9
THE CONSERVATIVE ECHO CHAMBER
“After the suffering of many years of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.”
—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
“You cannot do political philosophy on television.”
—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
A few years ago, my wife and I attended a popular “megachurch” in Northern Virginia. I had heard the preacher on the radio, and that’s what got me in the door. But I left before he ever spoke. Our seats were so far away from the pulpit, our only option was to look at huge screens (it was like going to a Dallas Cowboys game and watching the Jumbotron instead of the game). We arrived during the music portion, which is supposed to be a time of worship, contemplation, and reflection. But when the guitar player was playing his lead, the camera zoomed in on his fingers like he was Jimmy Page. It felt like we were worshipping him, not the Almighty. And it taught me something: television makes humility hard, and technology makes intimacy difficult.
Yes, throughout history, every new technology has faced a backlash. No doubt, there was some old guy bemoaning the fact that the printed word replaced the intimacy of telling stories around the campfire. But according to Neil Postman, author of the classic book Amusing Ourselves to Death, television is a uniquely problematic medium. As such, it is incorrect to think of the television as merely an extension of past media, just as it would be foolish to think of the automobile simply as a horseless carriage.
Having grown up with the television on in the background, it is almost impossible for me to imagine what life was like before its soothing glow. But as a digital immigrant—someone who was alive as the Internet became ubiquitous—I am able to appreciate the paradigm-shifting power of a new technology. My children, who are digital natives, might struggle to understand this. Television changed everything. Children would learn what was cool not from their friends and family—or even from the movie theater—but from Fonzie…or Joey and Chandler, or…whomever. The values that would be instilled in us would come not just from our parents and our teachers, but also from people in Hollywood with dramatically different values. A president would now also have to be an entertainer. If video killed the radio star, then TV killed the boring pol. When one considers the elections of John F. Kennedy and an actor named Ronald Reagan, it becomes pretty clear that television made image dramatically more important.
Not everyone saw the storm clouds gathering. For “good government” types, it once appeared television might be a positive force. This was not only because it helped the winsome John F. Kennedy defeat the “evil” and sweaty Richard Nixon, but also because, as Susan Jacoby writes in The Age of American Unreason, “Television coverage had…spelled the end for Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in the spring of 1954, when ABC devoted 188 hours of broadcast time to live coverage of the Army-McCarthy Hearings. Seeing and hearing McCarthy, who came across as a petty thug, turned the tide of public opinion against abuses of power that had not seemed nearly as abusive when reported by the print media.”
Perhaps Joe McCarthy was merely unfortunate enough to have been Patient Zero? Future demagogues on both sides of the aisle would learn how to manipulate this media, as well.
The Rise of Conservative Media
I’m old enough to remember the bad old days when the mainstream media filter presented only one side of the news, but it’s hard not to argue that there have been some unintended consequences associated with lifting this filter. It has become clear that the ability to perform on cable television has greatly influenced how Republican primary voters—especially early on in the election process—rank possible presidential contenders.
Additionally, new media innovations such as blogging and social media platforms like Twitter are also double-edged swords. They remove the filter and lower the barrier of entry. This lets both the good and bad actors who had been previously excluded from the establishment into the system. Like many of the trends discussed in this book, this is not an altogether new conundrum, even if the potential for using and misusing media has greatly increased. Before websites like Breitbart.com, there was talk radio. Today, we are familiar with how the end of the so-called Fairness Doctrine (which required owners of broadcast licenses to provide “equal time” to controversial political subjects) paved the way for Rush Limbaugh to become a national figure in the late 1980s. But prior to the law’s inception, there were all sorts of controversial radio hosts, including religious figures like Los Angeles’s “Fighting” Bob Shuler and Father Charles E. Coughlin, who spewed demagogic messages and (in some cases) anti-Semitism over the radio waves. In the 1930s, Coughlin had somewhere around thirty million listeners and was an important booster of FDR and the New Deal (both of which he later rebelled against).
