Speaking of Talking

Bloggers, and blog readers, should never forget that our path was paved by a formidable, and growing, army of talk radio hosts who first pushed back against the liberal broadcast media's monopoly of the airwaves. With the demise of the Fairness Doctrine (the renewal of which Ronald Reagan vetoed), air time could be devoted to programs that people actually wanted to listen to. Because of liberalism's death-grip on most media outlets until that time, it was only natural that talk radio shows would spring up to fill the void in conservative broadcast voices.

Some liberals, of course, detest this exercise in First Amendment rights, and for a variety of reasons. Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-NY, thinks Americans are too stupid to make up their own minds about news stories. Some disgruntled talk show hosts blame corporations, rather than their own change of political heart, for denying them air time.

Still, the performance of liberal talk radio can't be encouraging for down-and-out leftists who think they're only one talent away from running Rush off the air. An excellent commentary on this appears in today's L.A. Times (registration). Brian Anderson offers three principal reasons for liberal talk radio's failure:

• Entertainment value. The top conservative hosts put on snazzy, frequently humorous shows. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, observes: "The parody, the asides, the self-effacing humor, the bluster are all part of the packaging that makes the political message palatable." Besides, the triumph of political correctness on the left makes it hard for on-air liberals to lighten things up without offending anyone.

• Fragmentation of the potential audience. Political consultant Dick Morris explains: "Large percentages of liberals are black and Hispanic, and they now have their own specialized entertainment radio outlets, which they aren't likely to leave for liberal talk radio." The potential audience for Air America or similar ventures is thus pretty small — white liberals, basically. And they've already got NPR.

• Liberal bias in the old media. That's what birthed talk radio in the first place. People turn to it to help right the imbalance. Political scientist William Mayer, writing in the Public Interest, recently observed that liberals don't need talk radio because they've got the big three networks, most national and local daily newspapers and NPR.

All are correct, I think, but the first deserves particular attention, for it nails a problem that elites have in ever age. In modern America, there are elites who are conservative, to be sure, but the great bulk of them have a populist, pro-American streak running through them, even if they own yachts and fourth homes. Many are self-made, and their money didn't just fall into their laps once Daddy passed on or litigated his fourth divorce. That is, they're conservative for reasons that transcend economic or class-based strategies for self-preservation.

Conservative elites aside, it's the conservative base that makes up the bulk of take radio's audience. And these folks, after all, are always the target of the liberal elite's scorn. It's the latter who cling to the hope that they're the natural aristocracy. Born superior, they should rule by default. It's this sense of privilege that, in their eyes at least, allows them to substitute attitude for argument, posturing for thinking. Put simply: any movement whose intellectual elite includes Michael Moore and Jimmy Carter is in deep trouble precisely because of its shallow nature.

What's this have to do with humor? Everything. The humor of conservative talk show hosts is usually made at the expense of liberals. And that's perfectly acceptable, given that liberal talk show hosts are themselves elites, or at least embrace a top-down view of American culture. This follows an age-old pattern -- those who don't claim to be aristocrats can always ridicule those who do. Go read your Swift, your Rabelais, your Boccaccio, your Petronius. This is good clean fun in any century, for it portrays the desires of the self-proclaimed little people against the privileged. And when many conservatives in positions of power share the fundamental social and cultural views of the vast majority of conservatives -- religious values, patriotism, faith in the family -- the divide between the two socio-economic levels can be far smaller than one may think.

But think of where this leaves the liberal talk show host. Whom does he satirize? Why, common folks, of course, moms and pops and truck drivers and postmen and small business owners. He may aim at, say, a Tom Delay, but then he's simply making fun of a pesticide guy who's done well. And this is always bad form, whatever shortcomings a conservative leader may have. It's a case of sounding more like Marie Antoinette than Jeff Foxworthy, and whatever you think of the latter, he's no elitist. And Foxworthy, by the way, isn't angry.

As I was always taught, you can tell a great deal about a person's class by how he treats his social inferiors. Those who treat the garbage man with respect and dignity are always more appealing than those who ridicule him as an uneducated ruffian who doesn't know which fork to use. Manners, after all, are nothing more than an outward concern for the feelings of others. If that's true, and it surely is, then the true snobs of our culture aren't on the right, at least not what I'd call the pro-democracy right (as opposed to that minority that still longs for crown and altar). No, they're on the left, where true snobbery rules, and where humor at the expense of middle America is the most sincere form of provincialism.