Tag Archives: Center of the American Experiment

Wanted: Conservative Intellectuals With Even a Half-Ounce of Conscience

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With a fourth COVID surge well under way, with Ozark/red state hospitals filling to the rafters with the denying and the dying, I recalled a sad little scene from up in Duluth last week.

Within the modern, reality-averse conservative bubble, there’s a long-standing, self-proclaimed “think tank” called The Center of the American Experiment”. Former Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten is a prominent member of this cadre of, um, deep thinking patriots. Very much like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s cynical and hapless “America First” tour, the Center was having a hard time finding any venue in Duluth that would host their “Raise Our Standards” carnival. That being a kind of faux intellectual barnstorming exercise designed to alert low information parents to the dangers of … wait for it … “wokeness” and Critical Race Theory.

Four Duluth businesses denied The Center’s request to rent space, before they settled on a tiny community center out on Park Point. Naturally, instead of acknowledging that the businesses had as much interest in associating with them as they would a band of travelling Holocaust deniers, The Center touted itself as the victim … “victim, I say!” … of freedom and liberty-hating left-wingers.

Eventually the group, led by attorney John Hinderaker, best known for his role in the conservative “Powerline” blog, made it’s case in front of barely 30 people, several of whom it turned out were Duluth area lefties curious to see what a quack show looks like up close.

I’ve followed The Center from a distance for years, once wrote a profile of Ms. Kersten and attended a luncheon they put on way … way … back to refute liberal, Chicken Little concerns about climate change. At every step along the way my perspective on The Center is as a crew of oddly embittered, borderline sociopathic contrarians. A clutch of people intelligent enough to form paragraphs, disciplined enough to check their punctuation, but so intellectually dishonest they refuse to concede that their whole game is simply the business of being against whatever peer-reviewed intelligentsia and liberals are for.

The aforementioned climate change bash was naked in its reaction to Al Gore … Al friggin’ Gore! … telling us carbon dioxide was bad for our health. What an alarmist! What a woke nanny stater!

Since then and up to now, The Center and Powerline have kept up a contrarian, reactionary drum beat against … well, let’s see … electric cars, COVID lockdowns, tax advantages for wind and solar power, police reform, anything Joe Biden says, equitable taxation of large businesses and especially “wokeness”, seemingly the greatest liberal sin of all.

In the grand scheme of things The Center of the American Experiment barely registers on the Richter scale of conservative cynicism. I bring it up only to offer an example of the kind of people who come to mind anytime someone asks, “Do these people actually believe this stuff, or is it all just another grift?”

With COVID surging among the unvaccinated, largely due to the self-interested cynicism of similar conservative “intellectuals” — people like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, a handful of bow-tied opinion writers, several hundred talk radio hosts, YouTubers and podcasters — their influence is proving fatal, again. This is not to forget Republican presidential “contenders” like Florida’s Ron DeSantis — lately hawking anti-Fauci t-shirts, as his state leads the fourth wave — and South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, the beauty queen-turned-politician most responsible for, at a time last fall, one of COVID’s worst death-rates-per-capita … in the world.

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Whether it be DeSantis, FoxNews hosts, Facebook influencers or the poor little Center of the American Experiment, it is impossible to watch this crowd of allegedly educated adults shovel out misinformation to the chronically aggrieved and not see the ratings, revenue, underwriting and political viability motivating them. Put most simply, it’s all about them getting theirs.

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You hear people say all the time that what this country needs are two — not just one — reality-embracing, fact-based political parties. And this is true. But watching the explosive sewer-flow of cynicism coming from modern conservatism’s so-called best and brightest I’d add that we also need two — not just one — ideological hierarchy that respects ethics, science and logic.

The Edina Resistance and Katherine Kersten

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Judging by the interest in what would normally be a sleepy school board election, The Resistance is alive and fired up in leafy Edina. The town is slathered with yard signs. It isn’t just that there are 12 people running for four seats. It’s also the clear reaction to former Strib columnist Katherine Kersten and a suddenly reinvigorated Center of the American Experiment (CAE).

