Decline and fall watch

Has the movement launched by Ronald Reagan really devolved to the point where one of its most influential grassroots gatherings features Ann Coulter denouncing a Democratic presidential candidate as a "faggot," to cheers from the audience? Is this really the kind of people we want to be, or to be associated with? How, exactly, do we conservatives protest against the kind of bigoted garbage that Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan were upchucking against Catholics and other Christians if we accept Coulter's offensive shtick? Ann Coulter has been very funny in the past, but this is indefensible, and one wishes she would either grow up or shut up. Her act is way beyond its sell date -- except, it appears, to young conservatives of the Romanian Coal Miners Brigades (you know, the unquestioning shock troops who could always be reliably summoned by Ceaucescu to swarm into the city squares to beat dissidents with their shovels) -- who, as The American Conservative put it not long ago:

The young men and women of the Right aren’t reading much Richard Weaver these days—nor much Robert Nisbet or Russell Kirk, to name two other seminal conservative thinkers critical of modern warfare. The time when Young Americans for Freedom wore badges blazoned with the slogan “Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton” has long passed. Now College Republicans parade in shirts proclaiming “George W. Bush Is My Homeboy.” The campus Right has almost always been more activist than intellectual, just as the wider movement has been more political than cultural. But where once students were at least familiar with the names Kirk and Weaver, or Mises and Nock, today they look to Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter for guidance. They’re little acquainted with the wisdom of the contemporary Right’s founding generation, and it shows.

Hard to imagine Russell Kirk (or Ronald Reagan, for that matter) standing before an important conservative gathering (or any gathering), and denouncing someone as a "faggot." That tells you something about the state of the Right today.