Talk radio is as controversial as ever these days. And not all of the attacks come from the Left. Some conservatives are also starting to suspect that the rise of “conservative” media hasn’t been solely positive. After noting that talk radio hosts were too willing to look the other way during George W. Bush’s era of big government conservatism, John Derbyshire, writing in the American Conservative criticized “lowbrow” talk radio, calling it “Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar.”
One of the other problems with this type of conservative punditry (and it’s not solely limited to talk radio, although it is prominent there) is that it panders to angry and disaffected listeners, essentially telling them what they want to hear. Meanwhile, because these conservative pundits also become opinion leaders (not to be confused with public intellectuals in the mold of William F. Buckley), they have a certain amount of sway over voters and politicians. On the Right, this often results in a very dangerous and counterproductive outcome. Let’s take the 2016 race as an example, where Donald Trump began alleging there were 30–34 million illegal immigrants in the United States—not the 11.4 million that has been commonly cited (since 2012). Where did he come up with 30 million? It turns out Trump’s numbers came from conservative commentator Ann Coulter’s 2015 book, Adios America. This number is, as PolitiFact noted, “triple the widespread consensus.”82
But the fun didn’t end there. Trump also proposed revoking birthright citizenship. This was an interesting move, for a variety of reasons. First, the argument that “Europe does it” shouldn’t carry much sway with people who talk about “American exceptionalism.” Second, people who care about the rule of law and define themselves as “Constitutional conservatives” probably shouldn’t be so cavalier about amending or ignoring the Fourteenth Amendment. Interestingly, birthright citizenship was observed in America as an extension of English common law, but was only officially ensconced into law to overrule the infamous Dred Scott decision, which said the descendants of slaves were not citizens. So, in one fell swoop, Donald Trump found a way to offend both “the Mexicans” (as he calls them) and “the Blacks” (as he calls them). But rather than pointing out that he is wrong on both policy and political grounds, Ann Coulter tweeted a startling endorsement of Trump’s immigration plan. “I don’t care if [Donald Trump] wants to perform abortions in the White House after this immigration policy paper,” she wrote. As previously mentioned, Coulter had, a few days earlier, defended Trump’s opposition to defunding Planned Parenthood—something almost all other conservatives supported. But Coulter was so happy with Donald Trump’s stand against illegal immigrants that she would be okay with him killing unborn babies…in the White House. Given a hypothetical binary choice between saving unborn babies and deporting illegal immigrants, Coulter comes down strongly in favor of the latter.
Media and the Dumbing Down of Politics
These trends aren’t limited to shock jocks or media provocateurs. Since the advent and proliferation of TV, the power of the executive branch has increased, magnifying the power of the bully pulpit. Meanwhile, Congress has looked increasingly dysfunctional. The House of Representatives began allowing television coverage in 1979, and the US Senate voted to televise its proceedings in 1986. Not everyone thinks this has been positive. “It’s probably the worst thing that happened to the Congress,” Alaska representative Don Young told USA Today.83 Or consider what former Reagan and Bush Administration official Elliott Abrams recalled during a June 2014 conversation with Bill Kristol84 about his first day working for Democratic senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of the state of Washington. His first assignment was to cover senators marking up legislation—the committee process where they would debate and amend legislation. Abrams described watching senators cut deals that would never be made today. This was primarily because, back then, lobbyists and reporters were excluded from the markup process. Then Abrams argued that television didn’t just change the process for legislative negotiation—it changed the kinds of people who would be doing the negotiating:
Warren Magnuson was the other senator from Washington State, along with Scoop. And, let me put it this way: he was real fat; he was slovenly. You don’t have that any more. I mean, people in Washington State didn’t care that they had a fat senator, because he was a great senator. He was a really effective legislator, Magnuson. And as I think back to the Senate, when I got there, the last quarter of the twentieth century, before TV, you had a lot of senators who were old, who had bad haircuts, bad suits, overweight. It didn’t matter. And it matters now, because you have cameras now. And you got a lot of guys who spend, apparently, a very large amount of time having their hair done. The “John Edwards effect,” you know.
