Consumer Welfare
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At the TAC main blog, Clark Stooksbury points us to this gem from Limbaugh:
How does it make you feel that Zhang Linsen has a big Hummer with nine speakers blaring as he pulls out into a four-lane road with so much smog he basically can’t see the car in front of him, and you are trading in all of your cars and trying to go out and find basically a lawn mower?
Actually, it makes me feel relieved that I don’t live in smog-infested cities where marathoners collapse and die because of the pollution. Limbaugh offers here the absurd spectacle of “conservatism” as the embrace of endless consumption and degradation of nature, and really what this reveals is a desire to belong to something like a pink subsidy state (a modified version of what James has called the pink police state). The implication here seems to be that if the market can no longer accommodate sufficient levels of consumption, the state should come in to subsidize that consumption and over-consumption, but above all it is a declaration that egregiously conspicuous consumption has something to do with national status and power. Of course, if you were to suggest to a mainstream conservative that support for consumerism is a common or accepted view among them, you would be immediately denounced as a closet socialist who wants to impoverish everyone, unlike all those high-minded economic conservatives who just happen to defend all forms of consumption out of respect for freedom.
Cross-posted at The Daily Dish
That the self-styled voice of modern conservatism is basically endorsing market-distorting subsidies undertaken by an ostensibly Communist regime in order to keep itself in power is as good as reminder as any why I am no longer a Republican.
Daniel,
I really enjoyed this post. “Freedom” seems to have undergone some perverse conversion or soul-transplant in certain right-wing circles. It seems true, well-ordered, freedom would consider more than our immediate desires, and think about the mutual benefit of our neighbor and our stewardship of natural resources,
Then again, what do we really expect from Mr. L.
On a somwhat related point, and in response to dphenreckson, I thinks its an interesting and sad phenomenon that those who know what freedom actually means lack a mainstream platform, while the newspeakers, opportunists and distorters of language seem to monopolize mass media. Why is this so? Is there really a high market demand for vapid bull****; a marketplace in which “the Daniel Larison Show” for example, would be unable to maintain an audience, flounder and fail, or does it have more to do with the career choices and personal ambitions of a Rush Limbaugh vs. a Daniel Larison?
Do ordinary, marginally politically aware people really want to be condescended to, or is it just that honest and intelligent people with good ideas just aren’t inclined to persue a career in mass media ,or simply can’t make themselves entertaining?
There are a couple of mutually reinforcing factors that prevent my hit show from taking over the airwaves in the future. First, as you guess, it has to do with different professional choices and career tracks, but I think there is also something of a temperamental difference. (I am not exactly the best or smoothest communicator when I am speaking, so that would hinder things considerably.) Even without that, though, the media of mass communication are not always very well suited to discussing an understanding of how ordered liberty depends upon a well-ordered polity created through the right ordering of souls through the practice of virtue and restraint. The nature of the medium limits what can be said, it rewards oversimplification, and there are incentives for appealing to excessive or disordered desire (ad marketing depends on this).
A conservatism of place and virtue, as I have sometimes called it, would have to tell people that they cannot have everything they want and should not want many of the things they desire, and this makes not only for poor entertainment but also a good way to get people to switch to another channel. One reason why Limbaugh and his imitators succeed as much as they have is that they flatter and applaud their audiences and locate the causes of all of the problems elsewhere.
When you put it that way, I understand why it would be exceedingly difficult and don’t disagree with you about the obstacles to mass appeal “The Larison Show†would face. However, I’ve had this furious itch for a long time that a very large part of why there hasn’t been any penetration of weighty, gripping discourse (as opposed to power politics and gossip) into popular media, is a combined lack of personal commitment and imagination among those who would be best qualified to spearhead the effort.
Blogs, podcasts and videologues are expressly designed to cater to a certain niche audience. It would be foolish to think that these formats could form the basis of a commercial endeavor into mass media. But I refuse to believe that there is no more room for commercially viable innovation in the merger of information and entertainment.
Are we to resign ourselves to the hugely depressing assumption that there’s simply no way to make honest and intelligent discourse engaging and entertaining to a wider audience?
I think it’s wrong to assume that, for example, a debate over the merits of interventionism vs. non-interventionism must be overly stuffy and dryly academic. One just need keep in mind that the listening audience consists of regular people who can best process new ideas in terms of metaphors and analogies. Granted, some intellectuals have severe difficulties communicating to laypeople, but some don’t. I for one remember a sense of giddy excitement when I was first exposed to ideas that caused me to question the validity of the two-dimensional partisan divide, compelling me to think in terms of concepts and values, rather than the superficial grab-bag political position staking I had thus far accepted at face-value. I was very entertained and invigorated by the feeling that I was learning how the world really worked. Most people are.
To illustrate what I’m talking about, The Bill Maher show comes the closest to approaching what I’d consider an intellectually elevated infotainment program in practice. For the most part, Real Time with Bill Maher is an exercise in how to waste its own potential, but on the rare occasions its good, it’s really good and very entertaining. He invited a diverse mix of intelligent people to discuss issues of weight (among other things) which at times acheived an honest airing of real ideas, real perspectives and real emotions that, however brief, enraptured the audience completely.
If you subtracted the obnoxious egotism, bad humor and pandering to celebrities, it might have led the way in cementing a successful formula for expansion into commercial and basic cable television. More importantly, a successful show of that nature would set a precedent and invite imitators, at some point permeating the collective consciousness to compete with pundit shows and opinion “journalism†as a popular vehicle for political and social knowledge.
Are you telling me that this is impossible?
[...] Rush Limbaugh thinks the government outght to subsidize fuel consumption in the name of economic growth. Larison has a nice response. [...]
I’ve never read a more soul-stirring call to envy. Its power is such that in addition to spurring a review of our environmental policy, it could be the motive force behind our trade and defense policies as well.