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Thursday, November 20, 2008
The Fairness Doctrine boogeyman
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Talk-radio hosts play their listeners as well as Yo Yo Ma plays the cello, stroking a string and making their audience respond exactly the way they want. It’s bizarre how easily they can manipulate people who like to think of themselves as sturdy, independent-minded Americans.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the fabricated right-wing outrage about reimposition of the Fairness Doctrine. Under that long-abandoned rule, radio and TV stations that use the public airways were required to give equal time to various sides of every political issue. The rule was well-intended, but in practical terms radio and TV stations found it safer to avoid political discussion altogether rather than risk running afoul of the law.
For that and other reasons, the Fairness Doctrine was abandoned more than 20 years ago, a change that quickly led to the boom in right-wing talk radio.
However, with Democrats in control of Congress and Barack Obama about to become president, the maestros of talk radio are eager to take advantage. They know that the more threatened their audience feels, the higher their ratings get. And what better way to get their listeners riled up than to claim that the Democrats are out to silence talk radio itself, the medium that brings conservatives the truth as they want to know it?
So for months, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and others have been warning their audiences that once in power, the Democrats plan to bring back the Fairness Doctrine. Politicians such as Newt Gingrich have joined the chorus, and the issue is now being cited as a critical reason why Saxby Chambliss has to be re-elected to the Senate. Right-wing pundits insist the issue will be part of Obama’s agenda in his first 100 days in office.
But of course, it’s all made-up nonsense, backed by no evidence whatsoever. In the current issue of the New Republic (subs. req. online), Marin Cogan goes looking for those Democrats supposedly plotting to kill talk radio but ends up empty handed.
Obama, for example, is on the record as very clearly opposing a new Fairness Doctrine (To which the paranoid replies: “That’s exactly what he WOULD say, now isn’t it?”) Other top Democrats questioned by Cogan either laugh off the idea or dismiss it as ridiculous. “That’s a completely made-up issue,” the press secretary to Sen. Dick Durbin told Cogan, stressing that Durbin has “no plans, no language, no nothing.”
The bottom line is that the Fairness Doctrine is not going to come back and it never was going to come back, and those on the right who got suckered by this scam ought to be angry at being played for fools.
But they won’t be. To the contrary, just as quickly as one justification for paranoia disappears, another one is certain to emerge. Among a certain crowd, paranoia is a steady state that continues independent of evidence or proof.
In a famous essay written back in 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter traced the evolution of what he called “the paranoid style in American politics” from the earliest days of the country up to what was then modern times. More than four decades later, his description of the paranoid narrative remains as fresh and accurate as the day it was written:
“But the modern right wing … feels dispossessed,” Hofstadter wrote. “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.”
Again, that was written more than 40 years ago, a passage of time that confirms Hofstadter’s wisdom that the paranoid style is enduring. The only thing that has changed is the degree of influence that the paranoid style has since achieved through talk radio, and the grip it now holds on the Republican Party.
In fact, the Democrats have every reason to encourage rather than break that relationship, and they seem to know it. As the paranoid right talks amongst itself on radio, Fox News and conservative web sites, egging each other into ever higher fits of hysteria, they construct an alternative America and alternative reality that is increasingly divorced from the reality perceived by mainstream America.
And when conservative politicians make the mistake of exposing that alternative reality to the mainstream, as U.S. Rep. Paul Broun did recently, they only make that alienation more obvious.
In his piece, Hofstadter made it clear that he was not using the term “paranoid” in the clinical sense. As he put it, “it is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”
“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point,” Hofstadter wrote.
Again, nothing has changed. In a piece this week in the Wall Street Journal, writer Thomas Frank quoted the words of Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus in an Oct. 17 conference call.
“This is the demise of a civilization,” Marcus is quoted as saying about the election. “This is how a civilization disappears. I’m sitting here as an elder statesman, and I’m watching this happen, and I don’t believe it.”
Marcus was not referring specifically to Obama in those remarks, but there’s no question that the president-elect stokes such emotions by his mere existence. Everything about Obama — his race, his age, his intelligence, his name, his back story — feeds the paranoid’s sense of dispossession identified by Hofstadter.
In fact, if you had to design someone to perfectly epitomize their deepest fears, Obama would be it. Over the next four to eight years, he’s destined to make Limbaugh, Hannity and their ilk even richer than they are today, and make their listeners seem even more crazy.
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GOP appealing to a shrinking America
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I wrote a few days ago about the idea that there is no single “America,” that the country is constantly evolving and that each of us has our own personal concept of what America ought to be and is.
One of the biggest problems confronting the Republican Party is the fact that they have built their party on the basis of an America that no longer exists demographically.
Alan Abramovitz, the very sharp political science professor at Emory here in Atlanta, runs the numbers for us:
“The declining proportion of married white Christians in the electorate has important political implications because in recent years married white Christians have been among the most loyal supporters of the Republican Party. …. Between the middle of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, the proportion of whites has fallen by about 15 percentage points, the proportion of married persons has fallen by about 25 percentage points, and the proportion of Christian identifiers has fallen by about 10 percentage points.
“Married individuals still make up a large majority of the electorate, whites are still close to 80 percent of the electorate, and Christians are still over 80 percent of the electorate. However, the combined impact of the changes illustrated in Figure 1 has been enormous. Married white Christians have gone from close to 80 percent of the electorate in the 1950s to just over 40 percent of the electorate in the first decade of the 21st century. Moreover, the data displayed in Figure 2 show that the decline in married white Christians has been even more drastic among younger Americans. The proportion of married white Christians among voters under the age of 30 has plummeted from almost 80 percent in the 1950s to less than 20 percent in the first decade of the 21st century.”
Robert Lang, writing in Politico, makes a similar point after noting how quickly the minority population of the United States is growing:
“The bottom line for Republicans is that no matter how this population is defined, an increasing number of current minorities are voting for Democrats.
Republicans can, of course, switch their strategy and make more direct appeals to minority voters. As recently as 2004, President George W. Bush almost won the Latino vote. But at the moment, the Republicans seem branded as the party of white people. Furthermore, much of the Republican base — especially those listening to talk radio — believe the U.S. is being flooded with immigrants (legal and illegal). It may be hard to pivot and embrace diversity without alienating the GOP base. By contrast, many whites in the Democratic Party are comfortable with diversity and now form a transracial coalition with minority voters.”
I have some sympathy for the GOP because, in a sense, the party faces a very similar challenge to that confronting newspapers. Changing demographics, technologies and lifestyles are undercutting their traditional customer base, and to survive they’re going to have to find a way to reach out to woo new customers without alienating their old ones.
It ain’t easy.
