Interesting guy.
What if Sarah Palin Were a Brain Surgeon?http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201504/ben-carson-tea-party?currentPage=1By his own admission, Carson's serious interest in Republican politics is rather recent. As a young man, he was a "radical, wild-eyed, left-wing Democrat" who crossed over to the right during the Reagan years. After the impeachment of Bill Clinton, he was so sickened by the hypocrisy of adulterous congressional Republicans that he became an independent. He only rejoined the GOP last year as a matter of convenience. "If I weren't thinking about running for office, I would remain an independent," he told me.
And yet today's GOP has proven to be a comfortable fit. Carson, to be sure, is a longstanding conservative in both temperament and ideology. His message of self-empowerment is part of a black-conservative tradition that dates back to at least the nineteenth century and Booker T. Washington. But Carson—who was understandably busy with his medical career, not to mention his philanthropic efforts aimed at African-American youth—didn't begin paying serious attention to broader issues until more recently. Which, of course, is right around the time that large portions of conservatism went insane. As a result, Carson's ideology of late appear to have been formed in the fever swamps of right-wing websites and Fox News—where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are portrayed as Manchurian candidates sent by Saul Alinsky to undermine the United States. He's taken the same sincere up-by-the-bootstraps message that he once preached to black children and grafted it onto a worldview promulgated largely on conservative talk radio, validating many of the most provocative sentiments popular on the far right by repeating them in his mellifluous tone. He's that rarest of breeds: a soft-spoken demagogue.
Carson is so certain of the rightness of his views that he's practically incapable of admitting error. The controversies he's ignited with his overheated rhetoric are, in his telling, the result of "political correctness run amuck." He complains, "We've reached a point where if you say the word 'slavery' or you say the word 'bestiality,' it's like you've sprayed a fly with Raid—people start spinning, and they just can't function anymore."
On several occasions, I tried to get Carson to concede that his analogy likening the U.S. to Nazi Germany was out of line (he's said that Americans under Obama are as intimidated and afraid to criticize their government as Germans under the Third Reich). But he refused to give any ground. Our longest discussion about the matter came in Jerusalem, in the cafeteria of the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem. We'd spent the previous ninety minutes touring the museum, followed by Carson entering Yad Vashem's Hall of Remembrance and, black kippah atop his head, laying a wreath made of red, pink, and orange poppies that read "Courage and Truth Will Win: In loving memory the 6 million." Given all this, I asked Carson, did it make him reconsider his analogy?
"Not at all," he said. "It makes it even stronger."
