What's the Matter With Fox News?

I've been reading the debates touched off by Julian Sanchez's post on "a systematic trend toward "epistemic closure" in the modern conservative movement".  I'm nervous about wading in because almost anything I say is bound to offend someone I like.  I'm especially sensitive--perhaps oversensitive--to the way that anything I proceed to say about conservative people outside the northeast runs the risk of sounding a lot like that fifties moderate whose work one occasionally comes across:  "Of course, I just love negroes--they're all so musical and I don't know how I'd get my house cleaned without our Bessie.  But why can't they be a little more patient about this civil rights mess?"I actually think there are a bunch of questions packed into this discussion which haven't been necessarily very clearly delineated:  there are overlapping conversations about the conservative base, the conservative wonketariat, and the conservative poltiical leadership.  The one I'm most interested in is the conservative intellectual environment, so that's mostly what I'll talk about, though they are all connected.Weirdly, the word I keep coming back to when I read a lot of these discussions is "privilege".  It's a word I get a huge amount of flack for using, from my conservative readers; and I've no doubt that I am going to inspire any number of bitter and angry rants from the other side for daring to apply it to a movement which is (overwhelmingly) majority white.  But I nonetheless think that this might be a useful concept to describe a lot of what I'm reading. Conservatives are, not to overlabor the obvious, marginalized in the
cultural elite, even though they are powerful in the political elite. 
(At least some of the time, anyway).  Obviously there's been an
enormous amount of ink shed about why this is, but my experience of
talking to people who might have liked to go to grad school or work in
Hollywood, but went and did something else instead, is that it is
simply hogwash when liberals earnestly assure me that the disparity
exists mostly because conservatives are different, and maybe dumber. 
People didn't try because they sensed that it would be both socially
isolating, and professionally dangerous, to be a conservative in
institutions as overwhelmingly liberal as academia and media.It's
actually fascinating to watch the inversion of liberal and conservative
positions on this one.  Liberals essentially seem to be saying that
hey, they don't all get together in the tenure committee and agree to
deny any conservatives tenure.  I believe them!  But I'm not sure why
they think this means that the disparity is therefore not a problem. 
As I wrote years ago, somewhere, I doubt many bank hiring committees in
the fifties got together and voted not to hire any negro bank
managers.  Yet, somehow, they didn't hire any negro bank managers.Why
not?  Because things like social networks, subtle bias, and tacit norms
about what constituted the boundaries of acceptable traits in bank
managers did all the work for them.  And I doubt they got many black
applicants, because after all, why on earth would you bother?  Better
to try to start a small business, or get a job as a Pullman porter,
where you had a realistic shot at making a decent income.  A poll of
black high school students would probably have indicated a very small
number expressing ambitions to fill jobs that realistically simply were
not available to non-white, non-male candidates.  But this is not
evidence that there is something different about blacks that makes them
not want to be successful corporate executives.It is equally
maddening that conservatives understand this about potential
conservative graduate students, but not about potential black CEOs--and
yes, I think this remains a problem today.  I'm not sure that
affirmative action is the answer, but that's a different post.So while I completely agree that there is no one-to-one equivalence between right and left,
as Ta-Nehisi writes, I'm considerably less sure about what that
implies.  First of all, I think Ta-Nehisi overstates his case to some
extent:In this specific case, the trouble is that the right's quackery is
not merely peddled by it's fringe, but by some of its most prominent
members. During the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush didn't dispatch a
couple of junior functionaries to Bob Jones University, where
interracial dating was literally banned at the time, he dispatched himself.
