What Has Changed?
Posted by David Darlington on 24 June 2008 | 8 responses
Camille Paglia two weeks ago:
[C]onservative talk radio, which I have been following with interest for almost 20 years, has become a tornado alley of hallucinatory holograms of Obama. He’s a Marxist! A radical leftist! A hater of America! He’s “not that bright”; he can’t talk without a teleprompter. He knows nothing and has done less. His wife is a raging mass of anti-white racism. It’s gotten to the point that I can hardly listen to my favorite shows, which were once both informative and entertaining. The hackneyed repetition is numbing and tedious, and the overt character assassination is ethically indefensible. Talk radio will lose its broad audience if it continues on this nakedly partisan path.
In my very first author bio for ITA (nearly three years ago), I said that I got my teenage political education from Rush Limbaugh. I listened to his show constantly, visited his television show twice, and got both of his books personally autographed. Unfortunately, when I listen to conservative talk radio hosts these days (Rush is by far NOT the worst), I get the same sick feeling Paglia does. What has happened to us? There’s plenty of substantive things to dislike about Obama–especially the shopping list of tax hikes he’s proposing–so why not attack him on that rather than on flag pins, funny names, and Marxist neighbors? Is that all we’ve got?
8 Responses to “What Has Changed?”
I think the reality feedback loop to conservative talk radio has been deteriorating. Yesterday, I had a similar thought as I was flipping around the AM dial. I think I learned that Obama was in favor of nuking our ally Pakistan. Or maybe that was the week before.
In any case, my theory is that there is a conservative subculture that has become insular and self-reinforcing to an extent that what was once spin has come to be taken as reality. So, where once you had more of a conservative take on facts that were portrayed in a more or less accurate fashion; now you have spin on facts with little foundation in reality. In some ways, it’s a caricature of itself.
But, I don’t know. I stopped listening to talk radio with regularity about the time I started logging onto the Internet.
Rush mentions Paglia’s article in this transcript of his attack on the “hacks” (his word, and one I find no argument with) working for Obama’s campaign:
If I could ask her anything, it would be why she votes against free markets. (She voted Nader in 2000 – you can’t get much farther to the left than that, at least not in this country.)
I don’t think the idea that Obama views class conflict as a primary driver in our society is controversial – lots of politicians do. Where you have to fall on that continuum to actually qualify as a Marxist is, of course, open to debate. Not sure if he hates America; he looks pretty bad when pulled off message and/or speaking extemporaneously, and as for his wife, well, both of them have apparently been going to that church for two decades. I guess my dispute would be limiting that criticism to his wife.
Like Doug, I quit listening to talk radio a long time ago, but Paglia saying she’s something other than a harsh critic of RW talk radio sounds a lot like those “lifelong Republicans” who are voting for Obama because they hate George Bush I keep seeing in blog comments. And an Obama supporter criticising the Hillary campaign as a “cult of personality” is at least a little unfair to the kettle. May the best man win.
Doug–I think you’re on to something with the self-reinforcing nature of the conservative subculture. With Fox News, conservative talk radio, and blogs, one can certainly live in a bubble. But that’s not the way conservatism is going to grow.
Alan–Like I said, I can think of hosts far worse than El Rushbo.
It would be nice if people went after Obama for wanted to raise the top marginal rate to 52 percent, or the capital gains rate to 25 percent, or the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour within two years in the middle of a recession. But no, we get stuff about being a secret Muslim, inability to talk extemporaneously (umm… President Bush?), and the Marxist charge.
I haven’t listened to conservative talk radio since I was in junior high, so it’s possible that I’m missing something. But it sounds to me like a case of Jane’s Law in an embryonic stage.
Not familiar with Jane’s Law.
Now this is a constructive (albeit cheesy) criticism of Obama on energy policy.
What talk show hosts are pushing the “secret Muslim” and “Marxist” memes? Just curious. People who raise these objections should name names and not just leave us guessing.
On the flip side, people who attach labels to candidates should name names as well – that is, cite specific policies and not just general descriptive terms like “socialist” or “Marxist” or “warmongering” or whatever.
And many of those who frequently appear as guests on talk shows seem focused on advancing what ideas they do have with personally belittling comments. So when Grover Norquist drops by a newspaper office and describes Obama as “John Kerry with a tan” does he gain new converts for his tax views or just associate in some peoples’ minds low tax advocacy with bigotry?
Maybe it was from watching too much trash-talk radio the respected journalist Liz Trotta blew just about a lifetime of good reputation for a “humorous” call for Obama’s assassination.
I remember arguing with Paul Musgrave in his insistence that politics is no nastier today than in years past. A big difference though is that in my early years, while people talked of politics frequently, there was not a constant barrage of ugliness on the air except through a few of the most extreme John Birchers. Yes, Nixon and McGovern supporters sometimes had unkind things to say of each other, but you heard it once a day at most and often less than that.
I think the gross exaggerations and mean ads of Moveon.org are partially a result of what evolved with talk radio. Certain numbers of people on each side have come to view any manner of swaying voters as legitimate. James Carville’s comment about George Bush the elder “stick a fork in him, he’s done” (and used frequently now) seemed rather harsh to me at the time but appears to be one of the tamer comments viewed in standards of 16 years later.
I think McCain and Obama intend to run a civil campaign against each other, but I think they will have little success controlling their most extreme supporters, as egged on by elements of talk radio, blogs or independent grass roots campaigns.
I personally believe that the concentrations of shrillness have much more to do with generational cultures than left/right divides. What I see is that GenX (b. 1961