I enjoyed this little article on the seeming end of political debate. I especially found the point about how the Limbaugh/Coulter/O'Reilly complex really hasn't seemed to expand the conservative base to be interesting, but that isn't their goal, of course. A charitable person would say they exist to facilitate base mobilization--keeping reactionaries in a constant state of nervous tension is important when you're depending on them to go to the polls. When given the right stimulation, they will vote reliably. Much harder to convince those moderate Republicans to really get out to vote for the GOP--if such an inducement were easier than convincing the wingnuts to turn out, then the GOP would be as moderate as Richard Nixon today. The calculus might change, of course, if the Democrats manage to capture the center for a decade or so and riling up the base isn't enough to win elections, and I think that's highly likely to happen. After all, the Limbaughs of the right aren't bringing people into the right wing, are they? And you can only lose so many when you try to win 51% victories all the time.
Now, do liberals do this sort of demonization thing as well? Certainly, although there is a significant difference here. Liberals at least are willing to take most conservatives at their word when they are say that they want to improve America. Right-wingers do not do so. They suspect liberals of having all sorts of secret motives and schemes--a sure sign of an extremist group if ever there was one. Sure, you might hear a liberal say that the Iraq War is over oil instead of George Bush's self-stated "freedom agenda" or the nonexistent WMDs, but Bush's freedom agenda does not extend to friendly-but-repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, among others. This is argumentation that comes from, you know, reasoning. Saying that liberals will do anything to destroy America is little more than hysteria. Coulterian books that make such arguments are usually just laundry lists of perceived (and frequently erroneous) slights, designed to deepen readers' existing prejudices.
In a greater sense, though, debate has become scarce because we Americans have convinced ourselves that we can never afford to be wrong about anything, ever. To this end, we have constructed elaborate institutions to shade every event to conform with our own ingrained realities. Conservative talk radio is about confirming an all-encompassing cosmology that simply does not map onto the real world. And it's in demand because certainty is in demand, even if the certainty is illusory.
