The Dartmouth Review: South Park Is Not Conservative

BOOK REVIEW

South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias
Brian C. Anderson
Regnery, 2005

Just a glance over the dust jacket of South Park Conservatives should give us occasion to pause. There's a pugilistic boxing glove and a garish cartoon explosion. Then there are all the other discouraging imperatives of the modern publishing industry: the cringe-making use of exclamation marks ("Guess What, Mainstream Media: You're History!"), the lurid subtitle ("The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias"), the shrill sensationalism ("The liberal media's monolithic power has cracked and broken"), and so forth.

Trepidation is justified, I think. Brian C. Anderson, a senior editor of the City Journal, has turned out a peripatetic survey of the emerging universe of conservative media. He wends from talk radio to publishing to the Internet to cable television, a new sphere of discourse he argues amounts to a "conservative counterculture." The revolution, apparently, is televised.

While Anderson justifiably lauds the nimbler media and its increasing promiscuity of conservative alternatives, he also tends to over-egg the pudding. At one point he crows, "CBS's cancellation in late 2003 of its planned four-hour miniseries The Reagans marked a watershed in America's culture wars." Whatever strikes you count against The Reagans, made-for-television movies are not typically hinge-events in cultural history. I would add that on-line 'weblogs' are hardly equivalent to Gutenberg's press—self-evident, I'd hazard, but not always so here.

Then Anderson takes a dubious leap. In a final chapter, he examines the way the undoing of mainstream conventionality has influenced college campuses, especially the elite ones. These conservatives are just like normal kids, he says, but they are also bucking liberal orthodoxies and having a swell time of it. The crude television cartoon that lends this book its title, 'South Park,' is popular with many young people. So goes South Park conservatism, so goes the country, is the thinking.

Anderson is all bumped up on young conservatives, and, as someone who recently completed a degree, my experience may be suggestive; what I hope to make here is a polite argument against the grain of so much conservative criticism these days.

There are salient reasons we should be concerned about the state of higher education. The contemporary university, in general, is pathologized by fashion, the wanton delight in change for its own sake. Ideas, values, and sensibilities that used to enjoy a presumption of validity are regularly undermined and negated, and, left under this stewardship, too often the preponderance is of loss. Students, then, arrive at college positioned to devote four years to a convalescent education that lacks the fundamentals, or, worse, sabotages them.

But the thing about the professoriate these days is that it is very uneven—not an unimportant detail. Unevenness implies a range of qualities. Some professors are so bad that it stops just short of criminality. The ideologues entered the profession during the sixties and seventies, periods of great turmoil and confusion, and exceedingly aberrant in the history of higher education and thought. Ward Churchill is a symptom of this environment, Larry Summers, a casualty.

But neither case is entirely representative, and conservatives have been slow to recognize the revival occurring at our colleges and universities. (Of course, it is a slow revival.) I would simply say: there are still many excellent professors, and the younger faculty I have especially found to be better—more dedicated, more civil and fair, more open to new ideas and different points of view, much more than their older peers. Besides, almost all faculty members tend to do a professional job, whatever their ideological proclivities.

Conservatives should not be complacent, but they should be a little more buoyant. It is beyond the broken-watch-is-right-twice-a-day principle: it is that there is still some good remaining in the academic world and that it can be found. There are enough great teachers that anyone who gambols through and misses a real education has only himself to blame. The silly frippery that passes for legitimate scholarship has been subjected to a blistering critique and is easily ignored; the task for the serious student is to strain out the nonsense. It's the issue of forests and trees. The woods are admittedly bad. But there are still some good trees, and hence the opportunity, probably already occurring, for regrowth.

Similarly, the atmosphere of liberal indoctrination is overstated. Students are not passive receptacles. Nobody, naturally excepting the gullible and foolish, is getting the top of his skull sawed off and jammed with involuntary ideas. Students are critically-minded, usually bright enough to recognize when they're being strung along or manipulated. The situation on the ground, for the students, is very different from what the university fashionistas would desire. This is because life is chaotic, the product of many different decisions of many different people, and, well, real. It cannot be 'engineered.'

Nevertheless, Anderson goes mooning on about how tough it is to be a conservative in "academe's monolithically liberal atmosphere." Well, gosh, it's not easy to be a conservative, ever. This is not to put into the puling whine of grievance, indignation, and discrimination that prevails among many conservative kids on campus.

Rather, it is to say that conservatism has a terribly complex and tangled intellectual history, and it requires a deliberate mental framework to understand it all, to engage it. Conservatism entails more than the familiarity with current affairs and the partisan scene that Anderson's media outlets advance,—but study and readings, in the complications of history, literature, philosophy, government. No one can possibly comprehend it all on the basis of websites, television personalities, and radio call-in shows. These are topical, evanescent, and do not lend themselves to a coherent politics. You try to pitch a tent without the poles.

Ideas matter. And the people and outlets that advance ideas matter, too. If these become disengaged from actual learning, that deliberate mental framework, then a way of perceiving the world becomes a way of knowing it—reflecting, circulating, and reinforcing patterns of response. It lilts toward a variety of thinking and experience that is not the result of perceptions and ideas but determines them, with its own unsound logic and premises. The new partisan media is just the obverse of the (mostly) homogenized university. Both are fossil formations, ossified. They insulate against analysis, evidence, and reasoning.

I am not as sanguine as Anderson about the effect of these new media outlets on young people. Sad to say, I have found the students who are most attuned to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and histrionic websites and the rest manage to be the least thoughtful and the most partisan. While many college Republicans are just busting with opinions, many evince little understanding of why they hold those positions other than the party-line. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument, to steal a bit of Emerson.

And—for heaven sakes—if South Park is the standard of our bold new movement, hell, here we come. In the centerpiece of his book, Anderson performs what my lit-crit professors would call a close reading and concludes, "Lots of cable comedy, while far from traditionally conservative, is fiercely anti-liberal these days, which as a practical matter can amount nearly to the same thing." No, it just doesn't.

First of all, Anderson fundamentally misunderstands the nature of satire, whose barbs are pointed against all pretensions. South Park excoriated the Republicans for their handling of the Terri Schaivo contretemps with as much vitriol as it did in previous installments of environmentalism, homosexual activists, and Rosie O'Donnell. The show is comical; it regularly sends up leftist pieties; young people enjoy it—sure, I can agree, to a point. But Anderson mistakes South Park's "exuberant vulgarity" for profundity; it is decidedly not the stuff of a credible political program.

"The right-leaning kids sure don't look much like the Bill Buckley-style young Republicans of yesteryear," Anderson nods approvingly, commenting on how the "new-millennium campus conservative is comfortably at home in popular culture."

In an instance of high irony, he quotes an undergrad from Washington University named Matt Arnold praising the anti-liberal overtones of South Park. The Matthew Arnold of Culture and Anarchy celebrated culture as "the best that is known and thought in the world." Here is the philosophy that the creator of 'South Park' extols, which Anderson effervescently cites: "I hate conservatives, but I really f***ing hate liberals." This is not a culture of mind: it is one of emboldened and unrepentant stupidity—not the best place to be comfortably at home, and not conservative by any means.

Is it not unseemly and even more graceless to point elatedly to William F. Buckley as a marker of just how far we've come? W.F.B., who manages to be thoughtful in just a sentence, should be an exemplar. We shouldn't celebrate the coarsening of manners, civility, and letters that Anderson trumpets: for such trumpery is acquiescence to the sad fact that unthinking homogenization is supplanting what used to be a vibrant culture of ideas, and against that we should hold out a while longer.