Making History: Intense Daily Discourse About Civics on a Massive Scale

Since when does a nation get its undies in a bunch over filibustering judges and cranky diplomats?

This is the best part (for me, and apparently millions of others) of the success and the emergence of new media.

Now, my opinion is Rush Limbaugh gets the lions share of credit for this. His show blazed the trail for Fox News, Free Republic, The Weekly Standard, Real Clear Politics, Sean Hannity, Lucianne.com, etc... Rush made politics cool-- especially conservative politics and he did this post Watergate, Viet Nam and Reagan! The Old Media was in its prime and loaded for bear. What were the odds of reversing that seemingly irreversible trend?

So, in Rush's wake we have: Newspapers, weekly publications, talk radio, television, the internet--- you name it-- all staffed with smart, passionate people who are writing and talking about how our government is working, what it is doing and what it plans to do. I've been a news junkie since I was 5 (I taught myself to read because I wanted to know how Mickey Mantle played the night before) and this is simply amazing. I've been put to sleep in class -- college and law school included-- when the subject matter has been the historical and legal ramifications of filibusters and ambassador or judicial nominees. But now there are riveting rants and opinion pieces on what most Americans -- pre-New Media-- would have considered absolutely boring. Never in this country's history have subjects like Senate Rules (!?) and filibusters been so close and so hot on the front burner of public discourse.

This stuff is so important and I have to believe what is historical here is the fact that Senate deals can't get done in a smoke-filled back room. There is so much sunshine on these public servants (due to cleaning up the atmosphere?) ...... you know, this is part of what is driving the Democrats crazy: They can't get their deals done without the public knowing about it. People care and the information they care about is made available in a very interesting fashion (hey, even when The New York Times writes a misleading and unsourced piece there is instant analysis pointing this out!).

Anyway, what use to be bone dry subjects are tasty morsels for everyone to enjoy-- and some liberals to choke on. Has this ever happened? Have people ever been so engaged in what their representatives do? My guess is never in our history.

There seems to be a direct proportion of liberals imploding to the rise of shows like Rush's and others in the new media. Why would information lead to the demise of a political party? What kind of organization implodes when there is competition and transparency?

By the way, this is what's wrong with the education system today: It is boring. Maybe teachers should take an hour every school day to tune in Rush, Sean, Tony, Laura, etc... Get some inspiration. Get some fire. Get some direction. There are daily seminars available and free as to how to make civics an absolutely fascinating class.

People seek out information when delivered in an inspired fashion. Even when it is about filibusters and ambassadors.

Thanks to Rush and those that have followed so capably. Intellectual stimulation on a daily basis, when the country is not in a crisis mode, over time on a massive scale, has probably never happened. Maybe baby boomers aren't so bad, after all. This is a wonderful development.

I don't think things have been quite this way, but I do think the average American was engaged long ago when the country was much smaller and federalism much more limited. The observations of de Tocqueville were that Americans were more informed about their governance and, if I recall, he was shocked to find discussions about the meanings of the Constitution in the rudest hovels on the frontier.

Thing today, of course, are much more complex but the basic elements of human nature have always remained the same. I think what you are trying to get at is that while events occur at much faster rates and communications and control are much greater, the ordinary citizen has long been asleep and content to allow 'experts' take care of the Republic largely because people are so danged busy and they feel so disconnected and powerless when faced with the monolithic use of information technology of the recent past.

With the advent of populist balance in the media sphere (Limbaugh was indeed the trailblazer in a forest of lickspittle leftists) the falsely controlled technological barriers of distance and detailed information have been struck down allowing, if you will, a return to a sort of back-fence dialog. Once again, Americans can discuss, through the electronic campfire of the internet and crackerbarrel of talk radio, the issues of the day and create their own consensus on what the meanings of the events are and, most importantly, what should be done about them. To this end, technology has worked for the common man.

In a fluid environment of freedom and unfettered information, our Constitutional Republic will only gather strength among reasoning people. The great problem will be to educate the ignorant fellow citizens of the meanings of our heritage after years of socialist erasure. The future, in fact, rests with the next generation fully apprehending the meaning, privilege and blessings of our full inheritance and avoiding the snare strewn lies of socialism promising evermore carefree pleasures that drugged the boomers for so many years.

In some ways, the global threat of terrorism should share a dark honor as the third leg of the triumvirate that has restored some measure of promise for patriots. Without the terrifying grounding of graphic death the conservative message, even with strong voices and internet capabilities, may never have achieve wing against the powerful lure of hedonism and the collective abandonment of responsibility.

Thanks for your thoughts and I agree with all you have said.

