| the skepticism that might greet the formation of a pro badminton circuit.
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Posted on 03/02/2003 7:34:51 AM PST by Pharmboy
The announcement that two Chicago venture capitalists will finance a liberal talk radio network met with the skepticism that might greet the formation of a pro badminton circuit.
Conservatives said that liberal dogma couldn't withstand the rough and tumble of talk radio (which is "ultimately about ideas," as Thomas Sowell put it), the implication being that the left has no thinkers with the gravitas of a Limbaugh or a Liddy.
Others said that liberals just can't be funny (the left has no wits like Limbaugh and Liddy, either), while the blogger Antic Muse said there are funny liberals, but they're working in Hollywood.
Still others said liberals won't engage in demagogy, liberals are afraid of offending their constituencies, liberals are boring policy wonks, liberals are too nuanced.
But hold it right there. If we're really looking to understand the success of right-wing talk radio, we needn't go much further than people's readiness to start sentences with "Liberals are . . ." and to go on to describe liberalism as something between a personality disorder and a market segment.
That's what the radio hosts batten on. They understand that their listeners respond more immediately to attacks on the phonies up the block than on more remote objects of indignation. Not that the hosts and callers don't have a deep antipathy to Saddam Hussein, criminals, illegal immigrants and the United Nations, but those miscreants tend to serve only as the pretext for denunciations of the people who coddle them — the libs, as Mr. Limbaugh calls them.
The familiar tone of that epithet has more to do with creating an "us" than a "them"; it sets the show's audience off from the clueless who haven't cottoned to the menace in their midst.
Talk radio didn't invent the negative branding of liberals. It began to emerge about 25 years ago, around the time when words like "lifestyle" and "yuppie" first entered the general vocabulary, as marketers replaced sociologists as the cartographers of the American social landscape. Phrases like "Volvo liberal" and "the chablis-and-brie set" were already well established when the liberal Republican John Anderson made his presidential bid in 1980.
Those labels are different from older descriptions like "limousine liberal," which evoke the charges of class treachery that conservatives have leveled at affluent liberals since the days of F.D.R.
The new vocabulary makes consumer preferences the most telling signs of personal values, so that it seems natural for Richard Lowry, editor of National Review, to talk about the " `tall skim double-mocha latte, please' culture of contemporary America."
Some conservatives have tried to take that connection seriously. David Brooks of The Weekly Standard has tied urban liberals' fondness for expensive coffee drinks to their predilection for inconspicuous consumption. They avoid the traditional luxuries of "vulgar Republicans," preferring to spend extravagantly on items that used to be cheap, like coffee, bread and water, or on products that seem to answer to practical needs, like Volvos or hiking boots.
Yet you can find a Starbucks outlet and a Volvo dealership in Franklin County, Pa., the locale where Mr. Brooks has done his weekend ethnography of pro-Bush America, not to mention other red-state bastions like Lubbock, Tex., Cheyenne, Wyo., and Murfreesboro, Tenn. However those retailers choose their locations, it isn't by looking for concentrations of liberal guilt.
Phrases like "latte liberal" and "Volvo liberals" have nothing to do with what anybody actually buys — they're plays on pure brand aura. Liberals are exactly the sort of people you would expect to drink an expensive, milky coffee concoction and to drive a safe, practical car from socialist Sweden.
The success of that branding strategy extends well beyond opinion columns and talk radio. In major newspapers, the phrases "middle-class liberals" and "middle-class Democrats" are used with about the same frequency. But "working-class liberals" is almost nonexistent; it's outnumbered by "working-class Democrats" by about 30 to 1.
It's as if you can't count as a liberal until you can afford to indulge yourself.
By contrast, the press talks about "working-class conservatives" and "working-class Republicans" with about the same frequency. In fact there are many more mentions of working-class conservatives than of working-class liberals, which creates a strange picture of American political attitudes.
You see the same discrepancies when you substitute terms like "black," "Hispanic" or "minority" in those patterns. As the media tell the story, minorities and members of the working class can qualify only as Democrats; liberalism is a mind-set restricted to the white middle class.
