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a look at the best-seller list lately? It's enough to take you breath
away. The January 6 list was chock full of conservative books. Bill
O'Reilly's No
Spin Zone has been holding down number one for weeks. Bernard
Goldberg's Bias
comes in at number six, followed at seven by Barbara Olson's The
Final Days. At number twelve there's Peggy Noonan's Reagan
biography, When
Character Was King. Next week, Pat Buchanan's Death
of the West will makes it debut on the list. And those are
only the most obviously conservative entries.
The rest of
the list is filled with presidential biographies (John
Adams and Theodore
Rex), war stories (The
Wild Blue, Ghost
Soldiers), and illustrated accounts of September 11 (One
Nation, America's
Heroes). Tired of presidents? There's a new
biography of Winston Churchill on the list. Tired of politics?
How about a memoir from just retired General Electric CEO, Jack
Welch? Looking for a Democrat? There's always Jimmy Carter's,
Christmas
in Plains. Tired of humanity? In The
Universe in a Nutshell, Stephen Hawking will gladly update
you on the latest scientific breakthroughs. It's hard to imagine
a more culturally conservative booklist.
The cultural
Left has striven mightily to sell September 11 as a monument to
the folly of social conservatism, but the American public isn't
buying. What they're buying instead are books about American greatness,
books that assault the Clinton legacy and the liberal elites who
embody it, and above all, books about strong moral character and
how to achieve it. The worst depredations of the Taliban may have
been carried out by, "The Department for the Promotion of Virtue
and the Prevention of Vice," but does anyone seriously believe
that the Taliban's moral tendentiousness somehow negates the importance
of virtue itself? Americans know better. They have responded to
September 11 with paeans to heroism and leadership, and a fierce
reaction against the failings of our erstwhile political and cultural
elite.
At number one,
Bill O'Reilly's No Spin Zone is just plain fun. O'Reilly's
plenty smart alright, but his tough-talking, working-class hero
persona drives our cultural aristocracy nuts. Every time NPR or
some Hollywood star, infuriated by O'Reilly's popularity, takes
a pot shot at him, O'Reilly just publicizes the swipe and watches
his book sales soar.
The striking
thing about O'Reilly's No Spin Zone is how it combines the
themes of the other conservative books on the list. Like Bernard
Goldberg, O'Reilly once worked for CBS, and Dan Rather and his organization
come in for a shellacking in both books. Before leaving CBS, for
example, O'Reilly did a story on the tensions between long-time
residents of Provincetown, Massachusetts and the visitors who'd
made that town a nationally famous vacation spot for gays. O'Reilly's
report simply presented both sides of the story, but that was too
much for CBS. The piece never aired. Up to now, we've mostly had
to content ourselves with inferring media bias from the one-sidedness
of what we actually see on the news. But O'Reilly's book, like Goldberg's,
goes behind the scenes and gives us the smoking guns.
In Bill O'Reilly
and Barbara Olson, our list has got a pretty impressive pair of
"Clinton bashers." For O'Reilly and Olson both, the Clintons
personify what's gone wrong with America — the collapse of
integrity in the face of a culture of perpetual excuses and phony
victimhood. With this best-seller list, we're a long way from President
Clinton's acquittal — a time when many conservatives felt that
the culture war had been all but lost. Although plenty of Americans
clearly felt that impeachment was too harsh a penalty for Clinton's
public lies and private betrayals, they were nonetheless profoundly
offended by the president's moral failings. William Bennett once
famously asked, " Where's
the outrage?" Well, it's here, on the best-seller list.
The war seems to have called the country back to its moral roots,
and the ghost of Clinton is slowly being exorcized.
O'Reilly makes
a point of taking on both the Left and the Right, but there's no
doubt that his ultimate target is the sixties ethos, and its carriers
in the cultural elite. His parents, O'Reilly tells us, believed
in "spare the rod and spoil the child." Misbehavior at
the O'Reilly house brought immediate punishment. In fact, as far
as O'Reilly is concerned, even "corrupt national leadership"
comes in second to "cowardly parenting" as the cause of
our national moral decline. It's character O'Reilly's looking for,
and the presidential biographies on the best-seller list just so
happen to shout in unison that character is king.
