Here’s an article on the profusion of conservative ideas in today’s media. The writer cites a couple of major sources for this trend: Fox News, the Internet (and the Blogosphere or, as I like to call it, the Bloggerdome), and conservative-slanted books.
I’m not going to take an ideological stance on this one, since I’ve spent my last few years unsuccessfully trying to reconcile a lot of my conflicting political viewpoints (and then there’s the attempted reconciliation of my philosophic and mystic bents). However, I will observe that this trend is similar to something that occurred around a decade ago in the music industry and, in both instances, technology was the root.
The author of the article seems to be saying: Conservative America is growing, but the real point is that its very existence and immensity is finally being acknowledged. As new outlets come into play (particularly the collective mental “processing power” of bloggers and other Internet users), we’re finding that a lot of people prefer to get their spin from non-mainstream sources (which, of course, “mainstream-izes” these new sources).
This trend reminds me of what happened when SoundScan was implemented in music retail outlets. See, for the longest time, the “Tops of the Charts” were determined through a pseudo-scientific method that relied heavily on informal polling. So certain musicians were given more heft as chart-toppers than they should have received. With the advent of SoundScan, which compiled sales info through bar-code scanning, a seismic shift occurred: Garth Brooks turned out to be the biggest seller in America.
Until more accurate sales records existed, the country music scene in America was pretty much relegated to underground status, weird as that seems. It was perceived as the province of rednecks and other southerners. With SoundScan, we learned:
a) this genre had broader geographic appeal in America than anyone thought, and
b) there are a lot more rednecks and other southerners buying CDs than anyone thought.
Similarly, SoundScan revealed that hip hop was a much bigger market than previously thought, and that sales were heavier in white suburban areas than in some black urban regions.
My point is, the market (or the population) was always there, but without the technology, its size was criminally underestimated. Of course, this led the major labels to focus almost exclusively on the demographics that were thus revealed, which naturally brought about a stagnation and self-parodization of those music styles, but hey. We’ll see what happens with conservatism in America.
Kudos to Arts & Letters Daily for linking to this City Journal article.