Does O’Reilly know that he’s on television? Isn’t he ashamed of building an arbitrary strawman and passing it off as a valuable point? Does he not mind losing control on the air? Of course not – he’s fighting a culture war.
That's not facetious. One major influence on my thinking recently is Robert C. Tucker’s excellent essay “The Dictator and Totalitarianism,” which was published as a chapter in his 1972 book The Soviet Political Mind. He argues that certain kinds of populist movements require a “war personality” to lead them, an individual whose psychology is uniquely oriented toward political combat – fomenting division, identifying and sometimes inventing secret enemies, and projecting onto those enemies motives so vile that they begin to look more like demonic caricatures than human beings. Such a person is prone to brandishing his finger in the face of his opponent and, seething through his teeth, accusing him of wanting anarchy.
Bill O’Reilly is an exceedingly wealthy, famous and influential man. That he has been so successful in selling this rhetorical poison for so long is frightening – it’s a testament to the volatility of our current political climate that he’s able to muster such a huge audience of malcontents.
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