Conor Freidersdorf is Not Ready to Take on Mark Levin

I’ve been watching from the sidelines as some of my favorite bloggers have taken turns swatting The Atlantic’s new “conservative” blogger, Conor Freidersdorf, like a beach ball at a Jimmy Buffet concert. If you’re interested in their posts, and I do recommend them, just to get a taste of Freidersdorf’s general writing style (if a young Thurston Howell III had been a blogger, well, there you go) and to read some good stuff from other writers who aren’t taking the left-wing Danegeld, then you can find them here:

Conor vs Stacy McCain.
Conor vs Donald Douglas.
Conor vs Dan Riehl.

Conor seems to have a singular dislike for Mark Levin, the talk show host, lawyer, and author whose latest book is dominating the New York Times bestseller list like Kobe Bryant dominated the Orlando Magic. I can understand why Levin doesn’t turn Freiderdorf’s crank, really. He’s blunt. He yells. He defends American ideals, especially those of liberty and capitalism, without the customary hang-wringing and layers of caveats about our past sins.

Okay. I get all that, really. I admit that Levin’s style gets to be too much for me as well sometimes. When that happens, I change the station. Not Freidersdorf, though. He writes a lengthy blog post wherein he tries to explain that Levin does “violence to a healthy public discourse”. No kidding. Actual honest-to God violence.

Well, I can’t let that rest, can I?

Since Freidersdorf said he wanted to address only the substance of Levin’s show, I’ll stick to only addressing the substance of Freidersdorf’s post. And, to further restrict myself, I won’t bring in the mountain of work Levin’s done on the radio in the past, which is something Conor should have done, especially as he is impugning the entire body of Levin’s work.

In the end, it’ll won’t matter whether I assail his style or his substance nor whether I use Levin’s own work to prove his depth and breadth of thought on the radio. He’s not ready to go after a heavyweight like Levin on either front. Heck, he’s not even ready to go after an amateur, self-educated conservative like me.

Here’s the particular comment Freidersdorf chose to Fisk.

MR LEVIN: Let me tell you what I think you’re doing, Mr. President. You want this economy to crash. You want this currency to crash. Because what a magnificent opportunity to rearrange and remake society once its basic institutions have failed. That’s what you’re up to. I’m the only one with the guts to say it, because I know history. I know economics. I know your mentors. I know what you’re doing. You have a huge chip on your shoulder. And a really sick philosophical point of view. That’s where you’re taking us.

Well, wow. That’s pretty out there, right? At least that’s what Conor (I intend no disrespect by using his first name. It’s simply easier to type and since I’ll be using it a few more times, I’d rather attend to my argument than my typing) would have you believe.

As it happens, I am a fiscal conservative. I criticized President Bush for reckless spending, opposed the Obama Administration’s auto-bailout actions, and regard President Obama’s decision to plan long term spending that drastically increases our debt and deficits as deeply irresponsible. This opposition doesn’t require me to question President Obama’s motives. His critics on this matter need merely to argue that he is wrong on the merits.

Conor’s right. He isn’t required to question the President’s motives, but he’s hardly restricted from doing so. Indeed, you can make an argument that the President’s motives explain his behavior. Courtroom lawyers do this all the time quite successfully and Levin, who worked at a deputy solicitor in the Department of Labor and as a private attorney, would certainly be familiar with the tactic.

Perhaps all the President’s critics need to do is question the merits, but that’s strictly a matter of opinion. It’s hardly the slam-dunk Conor says it is. Levin has made a career out of persuasion and his methods reflect his knowledge and experience just like Conor’s reflect his knowledge and experience. More on that last bit later.

Instead Mr. Levin tells his audience, against all logic and evidence, that our current course is owed to a President who wants the economy to fail. Never mind that lots of Democratic lawmakers, economists, and pundits share President Obama’s policy prescriptions, that his response to the fiscal crisis garnered some support from Republicans, or that even unimpeachable fiscal conservatives like Megan McArdle and Jim Manzi reluctantly went along with major portions of his economic policy (precisely because they thought that inaction risked provoking a global economic meltdown). Do all these folks also desire economic meltdown?

