How have they had such success over the last few years? The culture wars are being won and lost, and it is the right who are on the winning side.
How have they done it and what lessons are there for British and European conservatives?
Two very different articles examine aspects of the issue.
The two articles in question are
We’re Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore by Brian C. Anderson
and
Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics by Bonnie Azab Powell.
Anderson starts boldly.
The Left’s near monopoly over the institutions of opinion and information-which long allowed liberal opinion makers to sweep aside ideas and beliefs they disagreed with, as if they were beneath argument-is skidding to a startlingly swift halt. The transformation has gone far beyond the rise of conservative talk radio, that, ever since Rush Limbaugh’s debut 15 years ago, has chipped away at the power of the New York Times, the networks, and the rest of the elite media to set the terms of the nation’s political and cultural debate. Almost overnight, three huge changes in communications have injected conservative ideas right into the heart of that debate. Though commentators have noted each of these changes separately, they haven’t sufficiently grasped how, taken together, they add up to a revolution: no longer can the Left keep conservative views out of the mainstream or dismiss them with bromide instead of argument. Everything has changed.
He goes on to set out the three “huge changes”, namely
1. The advent of cable TV, especially Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel and shows like South Park.
The power of Fox is widely acknowledged but South Park? Yes, Anderson shows how the show (whose creator Matt Stone once said “I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals.”) is in the words of Andrew Sullivan “the best antidote to PC culture we have.” Sullivan coined the term “South Park Republicans” as a label for the growing number of younger conservatives who defeat the stereotypes. Anderson quotes Eric Spratling, a Arizona State undergraduate,
“who says the definition fits him and his Republican pals perfectly. “The label is really about rejecting the image of conservatives as uptight squares-crusty old men or nerdy kids in blue blazers. We might have long hair, smoke cigarettes, get drunk on weekends, have sex before marriage, watch R-rated movies, cuss like sailors-and also happen to be conservative, or at least libertarian.” Recent Stanford grad Craig Albrecht says most of his young Bush-supporter friends “absolutely cherish” South Park-style comedy “for its illumination of hypocrisy and stupidity in all spheres of life.” It just so happens, he adds, “that most hypocrisy and stupidity take place within the liberal camp.”…Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice-a “punk-rock-capitalist” entertainment corporation that publishes the hipster bible Vice magazine, produces CDs and films, runs clothing stores, and claims (plausibly) to have been “deep inside the heads of 18-30s for the past 10 years”-spots “a new trend of young people tired of being lied to for the sake of the ‘greater good.’ ” Especially on military matters, McInnes believes, many twenty-somethings are disgusted with the Left. The knee-jerk Left’s days “are numbered,” McInnes tells The American Conservative. “They are slowly but surely being replaced with a new breed of kid that isn’t afraid to embrace conservatism.”
Polling data indicate that younger voters are indeed trending rightward…Together with the Foxification of cable news, this new attitude among the young, reflected in the hippest cable comedy (and in cutting-edge cable dramas such as FX’s The Shield and HBO’s The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, which are unflinchingly honest about crime, race, sex, and faith, and avoid the saccharine liberal moralizing of much network entertainment), can only make Karl Rove happy.
The second of the “huge changes” is:
2. The rise of the Internet, especially the Blogosphere.
Anderson explores the massive impact of sites like the Drudge Report, NewsMax, and Dow Jones’s OpinionJournal. Anderson notes that
The Internet’s most powerful effect has been to expand vastly the range of opinion-especially conservative opinion-at everyone’s fingertips. “The Internet helps break up the traditional cultural gatekeepers’ power to determine a) what’s important and b) the range of acceptable opinion,” says former Reason editor and libertarian blogger Virginia Postrel. InstaPundit’s Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, agrees: “The main role of the Internet and blogosphere is to call the judgment of elites about what is news into question.”
Sites like the superb Arts and Letters daily are introducing new readers to serious conservative thought. Anderson notes that “It’s not just the large numbers of readers that these sites attract that is so significant for the conservative cause; it’s also who those readers are. Just as Fox News is pulling in a younger viewership, who will reshape the politics of the future, so these conservative sites are proving particularly popular with younger readers…Equally important, these sites draw the attention of journalists”.
The powerful information sharing gives rise to one of the most effective political weapons of them all: rapid rebuttal teams operating as media watchers. Rapid rebuttal was a tactic adopted by Britain’s Labour party in their 1997 record breaking election whitewash (they adopted it after learning about it from the Clinton Whitehouse). Today American conservatives, aided by the internet, have mastered the art.
