There has been considerable comment in recent weeks about the failure of left-wing commentators to make it on talk radio. The leaders of the Democrat party speak openly of their desire to find someone to counteract the impact of Rush Limbaugh.
Al Gore is said to have had several meetings with potential backers for a talk show that would get out the Democrats’ message.
There is no mistaking the phenomenon. I have lived in three different locales over the past 5 years: the suburbs of New York City, along the coast of North Carolina, and the suburbs of New Haven, Connecticut. All three markets are dominated by conservative hosts, both nationally syndicated personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy, as well as local hosts. Over the years, WABC radio in New York, the nation’s largest talk show station, has tried to find a liberal who would get an audience sufficiently large to warrant keeping him or her on the air. Each was a bust, most notably Mario Cuomo.
Cuomo’s flop was especially vexing for Democrats, as he had been billed as the their star personality at the time, reportedly bright and eloquent and well-informed. Well, Cuomo may have been all those things, but no one wanted to listen to him. His show went off the air after just a few weeks, and at a time when Cuomo was looking for work after he had been defeated in his run for re-election as governor of New York.
There is no easy explanation for this circumstance. It would be nice to think that the success of the right-wing talk shows is an indication of a great silent majority out there waiting to be galvanized to transform the culture. But, from what I can tell, the country is not overwhelmingly conservative, politically or culturally. The liberals dominate the nation’s major newspapers and newsweeklies. They control Hollywood and academia. Politically correct movies do well at the box office. Their journals of opinion, such as The New Republic and The Nation, have circulations comparable to the right-wing publications, such as National Review and The Weekly Standard. The polls and electoral patterns indicate that the country is roughly split down the middle between Democrats and Republicans. The Republican edge in the Congress is narrow. Bill Clinton won — twice. Most of the country’s largest cities are overwhelmingly liberal Democrat, including those where conservative talk show hosts rule the airwaves.
Then what is the explanation for the right’s success on talk radio? Why do the same people who laugh at comedians who mock traditional values and watch movies that glamorize “liberated” lifestyles, listen to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly? I don’t have empirical data to make my case. The explanation that follows is definitely in the “hunch” category. Take it for what it is worth.
First of all, let us keep in mind that the popular conservative talk show hosts are on “our side,” but only to a degree. What they are seeking to “conserve” is not the best of Western Christian civilization. No one would confuse them with Fulton Sheen or G.K. Chesterton. They are not moral crusaders on the questions of abortion, censorship or the sexual revolution. Quite the contrary. Their formats are designed to attract as wide an audience as possible. They do not want to offend their listeners who agree with them on high taxes, illegal immigration and “coddling” criminals — but who also want porn accessible on the Internet and abortion available “just in case.” Conservative talk show hosts with a more clearly defined edge on cultural issues — such as Pat Buchanan — have not been all that successful. Tough talk on abortion and porn can chase away an audience — and advertisers.
So here’s my theory: I suspect that the way Rush Limbaugh, O’Reilly and the others shy away from issues such as abortion and censorship gives us a clue to why the left-wing hosts fail to garner an audience. Mass audiences do not like to be preached to — from either the left or the right. They want to be entertained; to hear their convictions and biases affirmed. They want to hear the hosts rip into callers who disagree with them — with the host and the audience.
The successful conservative talk show hosts have found a way to avoid being “preachy” by staying away from topics such as abortion. But liberals have a harder time doing that. Being “preachy” is who they are. They see themselves as reformers, agents of change. Their goal is to break middle America away from its “bourgeois” outlook by introducing it to progressive views — about sex, race, poverty, environmental issues, etc. articulated in the behavioral sciences.
The heroes of the intellectual left have always been those who take on deeply embedded traditional beliefs that hold back society’s “liberation”: Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, Gunnar Myrdal, the new left historians, and the deconstructionists, for example. Department heads at our most prestigious universities, Hollywood producers and directors, and middle school social studies teachers are likely to see it as their job to do the same, to challenge the middle class “prejudices” of their audiences, to liberate them from the “shackles of the past.”
So do liberal talk show hosts. This gives them a “nagging” quality when they are on the air. They scold their audiences for not being willing to redistribute their wealth through higher taxation, for being judgmental about those with “alternative lifestyles.” Nagging of this sort can go over with a group of undergraduates, who see the nagging as being directed not against themselves but against “the establishment.” In fact, the college students in a classroom being conducted by a left-wing professor may feel complimented by the harsh criticism directed against the values of their parents and neighbors; feel that they are being admitted to an intellectual elite that sits in judgment of the “backward” views of society as a whole. The audience listening to a radio talk show will not react the same way.
The audience for talk show radio is made up of people commuting to and from their jobs with the “corporate establishment.” Their drive will likely take place in a car that the left wing host will criticize for wasting too much gas. Their home may very well be in one of the housing tracts built to serve the “white flight to the suburbs.” They will see the left-wing hosts’ barbs as directed against them. Which is the last thing they will want to sit through after a tough day on the job. That is why they changed the station after a few minutes listening to Mario Cuomo. Drive-time radio is supposed to be entertainment, not a scolding.
My conclusion? It is a good thing that the public gets impatient with left-wing ideologues on the radio. But let’s not think that their rejection is the early stage of a rebirth of Western civilization. Things are not going to be that easy for us. The same guy who listens to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly on his commute may have a copy of Penthouse sitting next to him on the passenger seat.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