In 2002, it was not a small time junior congressmen who asserted that
things would have been better under segregation, it was the highest ranking Republican in the Senate. In 2005, it was not merely a fringe group of party activists who called for interference in the Terri Schiavo case, it was the Republican president of United States. It was---yet again--the highest ranking Republican in the Senate dispensing a neurological diagnosis on a woman in Florida, from his office in Washington.In
2007, when Trent Lott announced his resignation from the Senate, it was
not merely state party officials claiming the good senator had been
railroaded, it was his Republican fellow Senators. During the 2008 race, it was Mike Huckabee, runner-up for the presidential nomination of his party, who claimed to not believe in evolution. Ta-Nehisi
neglects to mention that it was also the Republicans who kicked Trent
Lott's butt out of the leadership for saying those things--as they
should have.  And while I am in absolutely no way defending Bush's
campaigning at Bob Jones university, I think it has to be noted that
Barack Obama didn't send some minor campaign functionary to attend the
church of a minister who was saying some pretty whacked out things; he sent himself.  Every Sunday.  I don't think that this made him unfit to be president, and I stand by what I wrote at the time. 
But I don't think you can tar Bush with the one while giving Obama a
walk on the other . . . at least, not when the topic is "Our favorite
fringes".  And the same goes double for conservatives who gave Bush a
walk, then attacked Obama.  I'm willing to cut Jeremiah Wright a little
more slack because white bans on interracial dating seem to me to be
obviously more dangerous than the racial anger of a man who grew up on
the wrong side of segregation.  But he is very definitely a member of
the fringe, and I certainly hope Obama wasn't endorsing all his ideas
by attending his services.It's obviously no surprise that the lunatic BS of our own side doesn't strike us nearly as forcefully as the absolutely appallingly unforgiveable wingnuttery
of the opposition.  But I think this goes beyond that--and in a way
that is important to understanding Jeremiah Wright, and the angrier
right wing talk radio hosts.  I am sure both would be appalled by the
comparison, but the point here is not to draw moral equivalence between
them; it's to point out how power dynamics work.I expect I'll
get a derisive response from liberals at the thought of explaining what
I see in the current Republican party thusly, given that the party
tends to be strongly identified with the racial majority of the
country.  But privilege is not binary; it's contextual.  Again, to
state the obvious, you can be privileged on one dimension, and a victim
of privilege on another  Being a member of the white upper middle class
does not protect me from male privilege.The point is that when one group has privilege, and the other doesn't, the response isn't
symmetrical, a fact that the dominant group tends to spend a lot of
time remarking upon.  The out-group is angrier, and prizes its group
identity--"conservative"--over weaker affiliations like "journalist" or
"sociologist".  The angrier the out-group gets, the more uncomfortable
and hostile the dominant group gets . . . which, of course, makes the
out-group even angrier. The dominant majority further
reinforces the effect because membership of "journalist" or
"sociologist" comes to be defined by "not having a strong allegiance to
groups such as 'conservative'."  Which further weakens conservative
ties to those professional identities.That's why you have black newspapers, and Jewish magazines, and Irish
arts centers, but no "Bland:  The Magazine of the American White Middle
Class".  The dominant group doesn't enforce its group identity the way
the out-group does.  It doesn't have to.  It gets to decide what
constitute the acceptable modes of behavior, sources of authority, and
ways of knowing.  The privileged group doesn't need its own institution
specifically devoted to advancing its interests.  All it needs is a
sigh, and a sneer This
is the core of privilege: for the dominant group, it is passive, while
for the minority it is an active experience.  If you're a nice liberal
urban media professional, you do not do anything to enjoy the perks of
affinity with all the other nice liberal urban media professionals. 
