BILL MOYERS: You write in here that they're not simply in retreat, they're outmoded. They don't act like it, you know?
SAM TANENHAUS: They do and they don't. What I also say in the book is that the voices are louder than ever. And I wrote that back in March. Already we were hearing the furies on the right. Remember, there was a movement within the Republican Party, finally scotched, to actually rename the Democrats, "The Democrat Socialist Party." This started from the beginning. So, the noise is there.
William Buckley has a wonderful expression. He says, "The pyrotechnicians and noise-makers have always been there on the right." I think we're hearing more of that than we are serious ideological, philosophical discussion about conservatism.
BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the fact that the news agenda today is driven by Fox News, talk radio, and the blogosphere. Why are those organs of information and/or propaganda so powerful?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, there's been a transformation of the conservative establishment. And this has been going on for some time.
The foundations of modern conservatism, the great thinkers, were actually ex-communists, many of them. Whittaker Chambers, the subject of my biography. The great, brilliant thinker, James Burnham. A less known but equally brilliant figure, Willmoore Kendall, who was a mentor, oddly enough, to both William Buckley and Garry Wills. These were the original thinkers. And they were essentially
philosophical in their outlook.
BILL MOYERS: Well, what does it say that a tradition that begins with
Edmund Burke, the great political thinker of his time, moves on over the years, the decades, to
William Buckley, and now
the icon is Rush Limbaugh?
SAM TANENHAUS: Well, in my interpretation it means that it's
ideologically depleted. That what we're seeing now and hearing are
the noise-makers in Buckley's phrase.
