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I have grown weary of Sam Tanenhaus. Which is too bad because I started out a big fan. I really enjoyed his Whittaker Chambers biography, and I have been looking forward to his biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., but his journalism leaves something to be desired. Apparently, he is the type who takes conservatives seriously as a subject only to mock and deride them in the end.

His latest opportunity to do so is a smarmy little piece on Ann Coulter and her new book Treason.

Here are some highlights:

Coulter’s slurring of Democrats?from Harry Truman (soft on communism) to Tom Daschle (soft on Iraq) ?has set off a howling chorus on the right. David Horowitz, Andrew Sullivan, and Dorothy Rabinowitz, among others, have been sternly giving Coulter history lessons, dredging up (once more) the anti-Communist credentials of Cold War liberals like Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey . . . But this is yet another case where the dumb public is right. Coulter’s shocking book is not shocking at all. Nor is it novel. It is merely the latest in a long line of name-calling, right-wing conspiracist tracts . . . Coulter is closer to the truth on the big question, McCarthy’s actual place in the conservative pantheon. For many years he was precisely the GOP folk hero she says?a pivotal figure who invented the inside-the-Beltway insurgency that has been the party’s staple for half a century now, currently embodied by flame-throwers like Tom DeLay . . . Ann Coulter may have committed “treason” against conservative good taste. But she’s done the rest of us a favor. She has exposed the often empty semantic difference between the “responsible” right and its supposed “fringe.”

It is hard to know where to start. But the irony is that in bemoaning the actions of Coulter, Tanenhaus paints with exactly the same brush.

First of all, he fails to outline any kind of definition or even broad concept of what he means by “the Right.” Notice the people he mentions as critics of Coulter: David Horowitz, Andrew Sullivan, and Dorothy Rabinowitz. Are these the same types of folks who were part of the McCarthy’s fan base? No, obviously these are people not traditionally considered part of that set. These are people who moved right in response to the over-the-top rhetoric and politics of the New Left and the anti-anti-communists. The excesses of the sixties and seventies drove them to the right politically. So by failing to clarify what group of people or ideas he is talking about, he forfeits clarity. You can’t meaningfully compare “The Right” over the last fifty years when the composition of that group has changed dramatically. At that point you aren’t talking about the same people anymore.

This leads to the second problem, he fails to distinguish between the different type of people on the right. As I have mentioned in the past, there are different types of conservatives (or people on the right) and different goals at different times. There are intellectual conservatives, political conservatives, social conservatives, literary conservatives etc. Some of these groups over-lap some do not. On top of this the McCarthy issue had a large cultural component as well. Blue collar mid-westerners, for example, might have supported McCarthy more than East Coast elites regardless of party or ideological perspective. Even those lines were often blurred. Heck, McCarthy was close friends with the Kennedy clan (Bobby worked for the Senator).

All of this ruins Tanenhaus’ cute little story, however, so he ignores it. Which is a shame because it hides the real reason Coulter’s critics are speaking up: they are afraid she will muddy the waters and smear them by association. Horowitz considers the communism beat his teritory. If Coulter comes in and steals his thunder and poisons the debate with her over heated rhetoric, it will be even easier for Horowitz to be dismissed as just another right wing nut. This is his sister souljah moment. That is a great deal more plausible an explanation than the one the Tanenhaus offers.

Another explanation, and one that describes my feelings, is that many conservatives believe that words and history are important tools not to be abused and stretched in the name of partisianship. They realize that in the past they have been caught in the guilt by association smear. State’s rights really means racism, opposition to affirmative action equals racism (get the picture?), pushing tax cuts and favoring welfare reform means hatred of the poor, immigration reform means xenophobia, the list goes on and on. Of course the quintessential smear is that anti-communism (or anti-terrorism) means a witch hunt that tramples on civil liberties. The liberals use of McCarthy solidified this point in many people’s heads. They realized that over-zealous and sloppy movements could backfire, setting back the cause instead of moving it forward. Tanenhaus seems oblivious to the fact that people on the right might have learned something from the last fifty years. Rather, he seems to assume that they are one monolithic group, the same today as yesterday. Coulter takes today’s looney left and paints everyone with that large brush, Tanenhaus is really just moving in the other direction.

If those on the Right find Coulter annoying it is most likely because she drowns out the more nuanced and balanced points they are trying to make not because she is brutally honest or reveals their true thinking. I guess it is too much to hope that a writer of Tanenhaus’ caliber would look past this kind of “false consciousness” BS and provide some insight into actual history. But of course if he wrote that he might not find his bylines in publications like Slate and Vanity Fair.