The courage
of John Adams, who as perhaps the greatest agitator for Independence,
literally put his neck on the line for liberty; the marriage of
true minds that the love of John and Abigail Adams embodies; the
almost impossible physical and spiritual vigor of Teddy Roosevelt,
tempered and rendered potent by his omnivorous intellect and surprising
prudence — these are the models at the heart of America's post-September
11 fascination with character. So far from making the country turn
against "virtuecrats" for their incipient Talibanism,
the war seems to have prompted an acknowledgment that national strength
depends upon the moral integrity of its people and its leaders.
The balance
of political power in the United States is still held by what used
to be called the "Reagan Democrats"-working-class voters
who tend to go with Democrats on the economy and Republicans on
cultural issues. Reagan Democrats rule the best-seller list. Bill
O'Reilly's working-class riff is well known. Bernie Goldberg, although
he never voted for Reagan, turns out to be a blue-collar Democrat
from the South Bronx — a self-styled "old-fashioned liberal"
who feels abandoned by the Left's embrace of affirmative action
and orthodox feminism. Peggy Noonan is another classic Reagan Democrat
type. And the ultimate Reagan Democrat, of course, was Ronald Reagan
himself, who, as Noonan is at pains to point out, was not only a
Democrat, but came from a more humble background than nearly any
other modern president. (And of course, Reagan's humble background
is something you never heard about from the liberal media.)
So the Democrats
might take some hope from the faltering economy and the loss of
the first George Bush after his success in the Persian Gulf War.
But the best-seller list seems to say that as long as the war remains
salient, the strategy of tarring the Republican social conservatives
with the brush of the Taliban will fail.
And the best-seller
list tells yet another story of cultural change in America. Although
the Left retains its grip on the most prestigious media outlets,
its stranglehold on the cultural life of the country now appears
to have been definitively broken. The Internet and cable are at
last enabling conservatives to do an end run around the media elite.
The system will never be the same. Of course, by exposing the shameful
and indefensible bias of the mainstream media, Bill O'Reilly and
Bernard Goldberg are telling a part of that story. Yet the fact
that they've made it to the best-seller list at all speaks to something
we now take for granted, but which has in fact changed everything
— the advent of cable and the Internet.
The success
of Goldberg's Bias was driven by the Internet's Drudge Report,
and by cable shows like Fox's O'Reilly Factor, which of course,
has given O'Reilly himself a way around the mainstream media. Likewise,
Barbara Olson first became known through her appearances on cable-news
shows. And, if I can be forgiven for tooting our own horn, National
Review Online and the conservative corner of the net is clearly
an important part of this picture as well.
Just a few
weeks ago, for example, I broke a story on NRO about the rather
spectacular silencing of feminist critic Christina
Hoff Sommers at a government-sponsored conference. That story
raced around the net and landed eventually on The O'Reilly Factor.
As a result, tremendous pressure for reform has been put on the
Department of Health and Human Services. Yet, as The Weekly Standard
recently pointed out, the Sommers story has been completely ignored
by the mainstream media.
Five years
ago, there wouldn't have been a story at all. A conservative critic
like Sommers would have been silenced by the government, and no
one would have noticed or cared. But today, the Internet, cable,
the conservative magazines, and talk radio together represent a
kind of parallel media — an alternative now draining viewers
at ever-growing rates from the mainstream outlets. It began when
talk radio put Rush Limbaugh on top of the best-seller list. Now,
the conservative media is sufficiently strong that, at a given moment,
it can break through the veil of mainstream silence and literally
dominate the list.
Of course,
none of this means that conservatives have won the culture war.
But it surely means that the culture war is far from over, and that
the pendulum is now swinging mightily in a conservative direction.
There's clearly something more going on here than a simple call
to battle — or even to national greatness, if greatness is
defined only in terms of military strength or foreign policy. Four
months after September 11, the best-seller list is less about the
war itself than about the personal character we'll need to fight
it. That shows just how broad and deep the potential cultural effect
of this war really is.
The promotion
of virtue and the prevention of vice are exactly what this best-seller
list is about. Woe to those who hope to use the folly of our enemies
to bring into disrepute the moral strength without which no nation
can long endure.
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