. She turned on the television, and Glenn Beck revealed secret knowledge to her. He put her entire life’s experiences into a narrative that explained everything. It was a sad end to what had been a fairly interesting life, which included many years going all over the world in a little sail boat.

What makes it most pathetic is that while Beck was a great showman, he had almost nothing with regard to content. He made a great deal out of insights that were not only obvious but meaningless. It was much like watching a child who realizes that “history” has the word “story” in it. While it is true, it also doesn’t tell us much about the word or the world. But Beck was so good at saying it like it meant something, it isn’t surprising that people were fooled. His whole shtick is that any bit of information is just the visible part of the iceberg.

The best example of this was what appeared to be news to him: that Nazism was actually “National Socialism.” This was usually presented very much as Jon Stewart presented him — with intense emotion to the point of stammering. This meant that the actual thing that was terrible about Nazism was that it was a socialist form of government. That wasn’t even true once the Nazis were in power. And this was a major conflict that Joseph Goebbels had — that he felt that Hitler and the Nazi leadership had abandoned that aspect of their movement. Goebbels was a true believer who didn’t understand that it was always and forever about power and only power. (Not that Goebbels wasn’t a truly vile person.)

But it is a curious aspect of conservatives to be so hung up on trivialities. I can call myself George Clooney, but that doesn’t make me attractive. Ideas don’t seem to matter. If my father’s girlfriend appreciated Beck as a gnostic, it is just as true that Beck himself is a gnostic. He has certain set ideas about the world, and by God he is going to find that secret knowledge to prove it. But what’s remarkable is that Beck is hardly alone. There as so many conservatives who seem to be smarter who don’t look any deeper.

A great example of this came out on Monday at National Review — William F Buckley must be fidgety in his grave. Kevin D Williamson wrote, Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism. He noted, “In the Bernieverse, there’s a whole lot of nationalism mixed up in the socialism. He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust.”

Forget that it is normally the left in other countries, and not the right, that most drapes itself in the flag. Because, you know: Nazism was National Socialism. That’s all that matters. Therefore, if you can call someone a nationalist and a socialist, then you must be calling them a Nazi. In other words: the extent of Williamson’s understand of Nazism is found in the term “National Socialism.” It’s shocking.

But of course, as usual for a conservative, Williamson isn’t interested in making any kind of point. He’s acting like a naughty boy at the back of the class who’s laughing about the spitballs he is launching at the teacher. Or perhaps better would be Beavis and Butt-head, “Ha ha! I called the liberal Jew a Nazi! Ha ha!” Pretty pathetic from a publication formed for the express purpose of giving the conservative movement a little intellectual heft.

But this is what conservatism is in modern America. It isn’t serious. It isn’t smart. It is, more than anything, a kind of identity politics where we are good and they are bad — by definition. Nothing else needs to be discussed. There are serious conservatives out there who do balk at this nonsense. But it is a vanishingly small part of the movement. And I can’t help but think that they only continue to call themselves conservative out of habit.

One of Dean Baker’s many complaints about the media is that it reports budget figures without context. For example, it will report some very big number of dollars in Social Security fraud. But given the enormity of the Social Security program, it turns out that all those dollars are a tiny fraction of the program. It isn’t just that it feeds into the conservative narrative that “the government can’t do anything right.” It is more that it simply doesn’t provide the reader with any real information. The paper might as well report, “Fraud in the Social Security program amounted to twiddle dippity doo da widget time.”

I think that most of the dysfunction of our media can be explained simply by the fact that it is lazy. And I’m not talking primarily about reporters here. They do what they are expected to do. They get the story — such as it is — in the time allotted. In the case of putting budget numbers into perspective or finding opposing opinions, it is obvious that these things get dropped because they would slow things down. And this is the case, even when newspapers explicitly decide to change. There was a moment a couple of years ago, when The New York Times made it policy that it would not present budget numbers out of context. And then, almost without missing a beat, their reporters continued to do it.

Glenn Greenwald pointed out a similar situation with The New York Times — and really the entirety of the press, The Spirit of Judy Miller is Alive and Well at the NYT, and It Does Great Damage. As everyone knows, Miller was the most prominent reporter at The Times to facility the White House’s war propaganda campaign. The high point of it was where Cheney’s office released “anonymous information” to Miller; she reported it; and then Cheney went on television, pointing to The New York Times as proving that he was right.