And you don't have to renew your membership in the white male club in
order to enjoy the many professional benefits of belonging.  Only for
the people who have to choose between identities does it require any
thought.  The dominant group can assert and enjoy power without even
knowing it is doing so.  So instead of cutting the out-group a little
slack because of the problems created by exclusion, the tendency is to
be less charitable because it's hard to see their plight, or identify with them.  If you're enjoying all the passive benefits of privilege, the anger,
and the strong lust to reinforce group identity, seems, well, kinda
crazy. Maybe morally wrong.  But definitely crazy.  And most of us are
not driven to positively engage with the insane . . . or with people
who think we are insane.I think this explains a lot of what I see on Fox News, and also, what I see from liberals who are enraged by it.  This
has practical importance for the conservative movement right now, and
especially (to return to my area of greatest interest) for the
intellectual core of the movement.  Conservatives created their own
institutions because it was hard to get traction within the existing
ones: not only did they feel excluded from academia and the media and
entertainment spheres, but to add insult to injury, they could not
convince the dominant group that this was due to anything except the
inherent superiority of the dominant group.  So, like other such
excluded groups, they created  their own papers, magazines, and think
tanks to mirror the universities and newspapers that seemed
increasingly closed to them after World War II.  But while
ideologically driven journalism and policy work can be excellent, it's
also in some ways inherently problematic.  I'm enough of a fuddy-duddy
to think that journalism and academic work should not be subordinated
to political goals--that indeed, one's political ideology should be
driven by the sort of questions asked by journalists and academics. But
if you are at an explicitly mission-driven institution, these goals
will always be in tension, even if you agree with the mission.I've
never worked at either a liberal or a conservative political magazine,
but from the outside, those tensions don't seem noticeably less at one
than the other--you don't see liberal think tanks doing a lot of
studies on "Teacher's Unions:  Major Obstacle to Improving Urban
Schools" or liberal magazine articles titled "More Abortions:  The
Unfortunate Side-Effect of Legalization". But I think there is a
difference, which is driven by that unhappy dynamic between in-group
and out-group.  To wit: conservatives at political institutions find it
hard to get hired by non-ideological institutions.  It is not
impossible to go from conservative ideological media to the elite
mainstream press, and indeed people have done it.  But the people I
know who have managed are noticeably moderate.  They also tend to be
absolutely brilliant, rather than merely solid reporters who really
know their stuff--particularly if they are something other than the
house conservative on an otherwise liberal opinion page. The political
and technical standards for graduates of the Washington Monthly or Harpers
do not seem to be quite that high.  (Don't get me wrong, it's still
very high--but they don't have to be "the best liberal journalist in
[insert city name here]").  So it becomes incredibly risky for even a
talented conservative to buck the group consensus.  The other
problem is that both sorts of enterprises are dependent on donors who
often have specific goals in mind--to paraphrase Noah Millman, they
want work that shows how great vouchers are, not work that suggests how
to fix the schools.  Academics have somehow managed to perpetrate a
great scam--they get people to donate money to fund all sorts of
research they don't agree with, just because those people have fond
memories of the buildings where the research is taking place.  This is
to the general benefit of society, but since these places aren't
particularly conservative-friendly, the right has had to build
institutions based on more . . . motivated . . . funding sources.  Don't
get me wrong; I think the donors to think tanks do an enormous amount
of good.  But that funding model almost definitionally means that
important kinds of work . . . broad based general inquiry with no
clearly predictable results . . . is hard to get done.This is
not to say that conservatives are all close minded and liberals are all
just bastions of tolerance and clear-thinking.  One need only read the
comments threads of any of these posts to find unbearably smug folks
congratulating themselves on how fortunate it is that all the crazy,
unreasonable and ignorant people really are all on the other side . . . an assertion that is self-refuting.  But
most of the people on the right that I know think that there is a real
intellectual crisis there . . . and to the extent that there are parts
of the right I like and agree with, I am also worried.  The Reaganite
cold-war coalition for tax cuts and military spending just isn't
cutting it any more, and I'm seeing less and less interesting and
original work on other sorts of policy.  Oh, I get a lot of great stuff
illustrating why government solutions don't work . . . but I'm not