The world has changed—and with it, so have our politicians. It has been noted that power once came from the cloakroom, now it comes from the greenroom. Old-fashioned politicians who could cut deals used to wield a lot of power. Today, that power has been transferred to anyone who wants to go on TV and raise hell against the establishment (and then, use the video clip to raise money). Meanwhile, little gets done legislatively. Transparency is a double-edged sword. Sometimes, one wonders if we might be better off with a few less blow-dried, perfectly coiffed candidates, and a few more colorful characters in bad suits cutting deals in smoke-filled backrooms.
How to Succeed as a Pundit (without Really Knowing Anything)
As someone who has done a good bit of political punditry, I think Neil Postman was right when he observed, “When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impossible to say ‘Let me think about that’ or ‘I don’t know’ or ‘What do you mean when you say that…?’…Thinking does not play well on television, a fact television directors discovered long ago.” And so, we fake it. And not just the politicians. Pundits are often in error, but never in doubt—partly because, as Bill Clinton observed, “When people feel uncertain, they’d rather have somebody that’s strong and wrong than somebody who’s weak and right.”
As a commentator, there is usually little cost to being strong and wrong. What you cannot be is unsure or boring or nuanced. Thinking doesn’t work on television, nor does evincing any sign of ambivalence. What works really well is to be 100 percent sure of whatever it is you are saying. This is not a conservative instinct. This is not a sign of epistemological modesty. But it works fabulously on television!
Let’s consider the aforementioned Bill Kristol, who once declared, “Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary.” Or Chris Matthews, who predicted Rudy Giuliani would win the GOP nomination in 2008 and that Michele Bachmann would win the nomination in 2012. Or, even worse, let’s consider Dick Morris, the erstwhile disgraced adviser to Democratic president Bill Clinton turned right-wing TV commentator and author. Just six days before the 2012 presidential election, Morris appeared on Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor and doubled down on his bogus prediction, assuring Bill O’Reilly that “Romney will win this election by 5 to 10 points in the popular vote and will carry more than 300 electoral votes.” (Morris reiterated his prediction of a Romney “landslide” on Election Day in his column for the Hill newspaper.)
Morris’s predictions were so egregious that Fox News actually dropped him as a contributor. This was remarkable. There is seldom a downside to making bad political predictions. Quite the contrary, there is only an incentive for doing so. Pundits who make dramatic or grandiose statements and predictions reap the rewards of Drudge Report links, and page views, and TV hits, and attention. And when they are wrong, there is little finger pointing. We mostly move on. And then the offender promptly repeats this stunt. The cumulative effect is that voters are misled, charlatans become rich, and conscientious political commentators are left on the sidelines.
Aside from feigning certainty, it also helps to look good on television. Maybe such superficialities shouldn’t matter. But the fact is, they do. In the modern era, it’s pretty clear that when it comes to the White House, we don’t elect bald men (Did Scott Walker’s bald spot help sink him?), diminutive men (Rand Paul’s probably average height, but considered slight by political standards; Tom Dewey similarly suffered), men with moustaches (two strikes on Mr. Dewey, one strike on Herman Cain) or beards, men with glasses (admittedly, the least of Barry Goldwater or Rick Perry’s problems), or (since Big Bill Taft) fat men. I’m not even sure if Rand Paul’s curly hair passes muster.
This is unfair, but it’s also reality. And it’s something to consider when we examine potential 2016 contenders. Let’s start with Chris Christie, who had lap band surgery. Losing weight is good for his health, but it also won’t hurt his political career. Consider this question: Would a fat Mike Huckabee have done so well in the 2008 Republican primaries? Many Americans are biased against the obese—and expect their politicians and celebrities to cut dashing figures. This may not be fair, but it is true.