But okay, after the total catastrophe that was the Iraq War, The New York Times admitted its error and turned over a new leaf. They had a new policy that stated when anonymous sources would be used. And the policy is good. But just as with the no-context budget numbers, The Times didn’t even seem to take a break to read the new policy; they just continued to pump out the anonymously source articles like before.

A great example from Tuesday is, ISIS Leader Takes Steps to Ensure Group’s Survival:

Now you really have to wonder what the justification was for giving anonymity to a government official for claiming the official government enemy Snowden is the reason that ISIS is so knowledgeable about our spying. That’s the sort of thing that the government wants leaked, and so something that reporters should know not to provide anonymity about. But regardless, the claim is preposterous. We’ve known for a very long time that groups like the Islamic State are very aware of our spying. Greenwald noted how this is exactly what the government has said about leakers going back at least to Daniel Ellsberg. But more specifically, “The Terrorists™ had been using couriers and encryption for many, many years before anyone knew the name ‘Edward Snowden.'”

But Greenwald documents a series of establishment reporters who took this as proof that Snowden has harmed the United States. Even if you thought that was the case, you would think that reporters would be so vested in the philosophy of the free press that they would respond, “Well, this is the price we pay for the free society.” But instead, they are like fascist apologists.

Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish writer and thinker during the 19th century. He was clearly a brilliant and insightful man. But he was stuck in his Romantic thinking. It is not at all surprising that the Nazis found him most compelling. In On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, he argued that history is just the story of what great men did. I’ve always found this a particularly simplistic take on the world. Did Carlyle really not see in his own time what is clear enough today — that powerful people are usually straightjacketed by their power? That power itself is mostly a illusion that quickly dissipates if it is exercised?

But what’s most interesting about Carlyle is that he coined the phrase “dismal science” to describe economics, “Not a ‘gay science’ [eg, verse writing], I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.” The man could write, there is no doubt about that. But that sentence comes from a curious essay that he wrote in 1849, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” In it, he argued in favor of slavery. And like a good conservatives — always roughly a generation behind his times — this came 16 years after Parliament outlawed slavery.

Now, there is something to what Carlyle had to say. He was highlighting the fact that there was a certain hypocrisy about the end of slavery. For one thing, most people living in England at that time were not doing well. People lived horrible lives despite the fact that they were nominally free. Child mortality at that time in Manchester was 50% for working families. What’s more, the people so interested in freeing the slaves didn’t seem too concerned that former slave areas were (just like in the American south later) recreating a kind of slavery by another name.

None of this means that Carlyle was a good guy. He believed in slavery. He was a total racist who thought that blacks would not work unless they were forced to. And going right along with his theory of history, he thought that they could do no better than be working under the “care” of rich white men. All of this brought about what seems to have been an inevitable break in Carlyle’s friendship with John Stuart Mill, who was rather famous for his abolitionist (as well as many other liberal) beliefs. Mill soon after published his own essay in response, “The Negro Question.”

There was certainly a big difference between them in terms of philosophy. But I think their disagreement speaks to the fundamental difference between a liberal and a conservative worldview. Carlyle was right that it is hypocritical to care about slavery but not the conditions of the poor generally. But that was only an issue for someone like Carlyle himself who didn’t care about the poor. Mill certainly did care about the poor and did various things to try to improve their lot. So ultimately, Carlyle’s argument is only that conservatives shouldn’t care about slavery because they don’t care about people generally.

I don’t find economics to be a dismal science. (In fact, I don’t find it to be a science at all, but that’s a different matter.) What I do find dismal about it is the fact that people use it as an excuse to push policy that they want for different reasons. And as a result, we end up with a lot of economics that might be very interesting and insightful, but which is absolutely wrong in the real world. If Carlyle were around today, I’m sure he could find lots of economists who would provide him with lots of theories to explain why his antidemocratic and classist theories weren’t just the result of his own bigotry and selfishness, but rather necessary due to the laws of economics. And that is indeed dismal.

I am not one of these guys who thinks that if I survived childhood then kids today don’t need bicycle helmets. Just the same, it does seem to me that we have become over-protective. That’s especially true when it comes to nebulous threats. Do people really think that huge numbers of strangers are lurking in the shadows just waiting to abduct their children? The vast majority of the cases are child custody battles. So the over-concern of people about their children’s safety in this regard indicates that as a society, we are highly narcissistic. And often, this is used to abuse children and parents alike.

