The Battle Is Joined
Brian Anderson documents conservatism's impressive cultural gains.
BY ERICH EICHMAN
Wednesday, April 20, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
"Truth springs from argument among friends," wrote the philosopher David Hume. Sometimes among enemies, too.
For a long time, Brian C. Anderson reminds us in "South Park Conservatives," American cultural life suffered from a lack of argument of any kind. A smug liberal piety governed the boundaries of debate, directing a chilly condescension toward ideas that ran afoul of its own sense of truth. Conservative opinion--a critique of feminism, say, or an attack on affirmative action--was treated as "a form of bigotry and extremism." Speech codes at universities spelled out the rules of enlightened conduct, actually punishing people with the audacity to deviate from acceptable views. But unwritten codes--in newsrooms and Hollywood studios, for instance--had their own way of keeping certain ideas out of circulation or, worse, in a purgatory of irrelevance.
No longer. The shuttlecock, if one may borrow Dr. Johnson's phrase, is now struck at both ends of the room. The blogosphere is filled with energetic conservative voices, many of them testing the claims of the mainstream media with deadly precision--think of Dan Rather's travails. (Mr. Anderson calls James Taranto's "Best of the Web," a feature on Dow Jones's OpinionJournal site, "an incisive guide to and commentary on the day's top Internet stories.") Right-of-center newspapers and magazines can be found on a host of college campuses, even Berkeley's. Fox News has ended the cozy conformity of TV news coverage and comment. And talk radio has long since noisily advanced ideas that go unexpressed in the corridors of The New Yorker--or of Cosmopolitan, for that matter.
Mr. Anderson, an editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, documents this transformation with vivid examples and a free-wheeling spirit, ranging across the culture to sample the effects. Yes, he notes, "South Park" is a coarse and offensive TV show. But precisely because it "spares no sensitivity," it can mock liberal platitudes--about multiculturalism, rain-forest worship, hypertolerance. And it can send up celebrities--like Rob Reiner--who personify "the Olympian arrogance and illiberalism of liberal elites." We all read about the supposed greatness of Jon Stewart's Bush-bashing "Daily Show," but Mr. Anderson reminds us that, for a while, it was followed on Comedy Central by Colin Quinn's "Tough Crowd," where Donald Rumsfeld was treated as a hero, at least by Mr. Quinn himself, and where guest comics engaged in "politically incorrect repartee."
This newfound push-and-pull is what Mr. Anderson wants to celebrate--a loosening of the stranglehold on correct opinion, a willingness to "uncensor" certain ideas and to question others once deemed sacrosanct. He does not write in a triumphalist mode: "The Right, broadly construed, may no longer be losing the culture wars," he observes, but it "certainly hasn't won yet, and it is too soon to tell if it is winning." He is particularly dour about the universities, where the professoriate remains overwhelmingly attached to a familiar leftward agenda. In a shrewd aside, he laments the narrow idea of "reasonableness" in the political philosophy of John Rawls, an emblematic figure whose liberalism does nothing to hide its own prejudices behind a veil of ignorance.
But elsewhere, and not only on roguish TV shows, there is the hint of a liberal mood, in the old-fashioned sense of trusting reason to find its way among differing points of view, even when they are stridently expressed. As Mr. Anderson documents, the publishing industry, noticing the success of Regnery (Mr. Anderson's publisher), has recently founded conservative imprints to serve an underserved market for, as one might say, alternative voices. From the other side, Al Franken and his friends have founded a radio network to answer the success of conservative talk radio. The New York Times' ombudsman cannot ignore the fact-checking on the Web, and the Web's commentariat, although routinely described as "right wing," is filling up with lefty sites that watch the conservatives who are watching the media for bias and slippery arguments.
And Ann Coulter is on the cover of Time. Go figure.
Mr. Eichman is The Wall Street Journal's books editor. You can buy "South Park Conservatives" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
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