The Sexy and the Superficial
If television made image more important than substance, then the Internet has dumbed us down further by incessantly fueling outrage. The rise of alternative media has benefited conservatives at times. Were it not for the Drudge Report, the Monica Lewinsky story might never have been known. And were it not for the blogosphere, Dan Rather’s revelations about George W. Bush’s time in the Air National Guard would have gone unchallenged. Instead, some conservative sleuths were able to debunk the story as a forgery.
On the other hand, alternative media has fueled a conservative outrage machine that distracts and damages the brand. Some of the outrage is even cyclical. You can almost set your watch to the Halloween columns about “slutty” pumpkin costumes and the evergreen “war on Christmas” festivities (not to say these things aren’t a scourge!). Again, the tragedy of the commons is partly to blame. It is in the best interest of a given conservative diva to say something crazy or radical—like Ann Coulter using the term “ragheads” to describe Muslims. This gains her attention and buzz and book sales. And, soon enough, everyone forgets it and moves on to the next big outrage. Con$ervatism, remember, isn’t just a philosophy—it’s also a business. It’s hard to quantify the long-term damage the Con$ervative Movement has done to the conservative movement. (In some regards, this is a bipartisan problem, but conservatives are disproportionately harmed by it. In recent years, Democrats have been able to enforce more discipline.)
Meanwhile, an entire cottage industry has sprung up, whereby conservatives use social media to mock or knock down stories. Sometimes, as with the case of “Rathergate,” this is a public service. Other times, it’s a net negative and evidence that the Right is aping the Left in terms of playing the victim card. There’s also the problem of relying on tit-for-tat tu quoque arguments. For example, if a Republican is criticized for doing or saying something racially insensitive, the immediate response will be to remind everyone that the late Democratic senator Robert C. Byrd was in the Ku Klux Klan. If a Republican gets a DUI, the initial urge is to bring up Chappaquiddick. This reflex is brought on by a disdain for the liberal media’s double standards, but it’s also just about the most childish and tribalistic form of argument available. It’s also a form of escapism, in which you are never forced to deal with your problems—or correct them.
Perhaps the saddest part is that there are no more civilians; we have now all been recruited into this political war where the ends justify the means. And I’m not just talking about the poor people who have had their lives ruined because of some unfortunate thing they tweeted. I’m also talking about the constant, low-grade toll that being on social media takes on all of us. If you’ve managed to avoid getting sucked into the Twitter vortex of false outrage and “gotcha” journalism, your days are probably numbered. To survive in the modern media industry, writers quickly learn how push people’s outrage buttons and play upon their thirst for the superficial to get the requisite clicks and attention. In turn, political coverage has increasingly come to resemble gossip or celebrity coverage (think TMZ) and sports (think ESPN). It’s hard to tell when this line was first crossed (maybe before the rise of the Internet, or when political operatives like James Carville started doing cameo spots in movies and TV shows?). But a prime example is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a once dignified celebration of journalism now turned into a celebrity freak show designed to produce as much viral online content as the Beltway can muster. “The breaking point for me was Lindsay Lohan,” former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw told Politico in 2013. “She became a big star at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Give me a break.”
In recent years, the State of the Union has even gotten in on the act. Representative Vance McAllister brought Duck Dynasty reality TV star Willie Robertson as his guest back in 2014. The superficial—whether that’s coverage of the “horse race” aspect of campaigns or political websites that feature Kim Kardashian slideshows—now obscures the important news and conversations. Political websites know this. The dominant business model today is to provide free information (no firewalls or subscriptions) and to pay for that (and, ideally, turn a profit) via advertising revenue—which is contingent on ad impressions, which is contingent on page views. Slideshows and salacious content are one way to drive up page views. The most positive way of looking at it is to suggest that guys clicking on pictures of Kate Upton help subsidize serious reporting and analysis. This is not an absurd theory. The Daily Caller, where I work, won an Edward R. Murrow Award for “The Horse Soldiers of 9/11” in 2012. That same year, at the more liberal Huffington Post, a former colleague of mine named David Wood won a Pulitzer for his extensive reporting on severely wounded veterans. One suspects that piece was subsidized by the Huffington Post’s less prestigious postings (such as 2012’s “The Year in Sideboob”). This model isn’t terribly new if you think about it. Newspapers always coupled hard news and thoughtful commentary with comic strips, advice columns, sports, gossip, horoscopes, celebrity news—you name it. Maybe today’s new media landscape is merely the latest incarnation of a very old financial arrangement. There have always been P. T. Barnums in the news business, and pamphlets and tabloid journalism have a long history. Still, there is the sense that we are in an age when showmanship is no longer the exception—it’s the rule.