The speed with which Internet sites can post new material is one source of their influence. No sooner has the latest Paul Krugman New York Times column attacking the Bush administration appeared, for example, than the “Krugman Truth Squad”-a collective of conservative economic analysts-will post an article on NRO exposing the economist’s myriad mistakes, distortions, and evasions. Earlier this year, the Truth Squad caught Krugman comparing the cost of Bush’s tax cuts over ten years with the one-year wage boost associated with the new employment it would create, so as to make the tax reductions seem insanely large for the small benefit they’d bring-a laughably ignorant mistake or, more likely, a deliberate attempt to mislead in order to discredit Bush. The discomfiture web critics have caused Krugman has forced him to respond on his own website, offering various lame rationales for his errors, and denouncing the Truth Squad’s Donald Luskin as his “stalker-in-chief.”
Another benefit of the Internet and the conservative cyber machine is speed of attack:
The timeliness of web publication also means that right from the start a wealth of conservative opinion is circulating about any new development-often before the New York Times and the Washington Post get a chance to weigh in. A blog or opinion site “can have an influence on elite opinion before the conventional wisdom among elites congeals,” notes Nick Schulz, editor of Tech Central Station
Anderson explores the blogosphere’s role in bringing down the Howard Raines of the New York Times.
Bebunking liberal humbug is one of the web’s most powerful political effects: bloggers call it the Internet’s “bullshit-detector” role. The New York Times has been the Number One target of the B.S. detectors… “Only, say, five years ago, the editors of the New York Times had much more power than they have today,” Andrew Sullivan points out. “They could spin stories with gentle liberal bias, and only a few eyes would roll.” If they made an egregious error, they could bury the correction later. The Internet makes such bias and evasion harder-maybe impossible-to pull off. It was the blogosphere that revealed Enron-bashing Krugman’s former ties to Enron, showed how the paper twisted its polls to further a liberal agenda, exposed how it used its front page to place Henry Kissinger falsely in the anti-Iraq war camp, and then, as the war got under way, portrayed it as harshly as possible.
What finished Raines of course was the Jason Blair affair. and the biggest scandal in the history of the newspaper.
But the Blair affair was more final straw than primary cause of Raines’s fall. Unremitting Internet-led criticism and mockery of the editor’s front-page partisanship had already severely tarnished the Times’s reputation. It may take the Times a while to restore readers’ trust: a new Rasmussen poll shows that fewer than half of Americans believe that the paper reliably conveys the truth (while 72 percent find Fox News reliable); circulation is down 5 percent since March 2002.
Other liberal media giants have taken notice. In May, the Los Angeles Times’s top editor, John Carroll, fired an e-mail to his troops warning that the paper was suffering from “the perception and the occasional reality that the Times is a liberal, ‘politically correct’ newspaper.” In the new era of heightened web scrutiny, Carroll was arguing, you can’t just dismiss conservative views but must take them seriously
The final “huge change” was:
3. The breaking of the liberal media stranglehold on book publishing
Whereas one “Conservative authors long had trouble getting their books released…Nowadays, publishers are falling over themselves to bring conservative books to a mainstream audience.”
“Between now and December,” Publishers Weekly wrote in July, “scores of books on conservative topics will be published by houses large and small-the most ever produced in a single season. Already, 2003 has been a banner year for such books, with at least one and often two conservative titles hitting PW’s best-seller list each week.” Joining Regnery in releasing mass-market right-leaning books are two new imprints from superpower publishers, Random House’s Crown Forum and an as-yet-untitled Penguin series.…It’s no exaggeration to describe this surge of conservative publishing as a paradigm shift. “It would have been unthinkable ten years ago that mainstream publishers would embrace this trend,” acknowledges Doubleday editor and author Adam Bellow, who got his start in editing in 1988 at the Free Press, where he and his boss, the late Erwin Glikes, encountered “a tremendous amount of marketplace and institutional resistance” in pushing conservative titles. “There was no conspiracy,” avers Crown Forum publisher Steve Ross. “We were culturally isolated on this island of Manhattan, and people tend to publish to people of like mind.”
What caused the turn around? “Ross believes that September 11 shook up the publishing world and made it less reflexively liberal…But what really overcame the big New York publishers’ liberal prejudices is the oodles of money Washington-based Regnery was making.” So, it was money. The other reason “that conservative books are selling: the emergence of conservative talk radio, cable TV, and the Internet. This “right-wing media circuit,”" This “right wing media circuit” utilises viral marketing to feed the powerful demand for such book. “Traditional gatekeepers of ideas-above all, the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books, publications that rarely deign to review conservative titles-[are] increasingly irrelevant in winning an audience for a book”.
