Brian Anderson, the author of the newly released South Park Conservatives (Regnery Publishing, a Human Events sister company), agreed to answer a few questions for Human Events Online readers. 1. Who are "South Park Conservatives"? A South Park conservative, as I use the term, is someone who isn't a traditional conservative, especially when it comes to popular culture and censorship, but who looks around at today's Left, with its anti-Americanism, its political correctness, and elitism, and says: "No way." In my book I find growing evidence of this anti-liberal attitude among college students and in a new kind of razor-edged political comedy that takes aim at the Left, and not just conservatives, and whose Number One example is Comedy Central's hugely popular, outrageously vulgar, and satirically brilliant cartoon "South Park." This anti-liberalism is one aspect of a bigger shift to the right in our politics and culture that is being fueled in part by the explosive arrival of the new media of political talk radio, cable news, and the Internet, which is the larger theme of my book. 2. Some conservatives have denounced "South Park" as part of the general degradation of popular culture. How do you respond to them? The conservative social thinker Peter Berger has written a wonderful book on the comic imagination called Redeeming Laughter. Of satire, he notes that it has four criteria: fantasy (often grotesque or obscene), a firm moral standpoint, an object of attack, and an educational purpose. I'd say South Park meets all four criteria. It is offensive-so much so that a mock warning precedes each episode saying that no one should watch it. But it has also satirized abortion rights, hate-crime legislation, multiculturalism, radical environmentalism, diversity mongering, sex-change operations, the sexualization of pre-teens, and any number of liberal celebrities, usually portrayed as monstrous, alien fascists. I offer an array of examples in my chapter on anti-liberal comedy. What other program in the history of popular culture had taken on liberal elites in this fashion before "South Park"? I can't think of any. The show's creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone make wicked fun of conservatives and organized religion, too, though there's nothing new about that. Obviously, if someone is put off by cursing or vulgarity he shouldn't watch the show-and it's most definitely not for children. But the fact that one of the most popular programs in America among young adult viewers regularly skewers the Left is of enormous cultural significance. It would not have been possible in an old media era. South Park Conservatives looks as well at other examples of anti-liberal humor-Parker and Stone's movie Team America, the standup comedians Colin Quinn, Nick Di Paolo, and Julia Gorin, and talk show host and comic Dennis Miller. The source material in the chapter is uproariously funny. I defy readers, at least younger ones, to come away from the chapter without a few serious laughs. These are very funny people. 3. Are college students really more to the right these days? What about all those Deaniacs we heard about last year? Before I wrote South Park Conservatives, I kind of assumed that most college kids were reflexively liberal, as they were when I was in school. But in researching my chapter on campus conservatives, I was struck by how poorly liberalism is faring on campus these days. About a year and a half ago, Harvard University's Institute of Politics did a study of college student values and found that they were to the right of the general population, with 31 percent of the students identifying themselves as Republican and 27 percent as Democrats, and the rest either independent or unaffiliated. The institute's director, Dan Glickman, put it bluntly: "College campuses aren't a hotbed of liberalism anymore." On a host of issues-taxes, abortion, military matters-students are way more conservative than they were ten or 15 years ago. As for the Deaniacs, sure, Dean had enthusiastic young volunteers, but so did President Bush. Pew Research just came out with a report that found Dean's supporters were much older, wealthier, and more liberal than the typical Democrat, which certainly wasn't the line touted by the New York Times and other mainstream outlets. Dean had particularly strong support among 40 to 59 year-olds. Many of his supporters may actually have been old McGovernites! Hardly the wave of the future. In talking to many students for my concluding chapter on campus conservatism, I found myself encouraged by the good sense, energy, and intelligence of these kids, many of whom you'd call South Park conservatives. Of course, student views tend to bounce around a lot, since young adults are still forming their opinions, but if people tend to move to the right as they get older, get married, have children, and start paying taxes-well, let's just say pollster Scott Rasmussen isn't wildly speculating when he speaks of a possible coming "GOP generation." The Democrats may have won the "youth vote" in this presidential election, but Bush garnered 46 percent of younger voters, and there was no surge to the polls by young progressives, as Kerry had hoped for and counted on. I'd be worried if I were a liberal. 4. Your chapter on talk radio predicts that the Right will continue to dominate the medium. But according to a recent New York Times piece, Air America doing just great. Air America, which has received a staggering amount of free publicity-countless puff pieces in the mainstream media, a HBO documentary, on and on-is surviving at best. Let's put things in perspective. Air America has expanded to 50 or so markets in its first year. That's okay, I guess, but look at what William Bennett's radio show has done, launched a week after Air America with zero mainstream press fanfare: it has now grabbed nearly 120 markets, and 18 of the top 20. And if you look at Air America's ratings, they're pitifully weak, even in places like New York City and San Francisco, where you'd think they be strapping. WLIB, Air America's flagship station in New York City, has sunk to twenty-fourth in the Arbitron ratings for the Gotham metro area. It's doing worse than the all-Caribbean format it replaced. Former New York governor and failed radio