Did Radio Wreck The Right?

Back sometime in the nineties there was a short lived radio program that was anchored around Pat Buchanan, but always had a liberal co-host. Usually Bob Bechel, Bill Press, or Bob Shrum. It was a bit like the old CNN Crossfire, but all light and no heat.

They had to fill three hours against Rush. So they didn't interrupt each other. But instead everyone got to make their full point before the other guy launched a rebuttal. No screaming and yelling either ,so their voices would last the entire show. 100% quality smart debate.

They took a few callers per hour also. And would have guests by phone or in studio. But the best part was the back and forth between guys who really like and respect each other. They loved arguing politics, and their love showed.

I became Pat's biggest liberal fan. Disagreed with him everyday. But what a winning personality that guy has. I really have missed that side of him until recently. Rachel Maddow seems to be able to bring out the sparkly laughing Pat I used to know and love.

You're going to get a call from Mr. "Excellence in Broadcasting" and have to make a public apology, son.

How DARE you call him "lowbrow"??  Limbaugh has no brows at all!

I also seem to remember reading Derbyshire's article when it first came out a couple weeks ago, and Mark Levin giving him the middle finger on his show that same day and making a typical Levin remark about how Derbyshire's hair seems to have a life of its own.

Its hard to take either one seriously.  Levin is now on this huge promo binge for his new book, some kind of stupid Conservative Manifesto deal inciting Conservatives to grab their rifles and begin an armed movement to Sedition, Secession, and Revolution.  I laugh and laugh, and hope he continues to make the Conservative Movement the clown parade and laughingstock it has become to all serious Americans. 

So, yeah.  I guess Radio DID wreck the Right.

double strike

It is the politically-motivated caricature of Conservatives portrayed by the Left, and now the Frumpies / Next(Self-)Right(eous) that exists in the popular consciousness. Has anyone ever heard/seen was passes for "high-brow" in the leftist media? Olberman, Matthews, Cafferty et. al. are as boorish and ill-informed as dolts get, yet it didn't seem to not have affect the Democrat Party's popularity. They seem to have done quite well. The difference is that they are portrayed in the MSM and by Democrats as pillars of intellectual heft, even as their audiences dwindle belying their reputations. Only one-side receives undeserved scorn by the Media (and their own elitist pseudo-intellectuals) while the true "low-brows" on the left are propped up by their own, and hence, enjoy electoral success.

The problem, however, isn't the messenger, or even the message; the problem is that those "in the middle" that we want to reach are disengaged. They base their voting on popularity and picking the winner. Intellectual arguments are lost on them. Conservatism is an active process, whereas Leftism is passive, therefore a natural draw to these free-rider wannabes. We need to get them engaged by making Conservative cool again as Reagan did, then Rush, then Newt -- all men of action. Then they listen and can be convinced that it is in their interest to come back.

It's when the Republican "moderates" and Bushies took over, and let themselves become punching bags that things went downhill because the middle lost respect. Policies don't much matter to them. The one thing they don't listen to -- let alone respect -- are pseudo-cerebral wimps. All your self-immolating, rhetorical flare, and sack cloth wearing won't do it.

Even a cursory look at the shape of the media landscape makes it nearly impossible to take Derb's thesis seriously.  For a number of reasons--few having anything to do with market competition--conservatives fare poorly in every other media market except radio and print.  And that's only because radio--with hundreds on hundreds of broadcast outlets up for grabs--was pump primed for that wave of deregulation thirty years ago and print remains the freest, most diverse medium of widely distributed expression.  If we give up on talk radio, we might as well chuck the only set of positive lessons conservatives have learned in competing in a media environment shaped by 60 years of Democrat regulation.

Instead of buying into this leftist fantasy world where the media's divided between right-wing rednecks and high-minded, trans-cultural public radio bores, we should be thinking about how to *further* inject center-right-to-right populism in a culture dominated by the arguably "low-brow" and decidedly left leaning journalists, commentators, comedians, musicians, screenwriters, television producers, actors, and Jon Stewart.

Eventually, those that offer like assessments like "did the radio wreck the right" will discover that their political opponents use the “votes” of the dead, the illiterate, and the demented to gain power, so I wouldn't sweat the low brow issue too much, have a nice discussion guys

See this. The problem isn't just Sean Hannity. It's also people like Instapundit, who's currently (to a small extent) promoting people sending tea bags. If you want to raise the level of debate, write major bloggers urging them to tell their readers to go ask politicians real questions - not rants, not personal questions - on video and upload the response.

Trying to pretend that MTV is the liberal version of Rush is a cop-out.  It's just a tacit gesture towards the standard conservative (Rush style) if you disagree with me it's just because you're an unamerican, gay, commie, Hollywood liberal reflex.  There is no equivalent to Rush/Hannity on the left.  Olberman comes closest to Hannity, but not that close.  As was mentioned above, you get something like Maddow or NPR as the middle brow left.

The reason Hannity and Limbaugh are perceived as the face of the right is because there is no Maddow, no Bill Moyers, no NPR on the right.  Even the magazines that intellectual conservatives are often proud of and point to as the reason there's more philosophical debate on the right (something I don't agree with, but that's beside the point) come off to me as more like right-leaning versions of the Nation, more informed combo between journalism and propoganda, leaning heavily towards propoganda, than real intellectual debate or exposition.  There just is no conservative equivalent to the middle brow version of the left, so the face becomes the extreme low-brow version.