STEVE ALMOND, an essayist and author of short fiction, leads readers of the New York Times on a bracing guided tour of his own anxious liberal mind. Mr Almond cops to a taste for the indignation and smug superiority right-wing cable and talk-radio so reliably provokes in him. "I fume at the iniquity of Pundit A and laugh at the hypocrisy of Candidate B and feel absolved—without ever having left my couch," Mr Almond says. "It's a closed system of scorn and self-congratulation". The problem, as Mr Almond sees it, is that this easy, idle indulgence only empowers the conservative punditocracy. "The demagogues of the world, after all, derive power solely from their ability to provoke reaction," he writes. "Those liberals (like me) who take the bait, are to blame for their outsize influence." I found this avowal of responsibility refreshing for about 30 seconds, until I realised Mr Almond was operating on a condescending false assumption. Obviously, the conservative millions who daily tune into Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are to "blame" for their influence. Mr Almond's infuriated eavesdropping has nothing much to do with it. That's the false part. The condescending part is the idea that liberal attention is America's principal source of cultural oxygen. Without it, the right can only choke on its own poisonous hot air. Here's Mr Almond's proposal for sealing the conservative ghettoes:

Imagine, if you will, the domino effect that would ensue if liberals and moderates simply tuned out the demagogues. Yes, they would still be able to manipulate their legions into endorsing cruel and self-defeating policies. But their voices would be sealed within the echo chamber of extremism and sealed off from the majority of Americans who honestly just want our common problems solved. They would be marginalized in the same way as activists who rant about racial purity or anarchy. Rush Limbaugh would be a radio host catering to a few million angry commuters, not the alpha male of conservatism. Fox News would be a popular fringe network, not the reliable conduit by which paranoid hogwash infects our mainstream media. In this world, it would be much harder to mislead people because media outlets would shift their resources to covering the content of proposed legislation, the exploding role of corporate influence in our affairs of state and the scientifically confirmed predicaments we face as a species.

Talk about playing into Rush Limbaugh's hands! The doctrinaire right positively thrives on the aggrieved sense that cultural arbiters—those haughty "liberal elites"—have conspired to write them off as rude bumpkins. Mr Almond not only sincerely proposes a conspiracy to marginalise certain conservative voices, but also feeds the right's fertile lie that talk radio and Fox News don't count as "mainstream" media! But they are mainstream. In many places, right-wing media dominates the alternatives.

Mr Almond's skill as a fiction writer is evident in his deft creation of a narrator who is torn by competing impulses. He writes:

The most insidious effect of our addiction to right-wing misanthropy has been the erosion of our more generous instincts. At least for me. I've come to regard all conservatives as extremists, a mob of useful idiots plied by profiteers, rather than a diverse spectrum of citizens, many of whom share my values, anxieties and goals.

I especially like how our "more generous instincts" have been worn away by "right-wing misanthropy". That's good! Then, having confessed a failure of sympathy, and having earlier called for restraint in the face of "the seduction of binary thinking", Mr Almond hastens to repeat his team's tendentious good-guy/bad-guy narrative:

I'm not trying to soft-pedal the very real pathologies of the modern conservative movement. The rich and powerful have clearly found in the Republican Party a willing collaborator. They've spent billions peddling Americans a failed theology of deregulation and lower taxes that is designed to foster and protect obscene wealth, not to serve the vast majority of our citizens. Thanks to the Supreme Court, the coming election will mark an unprecedented infusion of corporate propaganda into the political bloodstream.

So says a man who claims to be "overrun by moral uncertainty, bewildered by the complexity of our planetary crises" and envious of the right's capacity for doctrinaire confidence. Good literature is life's contradictions writ small.

Dueling narratives aside, Mr Almond goes wrong in supposing that the cultural and political influence of deplorable falsehoods would vanish, more or less, if only the reasonable people would agree to ignore the unreasonable people. This sort of thing doesn't work for ostriches, and it won't work for us. Politicians and policymakers with real power over our lives frequently take cues from the outlets Mr Almond would like to see shunned, not only because these broadcasters help frame the American debate, but because they reliably channel their audience's pre-existing sentiments. Refusing to rebut, satirise, or even acknowledge the arguments and assumptions aired daily on Fox News is simply to let their influence grow unchecked. At the same time, the futile effort to put a third of the country under quarantine would only promote the further segregation of media along partisan lines, and further exacerbate the partisan polarisation behind increasingly acrimonious and gridlocked government.

Reason may be too feeble to overcome the deep-seated drive to see ourselves always as warriors of light beating back the darkness of our backward foes. But it's not so feeble that a cogent case against a bad idea cuts no ice. If bad ideas were fires that only blazed brighter when doused, we'd still be applying leeches, jailing usurers, burning heretics, and trying to make things go away by ignoring them.