Hannity no-awarded
Even some conservatives don’t like Sean Hannity.
Fox News Channel star anchor Sean Hannity will no longer receive the conservative Media Research Center’s William F. Buckley Award for Media Excellence at its September 21 gala, sources familiar with the situation tell CNN.
Buckley, the founder of the National Review, who died in 2008, was hailed in his day as “arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States.” Giving an award in his name to Hannity — a pugnacious talk radio host who has shared conspiracy theories on his popular cable news show — had caused hand wringing among some conservatives.
It also caused distress among Buckley’s family — in particular his only child, best-selling author Christopher Buckley.
A source familiar with the situation tells CNN that Christopher Buckley “expressed great dismay” at the announcement that the award would go to Hannity, who has spent a great deal of time insulting conservative intellectuals on Twitter, particularly since he became a strong supporter of Donald Trump.
Left and right is only one tribe. Another is intellectuals and anti-intellectuals aka “populists.” The latter can often trump the former.
After the initial announcement by MRC that Hannity would receive the media award, many conservative writers and intellectuals expressed dismay. Perhaps most notably, conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote an entire column about it, decrying the move as evidence of an overall trend towards anti-intellectualism among the conservative movement.
“If we have reached the point where rank-and-file conservatives see nothing amiss with giving Hannity an award named for Buckley, then surely there’s a Milton Friedman Prize awaiting Steve Bannon for his insights on free trade,” Stephens wrote. “The floor’s the limit. Or, in Hannity’s case, the crawl space beneath it.”
Good. I despise anti-intellectualism myself, so I approve this message.
Yes, but, took them long enough to notice and speak out about it. I mean, “a trend”!? A trend???
After, what, thirty, forty years? Anti-intellectualism in movement conservatism is not a “trend.” It’s standard operating bullshit.
Yep. Always has been, really. McCarthyism; HUAC; their predecessors…
Really? What a shock! (I’m currently reading Why Truth Matters, co-authored by one OB, and that seems to be the overall message of that work….)
Movement conservatism has two faces (in several senses, yeah, but in this case)….
There’s the one facing the rubes, “the masses”, where you feed them raw meat and get them into the ballot boxes and screaming on talk radio. That one’s been anti-intellectual pretty much forever, certainly going back to the printing press, before it was “movement” conservatism at all. Now it’s Hannity; back in the day, it was pogroms then the KKK.
But there’s also the verbose, pretentious Buckley tradition, that draws in the college students who swallow conservatism but appreciate a well-formed sentence and being able to look down on people on the basis of money or education. They’ll be the ones fondly recalling Burke, Montesquieu, Chesterton, or at least Locke, Smith and Rand. (Whether or not they’ll be representing all or any of them well is another thing.)
Being able to look down on the Hannity sorts – or their audience, certainly – is a crucial part of being a Buckley-style conservative.
But there isn’t much room for the Buckley crowd to quietly run things and take the Hannity mob for granted as mere ballot box fodder nowadays. For one thing, there’s been a generation of superficial thinkers who have been drawing in the college students and leaving them with Steve Bannon, Christina Hoff Sommers and Milo Yiannopoulos as (kittens help them) intellectual icons, so the “thoughtful” conservative wing is penetrated by the mob. For another, whether that generation is even pretending to think, it’s of an age to be managing things, and it’s been raised as Limbaugh Babies.
Jeff, the problem is that the left has its own two wings, one of them equal in anti-intellectualism to the right wing. These are the homeopaths, the naturopaths, the “spirituality”, the “science can’t answer all questions so they can’t answer any questions”, the “I feel x, therefore I am x…as long as x is defined within my own preferred unexamined socially acceptable terms” crowd.
When I was getting my environmental science doctorate, I found that certain aspects of that field (particularly the environmental philosophers and environmental journalists) were very infested with the “science is bad” sentiment. They defined all science as physics, all physics as bombs, and all science as sucking up to the teat of Big Government, Big Pharma, and Big Whatever the current Big fashion is…We had a grand total of ONE of those in our environmental science program, and she didn’t finish the program. The other “environmental studies” programs were fairly swimming in them.
Both sides need to do a lot of housecleaning, and decide what they stand for. Then the rest of us can mop up the mess.
iknklast @ 3 – heh – good point.
[…] a comment by Jeff Engel on Hannity […]