INTRODUCTION
SINCE DEFECTING FROM THE REPUBLICAN PARTY in the latter half of the 1990s and publishing a confessional memoir in 2002, I’ve discussed my right-wing past with politicians, political activists and strategists, academic scholars, student groups, fellow writers, and hundreds of readers of my book Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative. I’m rarely asked anymore why I changed, or about the baroque intricacies of the anti-Clinton movement, which I once participated in and then renounced and exposed. After a presidential election decided by the Supreme Court, the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the war with Iraq, politics has moved to a different place.
Nowadays, when I talk about Blinded by the Right, people want to know not how I was blinded by the Right, but how so much of the country seems to be in that position. For the first time since 1929, the Republican Party controls all three branches of government. Fewer people identify with the Democratic Party today than at any time since the New Deal. Conservatism seems the prevailing political and intellectual current, while liberalism seems a fringe dispensation of a few aging professors and Hollywood celebrities. People ask me, a former insider, how the Republican Right has won political and ideological power with such seeming ease and why Democrats, despite winning the most votes in the last three presidential elections, seem to be caught in a downward spiral, still able to win at the ballot box but steadily losing the battle for hearts and minds.
While it is not the only answer, my answer is: It’s the media, stupid.
When I say this, in a more respectful way, to folks outside the right wing, I usually get either of two responses. Those who receive their news from the New York Times and National Public Radio give me blank stares. They are living in a rarefied media culture -- one that prizes accuracy, fairness, and civility -- that is no longer representative of the media as a whole. Those who have heard snippets of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, have caught a glimpse of Bill O’Reilly’s temper tantrums on the FOX News Channel, or occasionally peruse the editorials in the Wall Street Journal think I’m a Cassandra. They view this media as self-discrediting and therefore irrelevant. They are living in a vacuum of denial.
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/05/con04218.html
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