Interesting article on attempts to move conservative ideas beyond conservative circles.
(Conor) Friedersdorf had a different idea in mind. "I’m not sure another Buckley’s what we really need," he wrote. "Instead, I’d prefer another Tom Wolfe, or better yet a dozen. As his generation’s conservative commentators railed against The Great Society, insisting its urban anti-poverty programs encouraged radicalism, bred dependence on the welfare state, and ignored the root causes of unemployment, Mr. Wolfe did something different: reporting." Wolfe had gone to the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein’s cocktail party, watched Park Avenue’s finest flatter themselves by sharing hors d’oeurves with Black Panthers, and wrote about it in scathing detail, first in New York magazine—the cover featured three white socialites in glittery cocktail dresses with raised fists—and later in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. In doing so, Friedersdorf believed, Wolfe had made a far stronger case for conservatism than the collected works of L. Brent Bozell. And Wolfe hadn’t had any need to work within the confines of a conservative shadow institution; writing in New York and Esquire, he had reached and potentially persuaded an audience that didn’t subscribe to Buckley’s National Review. In sum, Friedersdorf wrote, "the right must conclude that we’re better off joining the journalistic project than trying to discredit it."
Friedersdorf is neither the first nor only person to advocate for conservatives to leave the safe havens of conservative publications and think tanks to the outside world, but the idea is still true. Conservatives rail about liberal reporters, but they eschew jobs at newspapers and television stations for other careers.
The fact is, journalism will probably never be a bastion of conservativism, no matter how many moonbats argue about corporate ownership and manufactured consent. The sort of people who want to work in the news business approach life from a different viewpoint than, say, a Brent Bozell or Charles Krauthammer. But there are enough conservatives to write news in such a way that conservative views get a fair hearing.
I'm not proposing that conservatives suddenly start slanting news reporting to the right, but simply to ensure that both the successes of conservatism and the failures of liberalism get more airplay. Yes, it's very difficult to argue against housing subsidies when the other side constantly portrays all homeless as hapless victims unable to help themselves. But it's more effective to show how housing subsidies create generational governmental dependence and stifle freedom by showing those escaping those situations, as well as the liberals eager to keep people dependent because they are "helping the poor."
These are stories that need to be published in mainstream organizations, where independents and those in the mushy middle will have a chance to have their minds changed.
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