If you missed that little use of ipse dixit in the first sentence there, let me point it out to you. Conor asserts that Levin is arguing “against all logic and evidence”, but what does he offer as proof? Sure, some Republicans have agreed with some parts of the President’s economic policies (though it would be helpful if he offered us a link or two so we could see if for ourselves), but some (and I would argue, the majority) have not. Even McArdle and Manzi oppose far more of the Obama economic plan than they support.

It’s also interesting to me that the two examples Conor used also happen to be writers at The Atlantic. I’m not besmirching either McArdle or Manzi, but I wonder if Conor reads anything outside his own employment bubble. His argument would be much stronger if he could have found someone well-known for their conservative economis positions such as Lawrence Kudlow, Gregory Mankiw, or Keith Hennessey.

Regardless, Conor’s argument doesn’t work and it’s more than a tiny bit dishonest. The distance from “reluctantly” agreeing with some of the President’s plan to a full endorsement of the whole plan that you might get from Paul Krugman is considerable. I doubt that Conor would argue that because James Bond drove around in expensive cars and stayed in expensive hotels like Auric Goldfinger, he also shared the villain’s desire to steal all the gold from Fort Knox.

The truth of the matter is that President Obama is a collectivist and a statist. He believes that our economy is best run by the government and every economic policy he’s put into place has been a step in that direction. Capitalism and collectivism can’t live in the same country for very long, though. One of them has to give and since we’re a capitalist country right now, it’s going to take a pretty catastrophic failure of our economy to weaken capitalism enough that it can be replaced.

Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself, or Conor.

Imagining that President Obama wants the economy to fail so that he might remake society fundamentally misunderstands the man and his agenda. We are agreed, I assume, that the President wants to implement a sweeping, expensive re-imagining of the health care system? That he wants to implement policies to reduce carbon emissions by taxing or limiting output? That he wants to increase spending on basically the entire progressive wish list? And that the sorry fiscal shape of the United States is a hindrance, not a help, even today?

So why would a President actively pursuing that ambitious, costly domestic agenda — one that Mr. Levin himself acknowledges and rails against — want to bring about a fiscal catastrophe that would guarantee its sidelining? There is also the elementary point that President Obama is going to fare much better in 2012 given a recovering economy that he can claim to have rescued than a flailing economy in an utterly collapsed society. As an amoral Republican campaign strategist, ignoring the misery fiscal collapses cause, it is obvious what you’d want to run against.

Alternately, the President could claim in 2012 that the fundamental underpinnings of capitalism have failed, despite his best efforts to buttress him and that he’ll need another four years to replace failed capitalism with a system that works. Can Conor really not imagine the President making such an argument and, given his considerable personal charisma, getting some serious traction with it? I guarantee you that the MSM will help carry his water. I also have my doubts about whether the Republicans will have their act together enough by then to mount an effective counter-argument, especially since the one Conor would use is exactly the one he’s going to expect and will have had four years to argue against.

Should it surprise us that cursory inspection reveals this particular Mark Levin monologue to make no sense? Well, the evidence Mr. Levin offered for his claims afforded a clue. What leads him to his peculiar conclusions? “I know history. I know economics. I know your mentors. I know what you’re doing.” What does this possibly mean? Is there a historical example of an American president intentionally destroying the economy? (Or is there some foreign leader Mr. Levin has in mind?) Can knowledge of economics tell us anything about Barack Obama’s motives? Do any of President Obama’s mentors favor the crash of America’s economy and currency? Every question heightens our doubt that Mr. Levin has any idea what President Obama is doing.

I don’t think “cursory inspection” means what Conor thinks it means. I have, in just a few paragraphs, shown that Levin’s argument does make sense, even if you don’t agree with it.

