Andrew Golis

Posted at TPMCafe:

As Josh said yesterday, it’s clear that the McCain campaign will finish up the race with a Greatest Hits of their racist McCarthyite campaign. Their bet? The media won’t fight back with enough force to make calling Obama a Muslim socialist terrorist a net negative.

The media sphere proving them wrong would be a victory not just for the Obama campaign, but for society as a whole and the forces of tolerance and rationality broadly. And some people are making an effort.

Louis Hartz wrote in The Liberal Tradition in America of McCarthyism not just as a threat but as an opportunity. He wrote (in 1955):

You can turn the issue of McCarthyism upside down: when as the meaning of civil liberties been more ardently understood than now? A dialectic process is at work, evil eliciting the challenge of a conscious good, so that in difficult moments progress is made. The outcome of the battle between intensified “Americanism” and new enlightenment is still an open question.

It is the same battle we see now.The battle between “intensified ‘Americanism’,” by which Hartz means the kind of rabid nationalism McCain and Palin are now stoking and McCarthy stoked before them, is not a battle between liberals and conservatives. It is instead a battle between demagogues and rationalists, those who would rule through fear and division and those who believe in an enlightened progress.

That’s why Colin Powell’s direct assault on the McCain campaign was so important. Playing his role as statesman, Powell endorsed Obama and highlighted the valour and sacrifice of a Muslim-American soldier, to push back against the forces of “intensified ‘Americanism’.”

So did Campbell Brown last week when she did the same thing by calling bullshit on the same “Muslim” as smear campaign. Brown is insisting that media elites do have a roll in distinguishing between demagoguery and argument regardless of ideology.

WIll there be more Powell’s and Brown’s? Moderate conservatives who will push back against demagogues despite their ideological leanings? Media elites who are willing to take the heat for engaging because they believe rising to the challenge of evil is more important?

That strikes me as the question of the next two weeks.