Lattes, Limousines and Lefties: How Conservatives Pigeonholed Those Poor Liberals

NY Times (Week in Review) ^ | 3-2-03 | Geoffrey Nunberg

[Pharmboy]

The announcement that two Chicago venture capitalists will finance a liberal talk radio network met with the skepticism that might greet the formation of a pro badminton circuit.

Conservatives said that liberal dogma couldn't withstand the rough and tumble of talk radio (which is "ultimately about ideas," as Thomas Sowell put it), the implication being that the left has no thinkers with the gravitas of a Limbaugh or a Liddy.

Others said that liberals just can't be funny (the left has no wits like Limbaugh and Liddy, either), while the blogger Antic Muse said there are funny liberals, but they're working in Hollywood.

Still others said liberals won't engage in demagogy, liberals are afraid of offending their constituencies, liberals are boring policy wonks, liberals are too nuanced.

But hold it right there. If we're really looking to understand the success of right-wing talk radio, we needn't go much further than people's readiness to start sentences with "Liberals are . . ." and to go on to describe liberalism as something between a personality disorder and a market segment.

That's what the radio hosts batten on. They understand that their listeners respond more immediately to attacks on the phonies up the block than on more remote objects of indignation. Not that the hosts and callers don't have a deep antipathy to Saddam Hussein, criminals, illegal immigrants and the United Nations, but those miscreants tend to serve only as the pretext for denunciations of the people who coddle them — the libs, as Mr. Limbaugh calls them.

The familiar tone of that epithet has more to do with creating an "us" than a "them"; it sets the show's audience off from the clueless who haven't cottoned to the menace in their midst.

Talk radio didn't invent the negative branding of liberals. It began to emerge about 25 years ago, around the time when words like "lifestyle" and "yuppie" first entered the general vocabulary, as marketers replaced sociologists as the cartographers of the American social landscape. Phrases like "Volvo liberal" and "the chablis-and-brie set" were already well established when the liberal Republican John Anderson made his presidential bid in 1980.

Those labels are different from older descriptions like "limousine liberal," which evoke the charges of class treachery that conservatives have leveled at affluent liberals since the days of F.D.R.

The new vocabulary makes consumer preferences the most telling signs of personal values, so that it seems natural for Richard Lowry, editor of National Review, to talk about the " `tall skim double-mocha latte, please' culture of contemporary America."

Some conservatives have tried to take that connection seriously. David Brooks of The Weekly Standard has tied urban liberals' fondness for expensive coffee drinks to their predilection for inconspicuous consumption. They avoid the traditional luxuries of "vulgar Republicans," preferring to spend extravagantly on items that used to be cheap, like coffee, bread and water, or on products that seem to answer to practical needs, like Volvos or hiking boots.

Yet you can find a Starbucks outlet and a Volvo dealership in Franklin County, Pa., the locale where Mr. Brooks has done his weekend ethnography of pro-Bush America, not to mention other red-state bastions like Lubbock, Tex., Cheyenne, Wyo., and Murfreesboro, Tenn. However those retailers choose their locations, it isn't by looking for concentrations of liberal guilt.

Phrases like "latte liberal" and "Volvo liberals" have nothing to do with what anybody actually buys — they're plays on pure brand aura. Liberals are exactly the sort of people you would expect to drink an expensive, milky coffee concoction and to drive a safe, practical car from socialist Sweden.

The success of that branding strategy extends well beyond opinion columns and talk radio. In major newspapers, the phrases "middle-class liberals" and "middle-class Democrats" are used with about the same frequency. But "working-class liberals" is almost nonexistent; it's outnumbered by "working-class Democrats" by about 30 to 1.

It's as if you can't count as a liberal until you can afford to indulge yourself.

By contrast, the press talks about "working-class conservatives" and "working-class Republicans" with about the same frequency. In fact there are many more mentions of working-class conservatives than of working-class liberals, which creates a strange picture of American political attitudes.

You see the same discrepancies when you substitute terms like "black," "Hispanic" or "minority" in those patterns. As the media tell the story, minorities and members of the working class can qualify only as Democrats; liberalism is a mind-set restricted to the white middle class.

But branding is a game that two could play, if liberals cared to leaven substance with style themselves. In their efforts to bond with the working class, conservative pundits can be as risibly phony and pretentious as anything that Hollywood or the Upper West Side has to offer. You think of Bill O'Reilly describing himself as a "working-class guy" — this from an accountant's son who grew up in Levittown, N.Y., the El Dorado of the postwar middle class.

