Yesterday’s Hub Blog has a pointer to an excellent article in the American Conservative. I’ve excerpted some of it below, but recommend reading the whole thing.
Now conservative offerings come with diagrams of farting cows-bless Glenn Beck. No one is likely to have his worldview rocked by Sean Hannity’s Deliver Us From Evil or his political eyes opened by Michelle Malkin’s Unhinged. Laura Ingraham’s Shut Up and Sing slides easily down the memory hole. But permanence isn’t their intent. Conservatism has shifted from a modest cast of mind to a playground contest of insults. Millions can play along.
This isn’t to say that bestselling conservative authors don’t manage to pack arguments into their books or buttress those arguments with facts and footnotes. But they do not aim to challenge the faithful or change the minds of their opponents-to turn moderates into conservatives or shake liberals from their delusions. Conservative readers are looking for how-to manuals-an easy way to beat that liberal sister-in-law in a dinner-table debate. Thus Beck’s latest blockbuster offers “the secret formula to winning arguments against people with big mouths but small minds.”
But it may be too generous to say that book buyers are only looking for ammunition: many conservative bestsellers aren’t purchased to be read so much as to be owned. In the bully’s game that talk-radio conservatism has become, if you can’t keep Barack Obama out of the Oval Office, there’s at least some satisfaction in forcing the New York Times to put Obamanation at the top of its list. Besides, stocking up on conservative kitsch yields a rush of inclusion, like wearing the jersey of a favorite football team. Being on the Right is no longer a lonely struggle standing athwart history; it can be more like standing in a stadium doing the wave.
It speaks to a lot of my frustration with recent conversations here on BMG. I’ve compared it to talk radio, but it’s really more like folks screaming “yankees suck” at Patriot’s games…
“Diagrams of Farting Cows” = “Republican Idea Pipeline”