One less obvious agent in this phenomenon is Amazon.com.
Amazon itself is another boon to conservatives, since the Internet giant betrays no ideological bias in selling books…Amazon’s Reader Reviews feature-where readers can post their opinions on books they’ve read and rate them-has helped diminish the authority of elite cultural guardians, too, by creating a truly democratic marketplace of ideas. “I don’t think there’s ever been a similar review medium-a really broad-based consumers’ guide for culture,” says 2blowhards blogger Michael. “I’ve read some stuff on Amazon that’s been as good as anything I’ve read in the real press.”
These developments have left the left reeling with shock and bewilderment. They furious about Fox news, a particular object of vitriol. Apparently “Al Gore likens Fox to an evil right-wing “fifth column”. Liberal are striking out at Blogosphere, Fox news and the right-wing books. At least they have the right targets. Anderson puts these “hysterical complaints” and “angry foot stamping” down to “baffled frustration over the loss of a liberal monoculture, which has long protected the Left from debate-and from the realization that its unexamined ideas are sadly threadbare.”
“The Left has never before had its point of view challenged and its arguments made fun of and shot full of holes on the public stage,” concludes social thinker Michael Novak, who has been around long enough to recognize how dramatically things are changing. Hoover Institute fellow Tod Lindberg agrees: “Liberals aren’t prepared for real argument,” he says. “Elite opinion is no longer univocal. It engages in real argument in real time.” New York Times columnist David Brooks even sees the Left falling into despair over the new conservative media that have “cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out.”
Andersons points are complemented by those in the second article, Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics by Bonnie Azab Powell.
It begins, “With Republicans controlling the Senate, the House, and the White House and enjoying a large margin of victory for California Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s clear that the Democratic Party is in crisis. George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science, thinks he knows why. Conservatives have spent decades defining their ideas, carefully choosing the language with which to present them, and building an infrastructure to communicate them, says Lakoff. The work has paid off: by dictating the terms of national debate, conservatives have put progressives firmly on the defensive. ”
In the interview Lakoff expounds on what he and seven fellows discovered in their research into Conservative political dominance conducted at the Rockridge Institute, a progressive think tank.
He sees the situation as follows:
Conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing….And that’s the problem. Liberals don’t get it. They don’t understand what it is they have to be doing.
Asked “How does language influence the terms of political debate?”, Larkoff says
Language always comes with what is called “framing.” Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like “revolt,” that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly, or assumes it is being ruled unfairly, and that they are throwing off their rulers, which would be considered a good thing. That’s a frame.
Asked why conservatives appear to be so much better at framing, he said:
Because they’ve put billions of dollars into it. Over the last 30 years their think tanks have made a heavy investment in ideas and in language. In 1970, [Supreme Court Justice] Lewis Powell wrote a fateful memo to the National Chamber of Commerce saying that all of our best students are becoming anti-business because of the Vietnam War, and that we needed to do something about it. Powell’s agenda included getting wealthy conservatives to set up professorships, setting up institutes on and off campus where intellectuals would write books from a conservative business perspective, and setting up think tanks. He outlined the whole thing in 1970. They set up the Heritage Foundation in 1973, the American Enterprise Institute after that, and many others, from the Manhattan Institute to the Hoover Institute at Stanford.And now, as the New York Times Magazine quoted Paul Weyrich, who started the Heritage Foundation, they have 1,500 conservative radio talk show hosts. They have a huge, very good operation, and they understand their own moral system. They understand what unites conservatives, and they understand how to talk about it, and they are constantly updating their research on how best to express their ideas.
There’s a systematic reason [Why haven't progressives done the same thing]. …Conservative foundations give large block grants year after year to their think tanks. They say, ‘Here’s several million dollars, do what you need to do.’ And basically, they build infrastructure, they build TV studios, hire intellectuals, set aside money to buy a lot of books to get them on the best-seller lists, hire research assistants for their intellectuals so they do well on TV, and hire agents to put them on TV. They do all of that….As businessmen, they know how to do this very well.
…The progressive foundations and donors give their money to a variety of grassroots organizations. They say, ‘We’re giving you $25,000, but don’t waste a penny of it. Make sure it all goes to the cause, don’t use it for administration, communication, infrastructure, or career development.’ So there’s actually a structural reason built into the worldviews that explains why conservatives have done better.
