Narrowing of the American mind?

Narrowing of the American mind?
Mark Mardell
BBC News

MSNBC, a cable news channel with a leftish slant has parted company with Pat Buchanan, the veteran conservative who ran for president in 2000 on a third party ticket and tried for the Republican nomination twice before that.

He had been a commentator on MSNBC for a decade.

The channel says he has been fired because of views expressed in his book, Suicide of a Super Power, which contains chapters on "The End of White America" and "The Death of Christian America".

On his blog, Pat Buchanan says he has fallen victim to blacklisters. He says he does think homosexuality is unnatural, but implicitly denies he is racist.

I haven't read the book, but judging from extracts it is easy to see how his pungently expressed anti-multiculturalism could be seen as racist.

But I do know the sort of views he is expressing are shared by many American conservatives who think their culture is under attack (just look at the comments on his blog, if you don't believe me).

It probably isn't good for democracy if these people feel their views can't be expressed in public.

But this isn't really about censorship or about fear on the right of a huge liberal conspiracy in the media.

Conservative views that seem very far to the right by British standards are all over the place - from blogs, to right-wing talk radio, and above all on Fox News

Trapped in the box

You can't be in America long before you hear people bemoan the death of a more bipartisan past.

To an extent this is piety, but sometimes the split in the media makes America feel like it is dividing into two armed camps.

There is a grave danger for American democracy that the two parties not only can't agree, they can't even discuss.

Left and right live in their little ghettos of the mind, unwilling to listen to anything that doesn't reinforce their own views. If you only hear what your opponents are thinking through the warp of second-hand caricatures, then there is no chance of understanding their point of view.

Thinking gets trapped within a very narrow box - one that often bears little relation to problems in the real world.

It would be sad if the silencing of a maverick has made this worse. It is always better for both your mental and political health to throw things at your TV or radio, than nod sagely as it confirms your prejudices.

While I enjoy reading Mr. Mardell's views on American politics, I disagree with him on the point or removing Mr. Buchanan will in any way limit meaningful political dialog. Some exerts from the book that got him fired:

"And as the faith that gave birth to the West is dying in the West, peoples of European descent from the steppes of Russia to the coast of California have begun to die out, as the Third World treks north to claim the estate. The last decade provided corroborating if not conclusive proof that we are in the Indian summer of our civilization."

"Mexico is moving north. Ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, the verdict of 1848 is being overturned. Will this Mexican nation within a nation advance the goals of the Constitution—to “insure domestic tranquility” and “make us a more perfect union”? Or has our passivity in the face of this invasion imperiled our union?"

"Not until the 1960s did courts begin to use the Fourteenth Amendment to impose a concept of equality that the authors of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, The Federalist Papers, and the Gettysburg Address never believed in. Before the 1960s, equality meant every citizen enjoyed the same constitutional rights and the equal protection of existing laws. Nothing in the Constitution or federal law mandated social, racial, or gender equality."

"Our intellectual, cultural, and political elites are today engaged in one of the most audacious and ambitious experiments in history. They are trying to transform a Western Christian republic into an egalitarian democracy made up of all the tribes, races, creeds, and cultures of planet Earth. They have dethroned our God, purged our cradle faith from public life, and repudiated the Judeo-Christian moral code by which previous generations sought to live."

Yeah, I heard a little about this. Pat has some....really right-wing views bordering on the nutty side imo. I mean they fall somewhere between Strom Thurmond and the KKK. He got into some trouble back in the late '80s about gassing the jews or something like that. I was surprised to see him on a network like MSNBC. What bothered me at the time was that I was afraid people from the left would listen to Pat and think that's what most Conservatives are like.

Dennis324 wrote:Yeah, I heard a little about this. Pat has some....really right-wing views bordering on the nutty side imo. I mean they fall somewhere between Strom Thurmond and the KKK. He got into some trouble back in the late '80s about gassing the jews or something like that. I was surprised to see him on a network like MSNBC. What bothered me at the time was that I was afraid people from the left would listen to Pat and think that's what most Conservatives are like.

I hope most of their viewers were able to distinguish between the views of the average conservative and those asserted by Mr. Buchanan. It does make you wonder why they hired him in the first place.

Bryant wrote:
It does make you wonder why they hired him in the first place.

To prove that they were inclusive and not as hard-core left-wing as everyone says they are?