But branding is a game that two could play, if liberals cared to leaven substance with style themselves. In their efforts to bond with the working class, conservative pundits can be as risibly phony and pretentious as anything that Hollywood or the Upper West Side has to offer. You think of Bill O'Reilly describing himself as a "working-class guy" — this from an accountant's son who grew up in Levittown, N.Y., the El Dorado of the postwar middle class.
Or listen to Ann Coulter, who grew up in New Canaan, Conn., and her paean to the New York's other boroughs, as reported in The New York Times: "Queens, baseball games — those are my people. American people."
Then there's Mr. Lowry, a University of Virginia grad, who admits to having no familiarity with motorcycles, but nonetheless holds that he would rather be governed by 2,000 motorcyclists than all the Volvo drivers in the United States.
That's a plight that the privileged pundits of the right can't escape: their politics turns them into traitors to their demographic. You have to feel a certain sympathy for all those Yale and Dartmouth grads at National Review and The American Spectator who feel obliged to eschew chardonnay and latte in favor of Budweiser and Maxwell House. One way or the other, modern politics makes fashion victims of us all.
Linking consumer preferences to personal values--can the talk radio hosts of the left compete?
Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford linguist, is heard regularly on NPR's "Fresh Air" and is the author of "The Way We Talk Now."
Can anyone get the point this linguist is attempting to make? That libs have been picked on by the media? That conservatives have NOT been picked on? Is this guy the dumbest Stanford perfessor ever? Help me out here, Freeps...
And another thing: when Ann Coulter says "my people" she doesn't mean that she COMES from Queens you dolt; she means that they SUPPORT her...
And another thing he DOESN'T get: he doesn't understand that conservatives think for themselves enough to drive Volvos and drink double lattes if they want to.
Try selling higher taxes on the radio! Failure is assured.
Lib charlatans posing as 'journalists' never tell the truth. They know why labels against conservatives don't stick. The truth is that it doesn't matter if a leader of the conservative movement does not come from a'working class' background. If he or she is a true conservative, then he or she isn't promoting high tax, intrusive government, failed welfare state programs, and political patronage designed to keep hard working americans and hard working entruprenurial small business owners down.
Actually, I can't. That is what I thought was deficient in the article too. This pointy head flails and flogs and makes no headway along the lines of cogent thought. Rather typical malady amongst liberals.
One reply is simple and you can cite me. My dad was one of those returning "Greatest Generation" guys who got married immediately after coming home. He went to college for 3 years on the GI Bill (didn't finish because I showed up, he-he-he). Got a job as a Technical Writer of machine manuals for a machine company and bought a Levit-Style home for us.
This was working middle class for our parents and us as we grew up. This for a large segment of america shaped us and grounded us. Libs don't get it, on anything period.
Actually, I thought his point was pretty clear. The Conservatives have successfully branded Liberalism. Its not about ideas or freedom or personal responsibility or Government waste or personal finances. Its about branding, and most of the great unwashed masses have fallen for it.
I think thats pretty funny because his whole article reeks of the elitism that is prevalent in Liberal thinking. i.e. that most people are too stupid to see through a slick marketing campaign, unlike the good professor.
Nothing is quite as demagogy free and nuanced as having "Nazi" and "fascist" screamed at you because you belive that government is taking too much of your money (and therefore your labor and life) and has its nose in too much of your business.
This article reads like tubin' out of season in the Guadelupe River, like in February: Drifting aimlessly, no directional control, cold as hell, pretty scenery.
| the skepticism that might greet the formation of a pro badminton circuit.
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Actually, Liddy is one of the best educated, most intelligent, and sharpest radio hosts around! Don't forget, in addition to being a convicted felon, he was both an attourney and an FBI agent.
You may not agree with him, and I often don't, but he's someone that I would love to spend time with socially, as I enjoy hanging out with people who are smarter than me... Sometimes I actually learn something! That's why I love FR! LOL
Mark
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This may come as a surprise to people, but there actually is a pro badminton circuit.