I recently wrote about how Republicans need to take responsibility for the situation they find themselves in politically. Both pieces essentially dealt with liberal media bias, an old refrain for many a conservative. Since thinking about the articles something occurred to me…what did we expect to happen this election? Or in 2006?
Certainly conservatives created plenty of problems for themselves during this period, corruption, bad leadership, bad policies, etc. So there is a good deal we can directly manage in the immediate future, basically clean house. But the flip side to this period is the pervasiveness of the arguments against conservative ideas and policies. Here again is the old saw about a biased press, academia, and Hollywood that basically says conservative ideas get little or no attention in the popular culture due to these professions’ biased personal. But what do we as conservatives expect? As a general rule for each of these professions: education, journalism, and acting conservatives are found in insufficient numbers.
The problem for conservatives going forward is much bigger than cleaning up corruption and “getting back to our political roots.” Think for a moment about the professions I just mentioned. They all have one thing in common, they each directly impact popular culture. And in America our culture is almost entirely popular culture. It drives nearly everthing from the foods we buy, clothes we wear, movies we watch, knowledge we possess and horrible, horrible television we talk about at work…admit it you watch Dancing with the Stars and Rock of Love.
And across wide swaths of American culture conservatives play practically no role in influencing the future. So why should we be surprised when polls show significant numbers of voters had no idea who was in charge of Congress? Conservatives can’t help properly inform voters because they are not plugged into the mediums of popular culture: television, movies and schools.
We have only ourselves to blame for this predicament. As a group conservatives, have a certain amount of contempt for each of these professions: Hollywood, is full of a bunch of nuts, journalism is a formerly great profession that is overrun with liberals, and “those who can do, those who can’t, teach.”
We actively discourage each other from these fields and we’ve been doing so for years. It was only a matter of time before we started to see the results at the ballot box.
Finally, Ronald Reagan warned us about this in his farewell address, saying:
“Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-’60s.
…for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it.”
Lessons from Reagan’s Farewell Address
Posted by WPA Research on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 12:23 PM
I recently wrote about how Republicans need to take responsibility for the situation they find themselves in politically. Both pieces essentially dealt with liberal media bias, an old refrain for many a conservative. Since thinking about the articles something occurred to me…what did we expect to happen this election? Or in 2006?
Certainly conservatives created plenty of problems for themselves during this period, corruption, bad leadership, bad policies, etc. So there is a good deal we can directly manage in the immediate future, basically clean house. But the flip side to this period is the pervasiveness of the arguments against conservative ideas and policies. Here again is the old saw about a biased press, academia, and Hollywood that basically says conservative ideas get little or no attention in the popular culture due to these professions’ biased personal. But what do we as conservatives expect? As a general rule for each of these professions: education, journalism, and acting conservatives are found in insufficient numbers.
The problem for conservatives going forward is much bigger than cleaning up corruption and “getting back to our political roots.” Think for a moment about the professions I just mentioned. They all have one thing in common, they each directly impact popular culture. And in America our culture is almost entirely popular culture. It drives nearly everthing from the foods we buy, clothes we wear, movies we watch, knowledge we possess and horrible, horrible television we talk about at work…admit it you watch Dancing with the Stars and Rock of Love.
And across wide swaths of American culture conservatives play practically no role in influencing the future. So why should we be surprised when polls show significant numbers of voters had no idea who was in charge of Congress? Conservatives can’t help properly inform voters because they are not plugged into the mediums of popular culture: television, movies and schools.
We have only ourselves to blame for this predicament. As a group conservatives, have a certain amount of contempt for each of these professions: Hollywood, is full of a bunch of nuts, journalism is a formerly great profession that is overrun with liberals, and “those who can do, those who can’t, teach.”
We actively discourage each other from these fields and we’ve been doing so for years. It was only a matter of time before we started to see the results at the ballot box.
Finally, Ronald Reagan warned us about this in his farewell address, saying:
“Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-’60s.
…for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it.”