He literally scares me, but not in the way you read me. I don’t need guns to deal with fans of Lou Dobbs any more than I do to deal with the hordes of lefties who scare me, from Ward Churchill to Al Sharpton. What an odd leap for you to go from one to the other I might add. If you want to make this a conversation about the joys and merits of gun ownership I’d be happy to, though I doubt we disagree about much.

He scares me because of what he represents — in his own small way — for the future of our politics and our culture. First, his schtick is clearly designed in no small part for ratings. Appealing to fear and conjuring bogeymen for such purposes is not admirable in my opinion. The fact that the supposedly high-minded folks at CNN approve of it and call it “news” is a worrying sign as well. His rhetorical routine is to imply and insinuate bad motives to people who disagree with him and suggest that unseen forces are out to destroy (or “sell out”) real Americans. I cannot grasp why you are so cavalier about a rise in anti-free market attitudes, as if it’s not much different from a rise in hemlines.

But what I was specifically getting at is that populism married to economic policy is a recipe for disaster. A little, at the margins and on very specific national security issues, is often healthy. But when it breaks out of those areas it takes on the logic of the cancer cell and corrupts everything it touches. What scares me is that we are seeing the blurring of cultural and economic populism. I rather like having the GOP be the party of cultural populism but economic (classical) liberalism and the Democrats the party of cultural liberalism (i.e. progressivism) but economic nationalism. I fear that we are moving ever closer to a race to the bottom between the two parties as both sides try to out-populist each other (an argument I made a bit ham-fistedly here. ). I don’t think I will need guns, should my fears be proven right.

As for liking bombast and eye-gouging writing, that’s all fair and I’m hardly the one to throw stones on such things. But it seems to me you’re offering a shadow of argument that I shouldn’t question Farah’s right to call people parasites. surely criticizing such things is also what keeps punditry interesting too. Without a sense of what is out of bounds, nothing is ever controversial.