Cultural Shift
The New York Times Best-seller List as mirror.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
January 11, 2002 8:45 a.m.

ad 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.