Most of the rest of the article is bunk, but the last section is worth reading:
Do any of the Democratic Presidential candidates grasp the importance of framing?None. They don’t get it at all. But they’re in a funny position. The framing changes that have to be made are long-term changes. The conservatives understood this in 1973. By 1980 they had a candidate, Ronald Reagan, who could take all this stuff and run with it. The progressives don’t have a candidate now who understands these things and can talk about them. And in order for a candidate to be able to talk about them, the ideas have to be out there. You have to be able to reference them in a sound bite. Other people have to put these ideas into the public domain, not politicians. The question is, How do you get these ideas out there? There are all kinds of ways, and one of the things the Rockridge Institute is looking at is talking to advocacy groups, which could do this very well. They have more of a budget, they’re spread all over the place, and they have access to the media.
Right now the Democrat Party is into marketing. They pick a number of issues like prescription drugs and Social Security and ask which ones sell best across the spectrum, and they run on those issues. They have no moral perspective, no general values, no identity. People vote their identity, they don’t just vote on the issues, and Democrats don’t understand that. Look at Schwarzenegger, who says nothing about the issues. The Democrats ask, How could anyone vote for this guy? They did because he put forth an identity. Voters knew who he is.
This is very interesting, because this confirms exactly what Anderson said, but the bad news for progressives is that the ideas being put in the public domain, the ones Politicians can “reference in a sound bite”, are being put there by the bottom up blogosphere revolutionaries and conservative pundits. Lakoff pins his hopes on advocacy groups, the stalwarts of the left’s political machine.
He has not noticed that part of the drive to the right has been powered by resentment generated by biased advocacy groups and single issue zealots. Furthermore the real grassroots are reacting against liberal orthodoxy and humourless political correctness. This is demonstrated by the power of the overwhelmingly right-wing blogosphere - the first mass medium unrestrained by elite filters and manipulations.
What can British and American conservatives learn form this? Plenty. Here is a partial list:
1. Recapture and acknowledge your natural supporters: Take back you natural supporters, the intelligent and freedom loving young and industrious minorities.
2. Attract comics: Use humour as your chief weapon in policy making and cultural warfare.
3. Keep in mind The South Park Principle: Do not reflexively attack apparent enemies that in reality are powerful allies.
4. Learn efficient political warfare techniques: Use rapid rebuttal teams and media monitors (e.g. Chronwatch, BBC watch). Establish media and critical thinking training for all activists. Learn and use viral politics, the power of complexity and social networks, the new discoveries from science (system theory, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology).
5. Harness the power of information: Establish a highly accurate quotation and fact database. Prepare toolkits for activists, augmented by knowledge bases, information and expertise swapping and a nationwide skills register and online presences (e.g. A conservative in Hackney can request assistance from a professor of mathematics in Hendon).
6. Develop media & publishing infrastructure: Encourage the creation of conservative media outlets, publishers, TV production companies,think tanks, radio stations, culture jamming teams, artists, comedians and journalists.
7. Get money: Learn how to fund raise effectively. The better one gets at getting funds from small private donors, the further one gets from allegations of sleaze and favouritism.
8. Frame frame frame: Recast the debate in our terms. Fight for every concept, every word, every phrase and harness every meme.
9. Act as though we are in power. Behave less like a peripheral and impotent organisation and behave as though we are in power. This means giving thought to speeches and policies as though they were to be acted on immediately by the entire civil service. Assuming the responsibilities and demeanour of power will hasten its reacquisition.
10. Unify. Recall Lakoff’s words: American conservatives “have a huge, very good operation, and they understand their own moral system. They understand what unites conservatives, and they understand how to talk about it, and they are constantly updating their research on how best to express their ideas.” They have an identity, voters know who they are. As Lakoff notes, American conservatives have “more of a budget, they’re spread all over the place, and they have access to the media”.
[Update: Anderson followed up this article here with a new one "Another Victory for the New Conservative Media" in The City Journal, 5th November 2003]
NOTES:
Sites mentioned in Anderson’s article:
Fox News
Drudge Report
NewsMax
OpinionJournal
Andrew Sullivan
InstaPundit
“The Corner” department of NationalReviewOnline (NRO)
Critical Mass
Arts & Letters Daily
FrontPage Magazine
2blowhards
WorldNetDaily
Tech Central Station
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