Ann Coulter’s success, I suggest, can be largely traced back to this psychological need. Her writing is so indulgently one-sided that, if you’re disposed to agree with her, you’ll find yourself as one shadow boxing before the TV screen, cutting and thrusting as she lands blow after artful blow on her dazed opponent. Never mind that the opponent is a straw man of her own construction. This is a sport, and must be appreciated on its own terms.
Now, for my tastes, Coulter goes too far and ruins the fun. That was my sense at any rate last summer when I went through her Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America. For her the French Revolution, with its radical and naive utopianism, is the prototype of everything that has gone wrong since then, from Lenin to MSNBC. And that simply asks too much. Yet, I must say I really did enjoy her tour through the French Revolution, as she recounted in great detail just how turbulent and savage it was. It served as a nice corrective to my sophomore year survey of European history, which presented the Revolution as a generally benign and rational dawning of egalitarianism. Having done some sporadic reading on the subject since then, I find myself more inclined to side with Coulter.
(I must add that without my Kindle I would have been denied the pleasure of her writing entirely, as I would be loathe to visibly tote her trademark décolleté from playground to playground. But there’s a downside to this, too. How many conversations have I not entered into because my Kindle’s anonymous leather cover has hidden my purpose?)