Stephen Colbert and Bill O’Reilly are feuding again, this time over inequality.
O’Reilly is the liberal-hating commentator for Fox News. Stephen Colbert, newly chosen to succeed David Letterman as host of CBS’s “Late Night,” is (for now) a comedian whose TV persona on Comedy Central parodies O’Reilly. But are they really so different? Colbert is an actor. O’Reilly, though sincerely conservative, is a bit of one, too.
Consider the O’Reilly method. On April 7, O’Reilly laid into a “grievance industry” that “says that America is not a fair nation, that the deck is stacked against minorities, women, the poor, gays, atheists, Muslims — you name it.” Because this was Fox News, O’Reilly did not elaborate whether these grievances had any legitimacy; he merely observed, neutrally, that their ultimate source was the anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s (while failing to mention the civil rights protests that preceded these), which brought about “profound [but unspecified] change.” Less neutrally, O’Reilly said the sixties bequeathed a “culture based on anti-authority” that embraced “political strife … sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.” The implication was that any political protest emanating from the left was just another form of self-indulgent hedonism.
Such griping is so familiar that we tend not to notice anymore that it is not, strictly speaking, an argument. It’s a pose. Grievances constitute an “industry.” The Vietnam War is invoked rather than segregation because it’s socially acceptable to scorn anti-Vietnam protesters but not to scorn civil rights protesters. O’Reilly didn’t point out that he himself opposed the war and took a college draft deferment. O’Reilly’s reverence for Martin Luther King — which he uses as a club to beat up current civil rights leaders — suggests he also supports wholeheartedly all civil rights laws passed during the 1960s. But that went unmentioned, too, presumably because it would have interfered with his purpose, which was to express contempt for social upheaval. He achieved that by, in effect, playing a role – a cartoon conservative, spouting indignation. Only at the end did O’Reilly concede, in passing, that inequality was a problem that needed to be addressed through “intelligent discussion and smart policy changes” that he didn’t specify.
The next night, April 8, O’Reilly went after Colbert.
Colbert had played clips from an earlier O’Reilly tirade against equality, then mocked O’Reilly for saying “The truth is there will never be equality in this world” because different people have different (i.e. unequal) abilities. O’Reilly, Colbert agreed, will “never be as emotionally mature as a toddler or understand how ties work as well as a middle schooler.” Pretty funny and a little bit mean. Colbert also had fun with O’Reilly’s claim that hooliganism by fans at college sporting events is a manifestation of the anti-authority ethic bequeathed by the 1960s. In fact, college students were misbehaving well before that. A new biography of John Updike, for instance, relates (according to a New York Times review) that when he was at Harvard the budding littérateur performed “elaborate pranks that required great mounds of elephant dung and the destruction of cars.” That was back in the conformist 1950s, a full decade before Berkeley’s Mario Savio ushered in a decade of student protest.
Apparently Colbert’s insults stung. O’Reilly answered that “I strongly believe in fighting for equality and also believe institutional bias should be against the law. What I oppose is government trying to impose equality” because that is the road to serfdom (“take a look at China and the former Soviet Union”). Note how what begins as something resembling a coherent argument (for equality of opportunity rather than equality of result) quickly degenerates into right-wing hysteria about the Red Menace.