Daniel Henniger of the WSJ covered this on April 29 in his excellent article about the Fairness Doctrine.

How Conservative Came To Be More Than a Word
April 29, 2005
Wall Street Journal, Page A16

In 1987, Rush Limbaugh sat down at a microphone at radio station KFBK-AM in Sacramento and began broadcasting something called "The Rush Limbaugh Show."

The rest is history.

The "rest" -- the inexorable 15-year rise of conservative ideas and clout across what Howard Stern calls "all media" -- is described in a provocative new book by Brian C. Anderson, "South Park Conservatives1." What was once a mostly exclusive liberal country club -- television, the press, book publishing, even the campuses -- has become heavily integrated with aggressive, even crude, conservatives.

As described by Mr. Anderson, a writer with the Manhattan Institute, conservatives established their first beachhead in the early 1990s with talk radio. Then FOX conquered cable news and finally a virtual Mongol horde of conservative-to-libertarian bloggers swept across the Internet. In the 2004 election, these electric horsemen (apologies to Jane Fonda) pulled down Dan Rather and haunted John Kerry's war hero with Swift-boat ghosts.

It is no news that America has become a big backyard pool of opinion, awash with Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Ann Coulter, Dennis Prager, the Drudge Report and, I'm told, Al Franken.

Contrary to myth, Roger Ailes didn't do this. Ronald Reagan did. Ronald Reagan may not make it to Mount Rushmore for winning the Cold War. But he secured his place in the conservative pantheon for tearing down another wall: the Fairness Doctrine.

The Fairness Doctrine was a federal regulation, dating to 1949, which mandated "contrasting viewpoints" from broadcasters. In reality, the Fairness Doctrine ensured that incumbents got "free" TV coverage across their terms while challengers got crumbs. The Fairness Doctrine was also an early nuclear option: If a local broadcaster's news operation made the local congressman or his party look bad, Washington could threaten to blow up his broadcast license.

Ronald Reagan tore down this wall in 1987 (maybe as spring training for Berlin) and Rush Limbaugh was the first man to proclaim himself liberated from the East Germany of liberal media domination.

It wasn't obvious that conservatives soon would dominate talk radio. Radio programming has always been a soulless decision based on ratings. If programmers thought they could win the drive-time slots with Don Imus reading Das Kapital, that would be on the air and advertisers would support it. But it's not.

What worked after speech became free in the spectrum ozone was hyper-articulate conservative hosts opening their microphones to millions of hyper-angry conservative voters -- not least in such liberal bastions as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles.

In 1994, Newt Gingrich, his Contract With America and the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1952 -- the years in which the Fairness Doctrine largely kept politics off the air. This didn't happen because the Gingrich candidates were getting their message out in the Los Angeles Times or Boston Globe.

The conservative media ascendancy chronicled by Brian Anderson has driven many liberals nuts. The liberal media-advocacy group FAIR wants a new Fairness Doctrine to repair "broadcast abuse." Just months ago, FAIR cited "the immense volume of unanswered conservative opinion heard on the airwaves."

What goes around comes around, I suppose. Conservatives would say they're now using radio, TV and the Web -- all of it free from political control -- to give as good as they got from the 1960s onward. For years, they claim, liberal managers in broadcasting, journalism, publishing and academia marginalized them. Were conservatives imagining that?

Maybe not. Mr. Anderson cites left-wing philosopher Herbert Marcuse (who taught at Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis) urging liberals back then to practice active "intolerance against movements from the Right" in the name of "liberating tolerance." Thus, for example, liberal academics would vote to deny tenure for conservative colleagues -- and still do -- believing that this is a morally mandated act.

Liberals now marvel at the energy and output of the conservative "movement" -- the talk shows, the think tanks, the blogosphere. No need to wonder; they compressed the rocket fuel for the inevitable explosion.

But a price has been paid. What got lost during the years of liberal exclusionism, according to Peter Berkowitz of George Mason University, was "guidance for the negotiation of disagreement in a democracy." No more perfect example of the price the political system has paid for years of conservative shunning exists than the Senate's standoff over judges. You can find the reasons Democrats are shunning the Bush nominees to the appellate bench by consulting the Web site of People for the American Way -- abortion, corporate law, minimum wage, Social Security, environment. They disagree with these nominees on -- everything.

For Democrats, judicial philosophy is a cultural Armageddon. Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy have turned the Senate into a Branch Davidian compound. No one in the liberal cult is allowed to leave, including the hostage nominees -- unless they recant their conservatism. How many Senate Democrats plan to be in this bunker when Bill Frist's ATF squad detonates the "nuclear option"?

Time was, "choice" for conservatives mainly meant accepting one's lot in life. Now they have options, lots of them.

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