getting much stuff telling me what does.  Except for tax cuts and vouchers, I mean.  There
are exceptions.  But when I look back at the bold experimentation of
the Reagan era, I am deeply envious.  I see a lot more work devoted to
preserving those gains than to striking out in new directions.  And I
see huge energy funneled into rallying the base.  Not by doing
anything, mind you . . . just by repeating how outraged we all are at
the latest government failure.Julian diagnoses this as the
collapse of geography, but while I think this is possible, I'm not sure
it works by forcing people in disparate areas to confront the
pluralistic values of other locations.  The opposite, perhaps:  it's
easier to find the people who agree with you, and just the people who
agree with you, which reinforces the worst tendencies of both the
dominant and the minority groups.  I think there's a lot of merit to
Julian's argument for certain issues, like gay marriage, where this
simply is a question of pluralistic urban values versus the
geography-induced consensus culture of a small town.  But it doesn't
explain how feelings about tax hikes and health care.What might
explain it is that the new communications strategies mean the out-group
is finding it easier to reinforce its own counter-identity.  Being
descended from one of America's more numerous and storied out-groups, I
see the benefits of that--but also the considerable drawbacks.  And in
the case of conservatives, I think it's a real problem for a political
moment that demands some fairly innovative solutions to some really
deep problems we're facing.  Okay, we don't want a VAT.  But where is
the workable plan for closing the budget deficit, given the political
and practical constraints of existing entitlements?Conservatives
used to spend a lot of time complaining about the liberal media--and
indeed, I have occasionally joined them.  But it now strikes me that
this was basically very healthy for the right.  Everyone in the
movement was frequently and forcefully confronted with the best the
opposition had to offer; they could not be content with preaching to
the choir.  They were muscular--and liberals flabby--precisely because
liberals didn't really understand what they were up against.  Now it
looks to me as if conservatives are often voluntarily putting
themselves in the same cocoon.(On a side note, this implies
that liberals are not doing themselves any favors when they allow
themselves to get genuinely enraged about the existence of Fox News.)  
All that said, I'm conscious of how limited my perspective is. 
Limited in time, because the present almost always seems either much
better or much worse than the past; we airbrush away all the little
speckles.  It may be that I think the conservative movement was more
vibrant in the past because I'm collapsing decades of people and their
work into a smaller time frame--the way many people imagine that the
Fitzgeralds and Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Parker all
sort of lived in one flat in Paris.  And limited in scope, because
let's face it:  I live in Washington DC.  I grew up on the Upper West
Side.  The only people I know in small towns are a few relatives.  My
perception of what is happening there is mostly mediated by a media
that, umm, is pretty liberal and almost definitionally, not living in
small towns of a conservative bent.But I don't think it's just
that.  The Republican party is not putting forward bold new ideas; it's
energy lies in thwarting the Democrats' policy plans, and doing more
tax cuts.  No matter how much I would like to see many of those plans
thwarted, I don't think this is enough.  And some of the fault has to
lie with the intellectual centers--the think thanks, the
magazines--which don't seem to be delivering a core of new ideas that
they can take to voters. When I look at the institutions of the right,
it seems to me that a lot of time is spent reassuring itself about what
is already believed, rather than challenging itself to find innovative
new directions to take the movement--or even better describing the
problem.  Too much Fox News, not enough God and Man at Yale.  I think I
understand, institutionally, why this is happening--and I think
mainstream institutions have to bear some of the blame.And yet, who cares who's to blame?  The New York Times cannot fix the problems on the right.  Only conservatives can do that.  I
suspect I'm going to provoke an angry reaction from many quarters with
this post--particularly from think tankers and journalists at
ideological outlets who will tell me that I've missed a whole bunch of
important work.  But this is not an attack on think tanks, or on
political magazines--my fiance works for a political magazine, for
which I held the deepest respect long before he joined the staff.  And
there is great work coming out of a lot of think tanks on any number of
fronts.  The problem from my perspective is that the right is doing a
better job of engaging with itself, and its own anxieties, than of
engaging with the broader intellectual culture--which is allowing the
intellectual culture to once again turn its back on the right.  That
makes it harder to create new ideas that have traction--and by
extension, harder to advocate for the good ideas they already have.