The right bites back

In a well-known spoof of a typical talk-radio exchange, two callers debate a fatuous point. The first says: "Right-thinking people in the US are sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up with this country being sick and tired. I'm certainly not and I'm sick and tired of being told that I am." The second caller retorts, "Well, I meet a lot of people, and I'm convinced that the vast majority of wrong-thinking people are right." A conservative housewife, listening to the blather, snaps, "Liberal rubbish!" and turns the dial. It's a shining example of what, in a country with a less sophisticated sense of humor, might be called Monty Python Tory-ism.

In South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias, Brian C Anderson, an editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, charts the rise in respectability or, at least of visibility and audibility, of proudly anti-elitist right-wing thought in America's public dialogue over the last two decades, a development that was spearheaded by Rush Limbaugh in the late 1980s on talk radio, and which has since spread to other media in a process Anderson calls FOXification. To him, the popularity of the stingingly anti-PC cartoon series South Park signals the advent of a new generation of Americans who refuse to accept public censure for their scornful attitudes towards gay men and lesbians, Native Americans, environmentalism and abortion rights. In an effort not to gloat, he cloaks his descriptions of this triumph in the humble fleece of the common man (Limbaugh is, for example, a college dropout who had put himself through a rigorous self-education, mastering an array of issues) and champions talk radio as the first media forum in which ordinary Joes can actually get a hearing for their complaints about what liberals have wrought in America since the 1960s. The purpose of Anderson's book is subtle, and, in spite of its "just-folks" pretenses, it is intellectual: he wishes to claim cultural territory for conservatives not by seizing it outright, but by crawling gingerly across it, inch by inch, with his arm over his head, as if a liberal weenie might jump out and clobber him at any moment.

By all appearances, he wants to seem reasonable, and his book tries to maintain a tone of genial detachment. But it also puts forward a deeply partisan argument: the American right is more reasonable than the American left and, what's more, conservatives are still being suppressed by liberal bullies.

What are the concrete abuses Anderson believes the left has perpetrated on the countrys dittoheads, given that a Republican president in his second term, backed by a Republican Congress, continues to prosecute a war that few on the left support? During the last election, somebody keyed Anderson's car because his wife had put a Bush sticker on it.

Also, he writes, liberals call the conservative majority names: Racist, homophobe, sexist, mean-spirited, insensitive – it has become an ugly habit of left-liberal political argument to dismiss conservative ideas as if they don't deserve a hearing. As if that weren't bad enough, network television portrays businessmen unflatteringly, doesn't show enough black criminals on prime time and is overly tolerant of extramarital sex and homosexuality.

Anderson quotes an interview that Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post's media critic, conducted with Lawrence O'Donnell, a political analyst and screenwriter for The West Wing, in which O'Donnell said, "You'll never, ever get the Republican TV show". Anderson and O'Donnell imply that this has something to do with politics, but isn't it more likely a question of ratings? Would anybody, even a conservative fan of South Park – especially a conservative fan of South Park – want to watch a sitcom about churchgoing parents with two children who lead an uneventful life and make regular donations to the Fraternal Order of Police?

Obviously, Anderson knows his audience: this book isn't intended for readers of The Times and The Economist and watchers of CNN. It's for the people who are sick and tired of mainstream media and are fans of the blogs and right-wing commentators he cites so abundantly.

Still, like Rodney King, he professes to want us all to get along, reminding us that democracy requires a willingness to engage the arguments of those you disagree with, recognizing their equality as citizens. Is this a process that reasonable liberals and reasonable conservatives can acknowledge? Perhaps the argument clinic of the Monty Python Tories can light the way. First speaker: "Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says". Second speaker: "No it isn't." Exactly.

© 2005 The New York Times