Or listen to Ann Coulter, who grew up in New Canaan, Conn., and her paean to the New York's other boroughs, as reported in The New York Times: "Queens, baseball games — those are my people. American people."

Then there's Mr. Lowry, a University of Virginia grad, who admits to having no familiarity with motorcycles, but nonetheless holds that he would rather be governed by 2,000 motorcyclists than all the Volvo drivers in the United States.

That's a plight that the privileged pundits of the right can't escape: their politics turns them into traitors to their demographic. You have to feel a certain sympathy for all those Yale and Dartmouth grads at National Review and The American Spectator who feel obliged to eschew chardonnay and latte in favor of Budweiser and Maxwell House. One way or the other, modern politics makes fashion victims of us all.

[Tacis]

Liberal is an old term that evolved from "commie-liberal," not a benign concept. Commie-liberals were in NYC, the US State Department, and wherever Soviet-loving, anti-American, elitist media types congregated. Their objective was the destruction of the US and its replacement with a soviet style paradise where they would be in charge.

Senator McCarthy stopped them cold but was then destroyed by them and their liberal media. The commie-liberals still control the old time media, newspapers and non-cable TV.

The key aspect of the liberal media is that it represents failed concepts and must lie about those failures. Liberal media must lie about the folks who it relies on for political power, the democrats. Thus, when the the democrats tell the liberal media to lie about the personal corruption of one of its leaders, the media follows orders. And, this is why any attempt to build a viable liberal talk radio/TV cable position is doomed to failure.

Liberal talk radio hosts will be allowed to mouth only the lies of the dems. If most people wanted lies, they would watch CBSNBCABCCNN or read the Times. The classic is Begala. He is a pure liar; nothing he says is not for a propaganda purpose. So, there is absolutely no valid reason to watch or listen to him.

The beauty of liberal talk radio is that it has to fail. On one hand, the host must first be a dem liar. But, OTOH, if he is not and tells the truth on only a few issues, he will have to become a non-liberal radio host. Honesty is the flush to liberal s**t.

[Pharmboy]

Thanks for the link.

In college, one of my coaches (fencing team) was a Phillipino American. We would occasionally set up a badminton net in the gym and play. No one could come near this guy. He truly made it an exciting game. I notice that the sport is dominated by Asians (there is one guy from Denmark).

[Pharmboy]

The key aspect of the liberal media is that it represents failed concepts and must lie about those failures.

Please see my tagline. I think we both get it.

[hillsborofox]

Liberalism, at it core, is about raising taxes.

And those taxes are for free abortions for everyone. It's for the children, after all!

[Howlin]

For a man who wrote a book entitled The Way We Talk Now, he has a horrible time getting his point across. Frankly, I didn't understand very much of this article at all.

This poor man doesn't realize the reason there are no "funny" liberals is because nobody laughs with them, they laugh AT them.

[ricpic]

"Can anyone get the point this linguist is attempting to make?"

He's trying to expain away the hostility to liberalisam as a reaction to liberal snobbery or to liberal tastes, in short, it's a matter of style. Who knows, he may be shallow enough to believe his own argument.

Confiscatory taxation, the elevation of group entitlements over individual merit, the assault on private property rights in the name of the snail darter; the list could go on and on. The liberal assault on liberty is the real reason why the very word itself has become anethema to so many.

Maybe it's for the best. The liberal style, it's disconnect from reality, will render liberals less and less relevant in the serious times we have entered.

[Dan from Michigan]

Let me spell it out for this guy.

The problem is this
Rich and upper middle class(wannabes) liberals are the worst type of hypocrite. They also aren't much fun to be around. They blast 'greed', etc, while they have more money than anyone else around. These are your Hillary Klintons.

They are a bunch of phonies, and that's why the charges stick. Us "hicks" can see through your crap.

[Eala]

Conservatives said that liberal dogma couldn't withstand the rough and tumble of talk radio (which is "ultimately about ideas," as Thomas Sowell put it), the implication being that the left has no thinkers with the gravitas of a Limbaugh or a Liddy.

He almost gets it... and then misses the target completely.

The reason "liberal talk radio" won't succeed is that liberals don't operate that way. They live in a world of "command structure" -- they tune into NPR, for example, (where's the feedback there?) in order to understand what they should be thinking today.

