Flyover Latte, anyone?
Posted on 03/02/2003 7:34:51 AM PST by 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.
I hope your dog doesn't read your post: s/he will be insulted. ;-)
Sounds right to me.
Flyover Latte, anyone?
Only tracks and trash from illegals sneaking across the border. Coffee over the camp fire still tastes the best.
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