I’ll go one step further by cluing Conor in to the logic in Levin’s explanation. Let’s establish a few stipulations about the President first.

1) He is not an idiot.
2) He knows enough history to know that collectivism has always led to ruined economies (Cuba, North Korea, Soviet Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, etc) but suffers from the basic progressive belief that they only failed because they were executed poorly.
3) He knows that FDR’s economic policies prolonged the Great Depression but believes it did so because they were too small.
4) He has a rather large ego.

I don’t think he’d disagree with any of those. But if those are true, then it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that the President knows he has to crash the economy for a short time, a couple or three years, in order to put his plans into place because, as I said, capitalism and collectivism don’t play well together (see the growing tensions in the Chinese economy for a good example).

Let’s also not forget the matter of the President’s mentors, a point which Conor only gives fleeting attention. He asks if the President’s mentors really want our economic system to fail. The answer is an unequivocal “yes”. Remember that the President launched his political career in the living room of two people who killed people in order to bring down our government. He has worked for ACORN, founded and run by Wade Rathke, who was mentored by the radical George Wiley whose tactics brought the city of New York to within seconds of bankruptcy. Wiley studied at the feet of Richard Clower and Frances Piven who developed the strategy used by Wiley and Rathke. Here’s a summary of the strategy from Clower and Piven themselves.

By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.

Does Conor doubt that, while President, Obama has encouraged such protests? Does he forget the white-hot rage against workers at AIG, stoked by the President’s own comments? Has he forgotten the chaos inside our electoral system caused by ACORN just this past November? How about the incendiary rhetoric of the President’s spiritual mentor of twenty years?

Mark Levin hasn’t forgotten, and they all give him ample evidence to suspect that the President is using the same tactics that his mentors used. Even if Conor doesn’t agree with Levin, he’s dishonest if he doesn’t at least acknowledge that Levin has reason to believe what he does.

If Conor can find a flaw in the reasoning, he’s welcome to let me know and we can hash it out. However, he can’t very well deny that Levin’s explanation that he knows history and economic lead him to a similar conclusion. I think Conor’s playing dumb here on purpose because if he grants that Levin at least has a logical train of thought from which he’s working, his entire post falls apart at the seams.

I know this has gone on for quite a while, but stick with me. I want to make one more point.

In debates, it is advisable to assume the most charitable things possible about your interlocutor’s frame of mind. Here I cannot say whether the monologue above reflects Mr. Levin’s true beliefs, or qualifies as an emotional outburst he didn’t really mean, or is a calculated effort at propaganda–nor can I say which option would reflect best on his character and intelligence, though I urge the reader to decide for yourself and assume that most charitable explanation.

Here Conor demonstrates that he doesn’t understand Levin at all. Remember when I said earlier that Levin’s background and experience has largely been as a lawyer? Well, that’s important. Conor believes that Levin is engaged in an Oxford-style debate. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Levin is arguing as a lawyer, assuming that he is in an adversarial relationship with another lawyer (which — surprise! — Barack Obama is) who will do whatever he must to win his case. In Conor’s debating world, motives don’t matter. Indeed, as Conor says repeatedly, it’s bad form to bring the other person’s motives into the debate. However, in a courtroom, motive matters. A lawyer must address motive because it answer the most important question: why? While an expert debater always assume the best about his opponent, a lawyer may assume the worst (especially if he wants to prove the worst).

Conor is much better off trying to persuade people that Levin’s adversarial style is not the best thing to use right now. At least he could make a convincing argument for that (and I’d not be entirely unsympathetic). However, Conor chose to attack the substance of Levin’s argument and did so without any ammunition at all. He says we should object to Levin “politely and rationally”. I agree. Perhaps Conor could help us by doing more than making bald assertions that ignore the real and rational reasoning behind Levin’s arguments.

It’s one thing to have someone like me tear gaping holes in his arguments. Imagine what would happen if Levin ever got hold of him.

Tags: Conor Freidersdorf, Conservatism, Mark Levin