Conservatives, by contrast, tune into to talk radio in order to share, compare, argue ideas in "the rough & tumble" with the Limbaughs and Liddys.

This is a broad sweeping generalization, but I think it explains the differences, and why "liberal talk radio" just won't succeed,

[demnomo]

Levittown was hardly the El Dorado of the working middle class. It was, by all accounts, a modestly priced, clean, safe place to raise ones children. I knew a woman who spent her childhood there. She said that it was great, but nothing fancy. Limousine liberals looked down on the residents and derided the architecture as being nothing more than "little boxes" built by capitalist developer swine. Me thinks that the author is trying to turn Bill Reilly's upbringing into something more than it was. Liberal obfustication. "See, they do it, too!"

[davisfh]

I've heard this guy a few times on "Fresh Air." What he
really needs is a lot of fresh air. As Laura Ingraham is
fond of saying, "This guy is a real pant-load."

[NittanyLion]

The author misses the boat. There's a sizable segment of conservatives who enjoy spending hours discussing/listening to politics; their liberal counterpart just isn't there. They are the people watching soap operas and talk shows all day.

[eddie willers]

I opened this thread because I saw that Howlin was replying to you on the Latest Posts page and figured it must be worth a look.

As I read it I kept thinking, "Does it have a point?" and as I got to the end, I was still puzzeled and thought, "Is it just me?"

LOL....it wasn't just me.
Liberal Radio is doooooomed.

[Montfort]

The problem for liberal talk shows is that selling liberal content in our current media market is like selling sand in the Sahara.

[Yardstick]

Actually, Liddy is one of the best educated, most intelligent, and sharpest radio hosts around!

I guess it's different strokes for different folks. Liddy is OK, but Rush is more organized and consistent in his thinking, more insightful, and his wit has a finer edge. There's just more to chew on in the things Rush says, IMO.

[Reactionary]

The point he seems to try to make is that the marketing guys have taken over, that the political labels we all use are social "constructions," that since this has happened we're all being victimized.

In other words, the Leftists are flailing about trying to find a reason for the success of talk radio and other outlets. The best they can come up with is that the corporate marketing guys are pulling a fast one.

Encouraging, isn't it? :)

[300winmag]

Levittown was hardly the El Dorado of the working middle class. It was, by all accounts, a modestly priced, clean, safe place to raise ones children. I knew a woman who spent her childhood there. She said that it was great, but nothing fancy. Limousine liberals looked down on the residents and derided the architecture as being nothing more than "little boxes" built by capitalist developer swine.

Levittown was hated by the liberals because it allowed the "little people" to leave the tenements and move out into the suburbs they wanted for themselves. They never got over the prosperity of the 1920s, and were dismayed that "ordinary people" could start to afford their own cars, and houses. Liberals intended the lower classes to remain in the city (preferrably in government housing), and take mass transit to their city-oriented jobs. The Great Depression and World War II stopped economic growth for the "little people", and liberals got to thinking that was the natural state of things.

Liberals are elitists who want to slam the door on everyone below them, and then dictate how the underclass should live. A Volvo or a SUV is their natural right, but if you or I buy one, ours destroys the planet, while the liberal's doesn't.

And if you notice, I'm using a lot of "liberals are...". And it fits!.

[MaeWest]

the libs, wanta hog it for themselves....Conservatives get thrilled at poor people getting rich, we encourage it, we admire it, we want it!!! And want it for whomever can get the grit to earn it.

Yes, and that's because we aren't 'mean sprited'.

[woofer]

Phrases like "latte liberal" and "Volvo liberals" have nothing to do with what anybody actually buys — they're plays on pure brand aura. Liberals are exactly the sort of people you would expect to drink an expensive, milky coffee concoction and to drive a safe, practical car from socialist Sweden.

My all-time favorite euphemism of a radical liberal: Watermelon.

Green on the outside. Red on the inside.

[The Electrician]

But branding is a game that two could play, if liberals cared to leaven substance with style themselves.

Again he trots out the old lie about liberals being too concerned with substance, policy, etc. to play the unthinking sloganeering, jingoistic games that the right employs via talk radio. Substance over style? Ever hear Bill Clinton speak/lie?

[P.O.E.]

Liberals may think they're funny, but they mostly are just good at sitting back and writing "nyah-nyah" insults, and haven't the stomach for debate.