Posted on 01/07/2003 5:50:26 PM PST by sweetliberty
YOU’RE NOT gonna believe this, but the usual Democratic spinners are expending a lot of worry time on how to counteract the well known conservative media. That’s right: the conservative media. Huh? Didn’t that used to be an oxymoron?
These days liberaldom feels itself outgunned by the Rush Limbaughs and all the dittoheads out there on the airwaves. Which is like an armored division worried about a bunch of pesky mosquitoes.
Having the three old networks on your side isn’t enough for some people. (From left to lefter: Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings.)
As if that weren’t enough heavy artillery, there’s the bellwether of the American press, the New York Times, whose only interesting editorials appear in its news columns. And if that’s too mass-circulation for our elite, they can get their mincing orders sotto voce on NPR. The other day, we caught its comprehensive review of late developments on the Korean peninsula since the reckless Bush administration, forsaking the reasonable policies of the Clinton Years, not only noticed that Kim Jong Il was developing a nuclear arsenal but inflamed him further by refusing to reward Comrade Kim for his sense of enterprise by negotiating a Nazi-Soviet-style non-aggression pact with his charming regime. All in all, it was a hoot even for National Propaganda Radio.
It was the New York Times, house organ of American liberalism, which ran this story about the left’s increasingly desperate search for a Rush Limbaugh of its own. After all, it’s already run through James Carville, Paul Begala, Mario Cuomo, Bill Press, and Phil Donahue to no great effect.
The next step, anxious liberals suggest, should be to start up a liberal network of their own. Like this would be something new. Or, as the Timesput it, in typically objective Timespeak, some Democratic bigs suggested "there was room to create a progressive version of Fox News."
When liberals start calling themselves progressives, you know that even they have realized that liberal ideas have lost their cachet. But the libs still aren’t willing to reconsider those ideas, only the packaging. That’s why the same product now appears under an assumed name. ("Tired of faded old liberalism? Try bright new progressivism!’’)
Old gray liberals who ain’t what they used to be may tell themselves it’s only because they haven’t found the right salesman for their old gray ideas. It can’t have anything to do with what they’re selling.
Only now, after losing the presidency and both houses of Congress, does the Democratic Party’s leadership begin to wonder what it’s been doing wrong. Naturally it’s got to be the media’s fault. Wasn’t that what the Republicans used to say all during their dry years?
To quote one Democratic apparatchik last week: "If you start from the premise that the message was right, which we do, then the problem was that it wasn’t getting out to the people." That is, if you start with a mistaken premise, you reach a mistaken conclusion.
Maybe the Democrats’ message was getting out to the people all right, and that’s why the people were electing Republicans. Or is that too obvious a thesis to appeal to these Deep Thinkers?
Some of the same D.T.’s have suggested that what they really need is a think tank of their own. An outfit that would counter the highly successful—and highly conservative—Heritage Foundation. As if the Brookings Institution isn’t enough. It isn’t, of course, but that’s not because of any failure of organization or communication, but because its ideas aren’t enough. And ideas still have consequences.
Unwilling to re-examine their ideas, liberals have taken refuge in conspiracy theories. (Paranoia is the last refuge of losers.) This week’s rumor is that every Wednesday right-wing organizers in Washington like Grover Norquist and Paul Weyrich call all the conservative commentators in the country together, and give them their talking points for the next week. They do it in "back-to-back meetings," to quote the article in the Times,which reads a little like an exposé of the Illuminati.
This kind of story is the newest version of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was so fond of. Of course it’s all nonsense; here at the Dem-Gaz, we don’t get our instructions till Thursdays.
A conspiratorial conservative media? It’s about as credible an undertaking as organizing a convention of anarchists. Of jabbering, idiosyncratic, highly individualistic anarchists. In secret. Can anybody believe all that?
Well, yes. It hasn’t been long since the deciduous Al Gore blamed his troubles on a fifth column in the media. We were all supposed to be getting our orders from the Republican National Committee—trickledown fashion, of course.
Can you imagine the brouhaha if some conservative politician accused the liberal press of being a bunch of fifth columnists? You’d have heard the howls of patriotic outrage quicker’n you can say McCarthyism.
WHAT THE LIBS need is not new organizations but new ideas. If they’re really interested in mirroring the revival of conservatism in American thought, they might remember that once upon a time it was American conservatism that was nothing but a welter of resentments and conspiracy theories, too.
Back in 1958, after still another Republican defeat in the midterm elections, an habitual prophet named Whittaker Chambers looked out on the political landscape from his rundown farm in Maryland and wrote his young friend Bill Buckley: "If the Republican Party cannot get some grip of the actual world we live in and from it generalize and actively promote a program that means something to masses of people—why, somebody else will. There will be nothing to argue. The voters will simply vote Republicans into singularity. The Republican Party will become like one of those dark little shops which apparently never sell anything. If, for any reason, you go in, you find, at the back, an old man, fingering for his own pleasure, some oddments of cloth. Nobody wants to buy them, which is fine because the old man is not really interested in selling. He just likes to hold and to feel. . . ."
The GOP, it is clear by now, snapped out of it. With the coming of Ronald Reagan and maybe, just maybe, George W. Bush, the Republicans are on their way to becoming the people’s party, grotesque as that idea may be to reflexive Democrats. And it is the Democrats, once the party of Harry Truman and Scoop Jackson, who have become so enamored of their pet hates and loves, somehow simultaneously coarsening and softening their ideas, that they’ve set up their own dark little shop, and the old man in back, fingering his resentments, looks an awful lot like James Carville.
Back in conservatism’s stagnant period, Lionel Trilling famously observed in his preface to The Liberal Imagination in 1950 that "in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation (but only) irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." Which pretty well sums up the sad state of liberal thought today.
To change that impression, change the substance: To get some new and better ideas, find some new and better thinkers. How do you get them? Do what the conservatives did at their nadir in the Fifties. All it takes is one each Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley. That is, one literary genius, political artist, intellectual wanderer willing to risk all, and gifted dramatist with a spiritual calling who can write a great book; and one young, spirited, resourceful, generous, intellectually rebellious, classically educated consensus builder who starts a magazine and renews a whole line of political thought. Put the two together, as in those first issues of the National Review, keep the faith, and all the rest should follow in about 30 years.
Good luck.
what they don't understand is the animus that they built for the last 60 years by their control of the u.s. government, the media, and universities.
power corrupts. but they don't understand that.
Don't. Jam a stake through it's evil heart and dump the body on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Regards, Ivan
That's why I suggested it - I figured with the rubbish I saw already there, one dead body wouldn't make much difference.
Unless of course liberalism looks like Jerrold Nadler.
Regards, Ivan
Well, it would be a fitting 10 year anniversary of the other landslide.
And learn to proofread, newbie!
First, get yourself one Great Depression ...
Does that make Bill Clinton their Sauron? ;)
Regards, Ivan
It's true. A friend of mine - a baby boomer who came of age in the 60's - is utterly convinced that most of the media is ultra-conservative, CNN being "mainstream" and FOX news being "fascist." (There is no "left"). No amount of reasoned debate - facts - can convince him otherwise; he's too emotionally bound to this theory. ...And there are literally millions just like him.
That’s easy with this little rhyme:
if you’re out win the prize… have all you clones lobotomized
When liberals talk to a host all they have is anecdotes and slogans. When conservatives talk they are much more likely to know the facts and be able to cite them and argue from them.
The agnostic listeners will not be well impressed. The existing true believers don't matter.
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