RSS FeedThe End of the Whacky Right: Changes Coming?
This posting allows me to forecast the future of politics and the media from what I’m seeing and reading today.
LAS VEGAS, NV (May 11, 2008) – John McCain is in; George W. Bush is out. David Brooks is in; Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly are out.
This is more than a trend. It’s a major shift in the philosophy of many Americans. As a result, you’ll see changes in the media and both political parties over the next decade.
We’re already seeing a rejection of the Neo-cons, the Religious Right, and possibly Fox News while we’re witnessing an embrace of moderate, intellectual, and business minded people with a conscience.
Why?
The first reason is the bungling of Iraq and Katrina. These disasters show the ineptitude of a low-tax, over-spending, special-interest government. This White House reduced everything to politics while abandoning sound economic theory. Read the books by Alan Greenspan and Bush’s former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.
The second reason is our poor standing as a world leader. Mr. Bush and his minions squandered a mass of political capital and worldwide good will after 9/11. Most Americans feel alienated from the rest of the world.
I saw it in Ireland recently. The Shannon Airport has a gallery of photos of American Presidents of Irish descent. George H.W. Bush was there: not his son. Maybe I missed it, but the sentiment from Irish businessmen matched the missing photo.
The third reason is the changing world economy. Emerging markets are growing thanks to better education and lower wages. Smartly, they continue to feed our appetite for cheap goods, while foolishly we get fat and fail to see that we are educationally out of shape.
Reason four is the realization that we border on the rest of the world. To survive, we need to work with other countries. It’s interesting that we want to embargo Venezuelan oil in retaliation for Chavez’s backing of Colombian terrorists, but we’ll trigger even higher gas prices. Bringing down Chavez politically, without further damage to our economy, requires us to not go alone. In addition, solving the problems of higher food and energy prices will not be an exclusively American solution.
It’s the younger generation that has grasped this notion of a world community better than us baby-boomers. They’ve lived with the Internet and its ability to remove barriers. Not only that, many more teens and 20-somethings are either mixed race or they have friends who are mixed race. Opening our arms to the rest of the world will come easier as they age and lead us. Already, they’re affecting this presidential race by helping catapult Barack Obama toward the White House.
Reason five is the need for more education and re-training in America. We’re falling down on knowledge; this includes our children and ourselves in our jobs.
So what will this new America look like?
Politically, the Republicans will not resemble your father’s GOP. David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, had a great piece on the British Tories, England’s equivalent to the Republicans. These conservatives are making electoral gains by changing their ways.
The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, “the whole way we live our lives.”
That means, first, moving beyond the Thatcherite tendency to put economics first. As Oliver Letwin, one of the leading Tory strategists put it: “Politics, once econo-centric, must now become socio-centric.” David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, makes it clear that his primary focus is sociological. Last year he declared: “The great challenge of the 1970s and 1980s was economic revival. The great challenge in this decade and the next is social revival.” In another speech, he argued: “We used to stand for the individual. We still do. But individual freedoms count for little if society is disintegrating. Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood — in a word, for society.”
Wow. That sounds – dare I say — liberal.
In America, things will seem more liberal. We will need more government intervention into our lives. After all, government it seems has abandoned too many of us in favor of special interests. Rugged individualism seems to only work for the rugged individuals.
However, we’re not swinging back to the extremes. For instance, conservatives and evangelicals are joining forces for the environment. Although you can’t say they’ve embraced Al Gore’s theories on global warming, they’re not roundly denouncing them either.
In the upcoming presidential race, assuming it’s McCain versus Obama, I can foresee a large number of party defections to one side or the other.
John McCain, though still flexing his muscles on Iraq, has offered a more conciliatory tone in foreign policy. Good grief, he’s making a speech on the environment this week. I still say if Mitt Romney acted like himself — the open-minded business executive and not trying to be a trumped up Ronald Reagan – he would have been the GOP nominee.
We shouldn’t be surprised. I wrote about these potential changes two and three years ago. Remember the fights in 2005 and 2006 on the immigration bill, the port security contracts, and even today on NAFTA. These issues divided politicians along the lines of free-traders and isolationists – something Tom Friedman, in his book The World Is Flat, predicted four years ago.
And have you noticed a Communist Marxist country is thriving now as it has slowly adopted capitalistic ways?
What about the media? Say what you want about the media being biased or being wagged by the politicians and special interests. There is some truth to it. But remember this. Media companies are for-profit entities. If this philosophical change becomes the rule, these media outlets will adapt.
Take Rupert Murdoch. He’s a businessman first; a political hack second. He now owns The Wall Street Journal, not the National Review.
Does this mean Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly will be gone? No. He still holds a solid audience. Granted, it’s a niche audience that is older and dwindling, but still passionate. In this niche world, O’Reilly will survive. However, he might not be the network’s standard bearer. Someone else who catches this new philosophy might be the next darling of Fox.
The same holds true for Rush Limbaugh and his radio ditto-heads. He’s not going anywhere in our Internet, Information Age. But like O’Reilly, he’s beginning to lose his political punch. If anything both of them, including people like Glen Beck and the rest of the Right Wing yakkers, they’ll be noted for their entertainment factor and not their political clout and insight.
In fact, they’ve lost most of their entertainment appeal to Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and The Colbert Report, two shows that pander to a growing audience that sees the silliness of the extremists – on the left and the right.
Instead, we’re turning more to thinkers – like David Brooks – who are thoughtful, even-tempered, intellectual, honest, while lacking a monetary special interest embedded in his work.
Thankfully, Brooks seems to be everywhere. I catch him on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and on National Public Radio in addition to his twice weekly column. There’s a reason. He’s good and his observations correctly explain this new philosophy.
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