Of all the hobbyhorses that the right has jumped on this year, perhaps one of the strangest is their crusade against volunteerism. Their latest salvo against community service comes against iParticipate, a week-long initiative by the Entertainment Industry Foundation, a Hollywood charitable group, to promote volunteerism in storylines and public service announcements in over 100 TV programs. Seems fairly innocuous, right? Not to some conservatives:
But while the project has found widespread support in Hollywood, the fact that it dovetails with President Barack Obama’s call for national service has fueled suspicion in some conservative circles that iParticipate is an effort to prop up left-wing causes.
Twitter users have posted messages complaining that the initiative is an abuse of the public airwaves. Writers on the blog Big Hollywood, part of the conservative news portal Breitbart.com, noted that iparticipate.org’s database of volunteer opportunities includes postings from Planned Parenthood and groups focused on ending global warming. (The database — powered by a nonprofit Web platform called All for Good — also includes listings for pro-life organizations and the conservative group Tea Party Nation.)
On his show last night, Glenn Beck joined in the fun:
[I]s it just a coincidence that all of this falls into line with President Obama’s Corporation for National and Community Service and call for more service and volunteerism?…It’s almost like we’re living in Mao’s China right now.
The assault on iParticipate continues the year-long war conservatives have been waging against community service. Earlier in the year, they trained their fire on that pernicious program, AmeriCorps, with the Examiner claiming that President Obama’s expansion of it had a “strong odor of creepy authoritarianism.” American Conservative magazine warned, “This is part of a long series of Democratic Party efforts to create pretexts to commandeer more of people’s lives.” Beck, as he is wont to do, went further, taking Obama’s call for a “civilian national security force” out of context and asserting that Obama’s bolstering of AmeriCorps “is what Hitler did with the SS.”
This smearing of volunteerism is, of course, deranged. One would think that everyone could agree that Americans devoting time and effort to community and national service was an unmitigated good that transcended ideology. (Indeed, just this weekend, Obama appeared with former President George H.W. Bush at Texas A&M in a joint celebration of volunteerism.) But the blind hatred of Obama — and his community organizing past, which Sarah Palin sneered at during the Republican convention — has led some on today’s right to oppose the seemingly uncontroversial. One gets the feeling that had Obama been an oncologist instead, these same folks would now be waging the War on the War on Cancer. Unfortunately these days, such inanities are simply the new normal for American conservatism.