The latter used to be a deeply ingrown redoubt for what passed for the intellectual right in Minnesota. (It’s run out of Golden Valley.) For years the leader was an amiable guy named Mitch Pearlstein, the sort of character you could have a pleasant and even entertaining lunch with and not feel like you’d been exposed to some mutant toxin. The CAE brought in speakers and held luncheons and generally maintained boiler pressure for the usual conservative shibboleths like “smaller government” and climate change denial.

But as American conservatism began walking further and further out on the plank of talk radio nuttery, the CAE began losing what relevance it had. I mean … eight years of ruinous, disastrous, freedom-sapping Barack Obama rule! This aggression can not stand, man! Whether Pearlstein grew tired of that shtick or simply too old, I don’t know. But roughly a year ago he was replaced by John Hinderaker, best known as the most incendiary (i.e. unhinged) of the attorneys fueling the nationally popular Powerline blog. (The Strib ran a perfunctorily bland PR piece shortly after he took over.)

Hinderaker will forever be remembered for this 2005 commentary on George W. Bush, “It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.” It was typical of both his depth and his lick spittle approach to conservative power centers.

Which is why a lot of people, me among them, suspect Hinderaker tapped some very (very) rich vein of cash to infuse the CAE with enough money to choke Edina mailboxes last month with a remarkably polished magazine, “Thinking Minnesota”, driven by a cover story from Ms. Kersten on “racial identity activists” polluting the traditional curriculum of Edina’s public schools. It was an academic gloss on nakedly distasteful racial fear mongering.

No matter how much Kersten, the CAE and establishment Republicans (most of whom have their toes curled at the very edge of the talk radio, race-baiting plank) try to “intellectualize” and legitimize her message, the fact remains that the targets of her animus are invariably organizations and people with increasing racial and cultural diversity. Rethinking hoary white traditions and encouraging racial/cultural acceptance is like a dagger to her ideological heart.

As everyone watching politics since Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” knows, modern Republican antipathy toward racial and cultural diversity is also a key tactical strategy in suppressing Democratic votes. (Here’s another Strib piece, reporting on the effects of Kersten’s persistent, dog-with-a-bone attacks on a Muslim-oriented St. Paul charter school.)

Anyway, pretty much everywhere you go in unequivocally first world Edina these days people are talking … school board elections. The “Thinking Minnesota” mailing, coupled with a Kersten commentary published by the Strib has given my well-bred, well-educated, upscale neighbors, (I’m none of that), an amphetamine-like injection of resistance/activist zeal. The field of 12 candidates has been parsed down to pro-Kersten and well, “[bleep] Kersten and the horses she rode in on”.

As I say, I don’t know where Hinderaker got the money. Lord knows there are enough well-heeled metro area Republicans to goose the CAE’s prospects. (Climate change denying will always get you a check from Stanley Hubbard.)  Or it could be, as conspiracy-minded liberals like me prefer to think, an example of the Koch brothers tossing the Minnesota bums a dime to both shore up “traditional thinking” on the school board and prep the landscape to reelect Third District Congressman Erik Paulsen. Paulsen being a legislative lightweight ripe for plucking if the Democrats can coalesce around a viable opponent. (“Adult spirits” heir Dean Phillips would seem to have the best shot.)

Defeat of the “Kersten slate” of school board candidates should rightly spook Paulsen.

Down around the bottom line is this: Edina has changed. Once a reliable fortress of white entitlement, the city, while still very (very) white is home to enough brain power and conscience to be disquieted-to-horrified by the corruption and bigotry of the Trump regime and the various apparatuses — (eg: the CAE) — that promoted his pyrrhic victory.

The resistance is lined up for lattes and scones at Patisserie Margo and is saying, “No way! Not here!”