Take, for example, the case of Laura Browder. She is a Houston single mother and college student. She got a suddenly announced job interview. So she wasn’t able to get a babysitter for her two children — 6 year old daughter and 2 year old son. So she took them to the food court at the mall, where her interview was. She got them some food from McDonald’s, and proceeded with her interview — where she was 30 feet away. Well, someone apparently thought the children were crying, and so called the police. The children were taken into protective custody and Browder was arrested.

It all worked out in the end. Browder got out of jail and quickly got her kids back. I don’t know at this time whether the charges are dropped or whether they will be. Browder did get the job, but after all that, who knows? Job offers are rescinded all the time. But what does this say about our society that this is the way we “help” young single mothers who are trying to make something of their lives? We don’t go and check on the children and help out as we may. You know: it doesn’t take a village; it takes a police department.

At the age of six, I used to walk a mile home from school with my friend George. So there were two (working) mothers who would now no doubt get arrested. Both of us could have had the excellent experience of being raised by literally dozens of foster parents. We seem to now live in a society that cares enough about the safety of children to punish both the children and their parents. But it doesn’t care enough to make their lives better. We can’t spend money on things like universal daycare. But we certainly have unlimited funds for policing and jailcare!

I see this all as the Ann Romney syndrome. Rich mothers are to be applauded for the “tough” choice of staying home and being intimately involved with their children’s lives. But poor mothers must be made to work — and in Laura Browder’s case, also go to college because she doesn’t want to be stuck in her current situation for the rest of her life. It would somehow be wrong to provide poor mothers with the same resources as rich mothers, even though the ultimate result is that rich children have far better lives than poor children.

Meritocracy, my ass!

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig wrote a good article on Friday, Feminists Should Not Give Up on Pope Francis. It is about the repeated liberal complaints that Pope Francis is not turning the Catholic Church into a feminist wonderland fast enough. This includes Sadhbh Walshe, who just four months after Francis became pope, wrote, Thanks for Nothing, Pope Francis. It had the subtitle, “Francis casts himself as a reformer, but his views on women’s roles in the church are as conservative as ever.” It is downright funny, but also sad. It reminds me a little of how we ended up with eight years of George W Bush because many liberals thought that he was no different from Al Gore.

Of course, this kind of thinking is silly. And I’ve been especially disappointed with the New Atheists. Last year, I wrote, Bill Maher Trashes Pope for No Good Reason. With him, and frankly with just about everyone complaining about the pope from the left, the ignorance is staggering. Somehow, the pope is supposed to come into power and change everything the way these people would like. There is no recognition that there are over a billion Catholics who are used to the religion being the way it is. Few of these same critics would be in favor of any political change that was so radical, but they expect it from the Catholic Church?!

Bruenig noted that there are many things that Pope Francis has done that are in alignment with the goals of feminism. For example, his most recent encyclical, Laudato Si, called for women to have more control over how many children they have and when they have them. In that, he was talking about the economics of childbirth and how it is dictated by our economic system. She also mentioned the fact that Pope Benedict XVI was investigating the Leadership Conference of Women Religious for the crime of “radical feminism.” Francis shut down that investigation “in a hail of praise for the nuns and their good work.”

But the main thing is that liberals don’t understand that there are great restraints on what the pope can do:

I think that is the critical thing. And this is where conservatives err as well. Everyone wants to think of the pope as though he were Stalin. But that’s just not true. Conservatives are unhappy, because he is pushing the aspects of Catholicism that are liberal. But those aspects have always been there. It is unrealistic to expect Pope Francis to change the Catholic Church to accept the use of condoms. My problem with Pope John Paul II was not that he was against condoms; it was that he went all over the world telling Catholics that they shouldn’t use condoms — as though that were the biggest thing that Catholics did for God.

From a political standpoint, expecting more from the pope than he can reasonably deliver is extremely bad. The question is not whether Pope Francis is perfect in the eyes of liberals. The question is whether he is better than the options. He looks set to be the most important pope at least going back to Paul VI. Pope Francis is making the Catholic Church better. So when Sadhbh Walshe says “Thanks for nothing,” she’s just being silly. Most people are being silly about the pope. And Francis is just doing his job — about as well as anyone could reasonably expect.