Political thought control is alive and well in right-wing America

By Thomas Fleming
20th February 2012

Here in the Land of the Free, the Conservative beehive is all abuzz over the cancellation of Judge Andrew Napolitano's television show on the FOX Business Network.

Judge Napolitano's hard-hitting analysis of American security since September 11 has made him very popular both with libertarians and with anti-establishment rightists.

While the network and the Judge insist that the cancellation is due to poor ratings, conspiracy theorists are convinced that the FOX is reacting to one of Napolitano's commentaries in which he more or less described the American regime as a two-party state that creates and manipulates public opinion in order to maintain and increase its power. It doesn't matter who wins elections, he argued, since candidates never attempt to carry out their campaign promises.

I do not pretend to know why Napolitano's show was cancelled, but I do know that his comments cannot have ingratiated the Judge with either the Republican Party or the media establishment. In pointing out the lies of George Bush and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Rick Santorum, he was not playing by the rules. If he goes on very much more in this vein, he will disappear into the obscurity of a newspaper blog.

This is what I do not understand. If Napolitano is serious in his argument, then he must have known that the party-state will not permit him to say it publicly, even on an unfrequented corner of cable television. The "system" can only be perpetuated if a sufficient number of Americans are persuaded that the shadow-boxing matches staged by the two parties are actually contests between principled opponents, that there really is a choice between the ideology of CNN and the ideology of FOX.

Hard as it is to believe, many - perhaps most - Americans who think at all about politics really are born little liberals or little conservatives. Otherwise intelligent Conservative do think that Ronald Reagan cut the size of government; educated liberals persist in believing that Barack Obama wants to help the middle class. The conservative commentator Joe Sobran used to speak of the liberal hive that was forever buzzing the same slogans without actually taking part in a conscious conspiracy. What he failed to note - until it was too late - is that the conservative hive is no less conformist than the liberal hive.

The hive has been an appropriate political metaphor since at least Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. From the late Karl von Frisch, however, we have learned how bees manage their little polities. Honey bees communicate the location of flowers by engaging in complex dances. If one of them makes a slight innovation in the dance, the other bees sting him to death. That is what happened to Sobran, metaphorically, and it will happen to Napolitano if he does not learn some discretion.

Political thought control is more severe today than it was 50 years ago, but it has always been a feature of political parties. The Marquis of Halifax noted the emergence of political parties in the late 17th century. (He also called them by a more accurate name: factions.) "The best party," he observed, is but a kind of conspiracy against the nation," and added: "It is like faith without works, they take it as a dispensation from all other duties."

Parties depend on a caucus system that imposes a discipline on the members who must submit or face punishment. In the United States, John C. Calhoun watched with horror as the leaders of the Democratic Party--Martin Van Buren in particular - began to crack the whip even on distinguished statesmen. Since Van Buren's day, America has been a two-party regime that punishes dissidents such as Calhoun himself, Robert LaFollette, George Wallace, and Pat Buchanan (recently fired from MSNBC).

Wallace was a corrupt politician with many flaws; nonetheless, knew the score when he declared, "There is not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties." In the four decades since Wallace was shot in 1972, the value of the dime has been eroded by inflation to two cents, but even that two cents is greater than the differences between Barack Obama and any of the Republican candidates except Ron Paul.