There are other equally noteworthy effects of this division of the press; starting a paper being easy, anybody may take to it; but competition prevents any newspaper from hoping for large profits, and that discourages anybody with great business ability from bothering with such undertakings. Even if the papers were a source of wealth, as there is such an excessive number of them, there would not be enough talented journalists to edit them all. So generally American journalists have a low social status, their education is only sketchy, and their thoughts are often vulgarly expressed. [ . . . ] the hallmark of the American journalist is a direct and coarse attack, without any subtleties, on the passions of his readers; he disregards principles to
seize on people, following them into their private lives and laying bare their weaknesses and their vices. — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Tocqueville also remarked that in a democratic age manners are never so refined as in an aristocratic age, but never so coarse either. Nonetheless, things can get pretty brutal, and if you haven’t seen the bone-crushing con-on-con action be sure to catch Conor and Rod and Frum and Dan Reihl and Mark Levin himself duking it out over whether Levin merits a bashing in the first place for the style, tone, and substance of his callous on-radio call-in disses.
Now, let me preface my comments by underscoring the putative link between hipness and effeteness that factors into the controversy about whether conservative talk radio types can be, like Dennis Rodman, bad as they wanna be. Stacy McCain, in defense of Levinism, puts it colorfully thus :
The upper echelons of American journalism have become the exclusive monopoly of former teacher’s pets, who as children were never sent to the principal’s office, who as teenagers were never suspended for showing up drunk for chemistry class, who as college students never woke up at 6:30 a.m. on the porch of the ATO house, who never played in a rock band or sold a pound of weed or dove from a 50-foot cliff into
an abandoned rock quarry.
Well, let’s see. Levin has never heard of Rod Dreher, but let’s agree, just for fun, that Rod, along with the Pomocons and American Scenesters, are fixtures of the upper echelons of American journalism. Our pampered tentacles, after all, reach everywhere, from The Weekly Standard to The New York Times . Damon Linker likes us. (Some of us.) The rough-and-tumble bona fides of manly writers like Drs. Ceaser and Crawford being beyond dispute, and Rod and Conor being quite crude enough to handle themselves in an internecine bar fight, I’ll make a few points in only my own defense. Like George W. Bush, I wasn’t in ATO but DKE. Like our own Sam Goldman, I know my way around a sweat-soaked soundproofed garage. Also I was not suspended for being drunk in chemistry because chemistry drove me to drink barricaded in my bedroom.
Studies do not show, in other words, that conservative writers who talk pretty are wimps, just as they do not show that conservative radio hosts who talk ugly are not wimps. Though nobody is contesting correlation, causation has not been established, in either direction, between nerdiness and wimpiness.
Now, at risk of ruining this post by making it too ‘serious’, let me accuse Mark Levin of the ultimate crime of effete nerdery: bad postmodernity. Run through Conor’s summation of that defense and you will note several of pomo’s worstest hits:
(1) Value relativism. Levin isn’t as crude as his enemies, who have tried to blow up Americans and let their mistresses drown. Since judging crudeness is only possible in relative terms, he is acquitted.
(2) Foucauldianism. All human relations are mere power relations. Either you “stand with” Levin or with his enemies.
(3) Narrativism. All judgment is internal to language, so any group’s use of their own special language is immune to criticism from outside the group.
All three of these isms play into and reinforce one another, but it’s the third one that really disturbs me. It’s one thing to insist that one’s comments not be ripped out of context. It’s another to insist that because one’s audience is in on the ‘real meaning’ of one’s comments, any critic of those comments — who by definition is deemed not a ‘real’ audience member — simply ‘doesn’t get it’. To say as much, I’m afraid, is to clamber up to well nigh the summit of identity politics: “It’s a _________ thing; you wouldn’t understand.” I can take bad manners and coarse mores — especially on the radio instead of the TV. What I can’t take is a defense of that behavior, ungentlemanly as it is, predicated not-so-secretly on a whole attitude and perspective that red-meat, red-state radio types supposedly abjure.
