Why all this fuss about Ann Coulter? Truth is, in life–in bars, in restaurants, in offices, on the phone–we all use vulgarity. When CPAC invited Coulter, it was simply empowering someone who talks without the veils of spin and PR and plastic discretion that politicians must learn. Yet the very skills that make a good polemicist like Coulter–provoking people with passionate, authentic opinion–are considered a handicap during a presidential campaign. CPAC took a bold step by inviting a conservative firebrand like Coulter. The best conservative spokesmen thrive on a discourse built in opposition to the mainstream, allowing conservatives to commune in ways not permitted by media and political gatekeepers. The vigorous dialogue promoted by people like Coulter is probably closer to real conversations than politicians’ sanitized talking points. In the end, campaigns prefer discipline over authenticity, while many conservative activists do not. So Republicans should focus on tapping the energy of people like Coulter, while managing their passion.

Am I wrong to defend Ann Coulter like this? You bet I am. But then so is The Nation wrong to defend the Edwards bloggers in just these words. (See “Bloggers on the Trail.”) Of course, that was last week. This week The Nation is scandalized by Coulter’s remarks.

One of the Edwards bloggers famously complained about George W. Bush’s “Christofascist base.” An intellectually high-end version the conservative-fascist comparison was offered by Alan Wolfe a few years ago in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Peter Berkowitz reminded us of this recently in “Excommunication for thee…,” while pointing out how odd it was that Wolfe should compare conservatives to Nazis, and then demand Dinesh D’Souza’s excommunication for calling the left “the enemy at home.”

Wolfe’s response to Berkowitz was weak. Wolfe made no attempt to uphold his initial broad comparison between conservatives and fascists. Nor did Wolfe deny that such a comparison would involve him in hypocrisy. Instead, Wolfe claimed only to have been talking about a few specific people–like Ann Coulter–and hyped minor qualifications in his original comparison of conservatives and fascists, as if those qualifications proved that Wolfe had never linked conservatives and fascists at all.

Berkowitz makes short work of all this in a reply to Wolfe at TNR’s website today. Powerful as Berkowtiz’s points are, the strongest part of his piece is the string of quotes from Wolfe’s initial essay. In context, its easy to see that the qualifications in Wolfe’s initial essay were simply setting up the main point–which was that modern American conservatives have an awful lot in common with fascists.

What to make of all this? I’ve already argued that Peter Wood gets in right, in his new book A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now. There’s plenty of anger out there on both the left and the right. Yet there’s also a difference between the two sides. The right is embarrassed by the new vulgarity, as we see in the move by conservative bloggers to repudiate Coulter. The left, on the other hand, seems at home with New Anger, as we see in The Nation’s defense of the Edwards bloggers, and in Wolfe’s failure to recognize the troubling nature of his conservative-fascist comparison.