Means and Ends

There is an excellent piece by Frank Rich in today's New York Times on right-wing rage and the way the conservative media enables it.

I have always thought that what lies at the heart of the ideology of modern conservatism is a confusion of ends and means. Essentially the right wing, or at least their demagogues in the media, feel that the ends always justify the means. What they fail to understand is how the means are implicated in the ends. If your end is, say, “freedom,” as our last president so often intoned, then restricting the privacy rights of your citizens through warrantless wiretapping is not the appropriate means. “Freedom,” in this case, ends up meaning very little.

This is more than mere hypocrisy. The conservative talking heads have taken this, now, to such an extreme that they are starting to devalue huge swathes of the English language (this is what George Steiner complained had happened to the German language in the wake of Nazism). What does it mean when “tyranny” and “fascism” are used to describe not restrictions of citizens’ rights, but extensions of those rights? What does it mean to decry “taxation without representation” months after taking part in a free election? Ultimately, in the mouths of the ideologues on the right, these words do not mean anything any more, except “anything we don’t like.” They continue to talk this way because they neither understand nor care what these words mean. If it hurts their enemies and helps their allies, they do not care if the words, with which they describe their ends and which are their means to those ends, mean very little in the end.