Page 30 - American Conservative September/October 2015

Style
So it’s ironic that in the 25 years since the USSR went poof, and especially in the dozen-plus years since 9/11, the American right has increasingly ad- opted the style of the old Soviet Union, starting with the znachki. Reagan didn’t wear a flag lapel pin―not when debating Carter, not when debating Mondale, not when negotiating with Gorbachev. Outside the circus atmosphere of a political convention, virtu- ally no one wore flag lapel pins back then. Nowadays they’re nearly compulsory in political circles and are a common enough sight on everyone from newsread- ers to sportscasters to talk-show hosts: a society-wide assimilation of nationalist kitsch worthy of the USSR and, accordingly, so perfunctory as to have meaning only in absence.
Then there’s the pure, uncut tovarishch talk of “you’re a great American,” the salutation Sean Hannity exchanges with favored guests and callers on his radio show. His book covers, too―with their abundance of reds, whites, and blues, and titles like Let Freedom Ring and Deliver Us From Evil―are enough to make one appreciate the graceful understatement of old So- cialist Realist propaganda.
And one can’t avoid mentioning Fox News when discussing Orwellian uses and abuses of language. The mock-heroic “Fair, Balanced, and Unafraid” and
“No-Spin Zone” are splendid examples of Ministry of Truth doublethink, insofar as you’re supposed to believe them and not believe them at the same time: believe them because they proclaim noble ideals and not believe them because if you’re a typical Fox News viewer you tune in precisely because you’re sure to encounter a gratifying and unembarrassed partisan- ship—sometimes known as spin—delivered with pa- triotic-hued backdrops, exhilarating denunciations of enemies of the state both without and within, and of course, flag lapel pins.
Part of Fox News’s charm, however, is that the network has set itself up as a kind of government in exile―defending the faith on a cable redoubt from which it can conveniently deprecate as un-American anything the actual American government does or doesn’t do. Hence Fox’s sensibility: a heady cross- purposing of Radio Free Europe and old-school Vre- mya. This seeming paradox, though, has roots that predate the Eisenhower administration, as Mary Mc- Carthy, confessed anticommunist, noticed in 1952 in that year’s response to the country’s perennial Red anxieties: “The strange thing is that this current in- doctrination for democracy has very much the same tone―pious, priggish, groupy―that we objected to in the Stalinism of the popular-front period.” The
30 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
Michael Hogue