Often this involves engaging in hyperbole. Other times, it just means making wild and outrageous predictions. In the case of Dick Morris’s bogus prognostications, the results include sowing paranoia and confusion among conservative viewers who, thanks to epistemic closure and the conservative echo chamber, might only get their information from conservative media outlets. It would be reasonable for them, having been assured Romney’s victory was a foregone conclusion, to suspect some sort of foul play when Obama is easily reelected. This also contributes to distrust of the media, political apathy, you name it. And I should point out that this belief in Romney’s inevitability was widespread—far from being limited to people in the so-called flyover country.
Around the same time Morris was doubling down on his prediction of a Romney landslide, I attended a meeting of conservative-movement leaders who were (to give you an idea of their confidence) preparing to launch a shadow transition office with the purpose of helping make sure conservative staffers were hired by the Romney administration. (This was a legitimate goal, inasmuch as an official Romney transition office would likely have erred toward hiring more moderate and establishment types.) At the end of the meeting—almost as an aside—the attendees were asked to raise their hands if they believed Romney would win the election on that following Tuesday. Mine was the only hand not to go up.
Technology and the “Sophisticated” Twenty-First-Century Voter
Having argued now at some length that technology is making us dumber, it’s important to admit that there is a paradox: it’s also making many of us more savvy consumers of media. Political slogans from a bygone era, such as “I Like Ike,” would be laughable today. So would TV jingles—unless done ironically.
In the political realm, technology has enabled voters to learn about the issues and fact-check politicians in a manner that was unthinkable a generation ago. And this is one of the reasons why the “too dumb to fail” strategy is doomed to fail. On the other hand, it would be a dangerous conceit to suppose that we have outgrown demagoguery. New technology allows us to avoid coming into contact with opposing viewpoints. There is no common culture or consensus. It’s entirely possible nowadays to go through a day and avoid hearing information that challenges your assumptions. A conservative could conceivably watch only Fox News; listen to only Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck; and read only conservative blogs. There’s nothing wrong with this being part of your media diet; it becomes a problem when it constitutes your entire consumption.
And while we might be more sophisticated consumers, the demagogues are more sophisticated purveyors of propaganda than ever. Someone’s always trying to sell us something, be that an idea or a candidate or a product—and it’s naive to think we have finally outsmarted them. Think of this as an arms race. Just as we try to grapple with being inundated with information and adapting to new technology, the politicians and advertisers use an ever-increasingly sophisticated means to manipulate us. And it’s not just the politicians and the corporations who invent devious new ways to find and seduce us; the truly bad guys do, too. Terrorists use the Internet to recruit Western jihadists. The assumption that technology would solve all our problems has always been a utopian fantasy.
Still, in some ways, it has made us better. Were it not for television, Ronald Reagan would probably not have become president. Were it not for the Internet, I wouldn’t have a job writing about politics. But overall, the decline of conservatism as an intellectual movement has not been helped by the rise of TV. Inevitably, shows like Bill Buckley’s Firing Line gave way to shows more like the political version of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. This is probably a moot point. We can’t go back. We can’t go back any more than our ancestors could go back to the days when America was protected by two oceans and we felt inviolable. The challenge for conservatives is to figure out how to maximize the positive aspects of technology so we can rise above our more primitive impulses.