talk show host Mario Cuomo says conservatives do well compared with liberals on the airwaves because right-wingers "write with crayons" while liberals write with "fine-quill pens"-that is, liberals like Mario are just too complex in their thinking to get their ideas across to the presumptively dumb listeners of political talk radio. That's an incredibly elitist explanation-and stupid, since you're basically writing off the 20 percent or so of Americans who get news from political talk stations. In South Park Conservatives, I give several more plausible reasons for conservative success and liberal failure on the airwaves. One is entertainment value: the top right-of-center hosts, following former DJ Rush Limbaugh's lead, put on sharp, funny, professional shows. Just listen to Laura Ingraham! She's hilarious as well as incisive. Liberal hosts have often been sanctimonious, and political correctness makes it hard for them to lighten up. Who are they going to laugh at except white Republicans? A second reason-and I owe this insight to Dick Morris, though it's obvious when you think about it-is the fragmentation of the potential audience for liberal talk. Large percentages of liberals are black or Hispanic, and they have their own specialized entertainment radio stations, which they're unlikely to leave for something like Air America. That leaves white lefties as listeners, and NPR has a lot of them already. Conservative programming doesn't have this problem to the same degree. The biggest reason, though, is the fact that talk radio is still an alternative to the mainstream media's liberalism. It's the liberal slant of the media mainstream that has helped Fox News, which self-consciously has sought to reach out to people frustrated with that slant, to rocket to the top of the cable news universe. Fox News now beats all its cable news competitors combined in audience share, a remarkable achievement for an enterprise founded less than a decade ago. 5. Conservative bloggers helped bring down Dan Rather. But more broadly, what kind of impact are blogs and the Internet having on politics and culture? A seismic impact, as everybody now recognizes. The cancellation of CBS's The Reagans, the mixed public reception received by Richard Clarke's Bush-bashing book, the Swift Boat Veterans' controversy, and of course the revelation of how CBS's Bush memos were fakes-all would have played out differently, or not played out at all, in a pre-blog age. With so many younger and influential media type readers, the blogosphere (using that term in its widest sense, to include web publications like Drudge, which aren't exactly blogs) has become an unstoppable force, almost overnight. As I show in South Park Conservatives, the Web has brought the Right at least four major gifts. First, since there are so many conservative and libertarian bloggers and Websites, the blogosphere has massively increased the sheer quantity of right-of-center opinion and analysis, ranging from hard-to-categorize Andrew Sullivan (some claim he isn't on the right, but I think that's incorrect) to the Buckleyesque conservatives of NRO to the paleo-cons of VDARE. Paul Krugman can't write a paragraph without a swarm of bloggers dissecting it. The blogosphere has made it a lot harder to get away with blatant political bias in reporting. Pew Research tells us that only 21 percent of respondents view the New York Times as a trustworthy news source, a decline in reputation that blog exposure has largely driven, in my view. CBS News now knows the medium's power. Secondly, the Internet has given right-of-center arguments a swift chance to be heard before elite opinion forms-what media analysts call the Web's "first-mover" advantage. Third, it has made readily available an incredible amount of local knowledge and expertise, sometimes superior to the reporting done by mainstream media outlets. This local knowledge is often what liberal gatekeepers in the mainstream media don't want you to know or haven't looked for because of unconscious liberal bias. The fourth way the blogosphere has helped the Right is indirect: it has empowered a left-wing Web presence, the Michael-Moore-wing of the Democratic Party-people who think the New York Times is a conservative paper. This has hurt the party's chances nationally, since most Americans find that worldview offensive. Blogs can have a downside, too: as Camile Paglia has recently pointed out, the immediacy of the medium encourages weak writing and an inability to carry out sustained argument. But on the whole, this incredibly democratic journalistic medium is invigorating political debate, creating a twenty-first century agora. I agree with Hugh Hewitt: we're only beginning to see its effects. 6. Can you give a quick snap-shot of your book? Yes: it's that the Right is no longer losing the culture wars. South Park Conservatives tells the story of how that dramatic change has come about. The book also carries an implicit normative thrust: that the Right should vigorously support a free media. The wild proliferation of new information and entertainment sources over the last 15 years thanks to talk radio, cable television, and the Internet has given conservatives and libertarians a much greater-and growing-presence in our culture, even if the coarseness of some of what the new media convey angers and offends some on the Right. No libertarian or conservative should support greater regulation of the blogosphere or the extension of onerous FCC broadcast rules to cable. I hope more people with right-of-center worldviews go into the entertainment world, too. For decades, the main currents of popular culture have flowed to the left. The potential audience for new forms of expression that aren't reflexively liberal in sensibility is, I believe, huge, as the commercial success of anti-liberal South Park and films like the pro-achievement The Incredibles or-in a completely different register-Mel Gibson's reverent The Passion of the Christ show. And the creative possibilities and conflicts are endless, since so little has been done to date. I'm encouraged by the forming of the Liberty Film Festival and its accompanying blog, Libertas, "a forum for conservative thought on film," as it describes itself. You see sketched the outline of a new cultural future.
