Well those numbers are less than those in the Harris poll, which is a far more comprehensive poll. It shows that those numbers have not moved much at all in the last several decades.
Conservative Moderat Liberal
% % %
1970s 32 40 18
1980s 36 40 18
1990s 38 41 18
2000’s (so far) 34 40 18
Here is the raw data:
Why is talk radio dominated by right wing politics??
Because, until recently, most of your bunkers and remote, heavily fortified woodland survivalist cabins could only get radio reception. You have to be listening to know when the black helicopters/homosexuals/immigrants are launching their effort to take over.
Besides, if you aren’t listening to talk radio, how do you know what to be angry about today? How will you know who is threatening your way of life? How will you know what to think, dammit?
It was the April issue, 2005 and the cover story, which runs about 20 pages long, with lots of factoids and side comments in blurbs around the text. My conclusion was based upon reading all that and since I’ll have to re-type, rather than ctrl+c and ctrl+v, plus the rules here about quoting, I’m gonna give you a few snippets. If you’re accusing me of misrepresenting what The Atlantic said, I’ll gladly photocopy the article and send it surface rate to you.
Source: Host by David Foster Wallace, April 2005, pp. 51 - 77.
What did you do? Go to a “Debating 101” website and just pick a logical fallacy at random to accuse me of? This isn’t even close to the mark.
As I said before, the freeper link I gave was simply a re-post of the numbers from the gallup poll. The numbers are valid, and only slightly off from yours by the way.
Even if we go with your numbers, there are still double the number of conservatives that there are liberals. Liberals get their fill from the mainstream media and NPR. Conservatives (until recently) didn’t have an outlet and thus conservative talk radio was born.
LOL. Yeah, that’s why there was such a popular groundswell to kill Social Security last spring. That’s why conservative judges proudly trumpet their opposition to Roe v. Wade. That’s why conservative bills that roll back environmental laws have honest titles like “The More Pollution Initiative”.
I don’t care how people label themselve in some stupid poll. If conservative philosophy is so mainstream, how come conservatives work so hard to hide what they actually stand for?
Face it, you guys are a loud-mouthed minority who lose at the polls whenever you say what you really believe.
Well, there are at least more people who self-identify with the label “conservative” than with the label “liberal”. If you ask about actual policy positions, though, large majorities of the population tend to agree with the positions traditionally defined as “liberal”: e.g., spending on education and anti-poverty programs is more important than tax cuts, Social Security shouldn’t be privatized, the Iraq War is a mistake, and so on.
People don’t like the label “liberal”, probably in part because the conservatives have been smearing it so relentlessly. But they still strongly favor many liberal positions.
This, I think, is quite true. It’s not that conservatives couldn’t find conservative viewpoints expressed in mainstream media, and even more so in conservative publications like the National Review and the Washington Times or Wall Street Journal ed pages. What they didn’t have was an outlet: a way to make their own voices heard and express their own feelings, particularly their feelings of rebellion against authority.
The whole counterculture movement and anti-establishment “Question Authority” gestalt was essentially a liberal phenomenon. By resisting that movement as a dirty hippy unpatriotic anti-American freak-fest, conservatives essentially muzzled themselves when it came to rebelling against authority. They were the self-proclaimed defenders of established authority and law and order and all that stuff; they couldn’t bust out and rebel against it. That was what hippies did.
But when Rush and others found the rhetorical formula that let conservatives rebel against liberals—that let them adopt the viewpoint of the oppressed and silenced minority daring at last to speak up—then conservative rebelliousness came bursting out like Mount St. Helens. And the exhilaration and energy of that swept the airwaves like wildfire. Talk radio is conservatives’ long Summer of Love.
This is the part where I tell you that if you got down out of your ivory tower you might realize that not all people are dumb, and are quite capable of deciding for themselves what to believe.
Liberal is a dirty word because of liberals, not because of conservatives. People are perfectly capable of labelling themselves.
Debaser, another important part of the Harris poll, was the number of self-described Democrats/Republicans. Perhaps there are more self described Conservatives that Liberals, but there are also more Democrats overall.
I think this is for several reasons. I think Conservative is a well-defined term, and yet flexible enough to cover most of the Republicans. So if I’m a social conservative, or an economic conservative, or a small government conservative, it means I can easily label myself as “conservative” without feeling like I’m being encompassed by the other two. However, If I’m an economic conservative, but a social liberal I may not be comfortable with the “liberal’ tag. I just think “conservative” is a safer term, with less room for misinterpretation than “liberal”.
But be that as it may, I don’t think this really explains why Right Wing Radio is so successful. I still suggest this is because of something intrinsic to the listeners. I mean we wouldn’t say that Howard stern is so successful with so many teenage boys because there aren’t enough Jack-ass DJs out there. Basically we say he gives the boys what the want. It’s not only the messenger, but the message, and the people who are taking in that message.
So let’s say it Right Wing Radio fills a void in the airways that the listeners need. This doesn’t necessarily mean because they can’t get unbiased news elsewhere, it means they can’t get biased news elsewhere. I think you may be confusing the causality.
I never said conservatives were evil. Just out of the mainstream.
Why wasn’t President Bush willing to release the documentation of Harriet Miers’ work at the White House? Why do conservatives complain when liberals compare Sam Alito to Antonin Scalia? Why was the work of Dick Cheney’s energy task force in 2001 conducted in secret? Why does George Bush talk about funding liberal causes (the Global Fund to combat AIDs, TB and Malaria, for example) then afterwards refuse to follow through with the funding?
Why can’t conservative politicians be honest about what they stand for?
Because conservatism is out of touch with what the mainstream stands for. That’s why.
Of course they are. And what they believe, on average, aligns more with liberal positions than with conservative ones.
Face it, the labels “liberal” and “conservative” are simply not good predictors of which positions people actually support on numerous major policy issues. There has to be a reason for that, and AFAICT, the chief reason is not that people are dumb, but that they’ve been swamped by a propaganda barrage that defines “liberal” in a misleading way.
“spending on education and anti-poverty programs is more important than tax cuts”
First of all, people don’t want spending on anything over tax cuts. Even in liberal Massachusetts we recently had a ballot question almost pass that would have entirely eliminated the income tax. People in this country are overtaxed and they know it.
Furthermore, if you seriously think that people want more welfare and are willing to pay for it with higher taxes then you must have really lost touch with reality.
"Social Security shouldn’t be privatized
Support for social security privatization is still very strong. This breaks down much more along age lines than by party. Young workers want privatization by a large margin. Bush failed on this largely because of his other problems, and the fact that he never spelled out a specific plan for reform. People didn’t trust him to do it, but they still want out of the ponzi scheme.
“the Iraq War is a mistake”
This isn’t a “liberal” concept. Kerry was for the war (after he was against it), as are liberals such as Hillary Clinton. Complaints about Iraq are more specific to Bush’s administration. It’s not a conservative vs liberal issue.
This is totally false. Almost every millage in every city, every time one is proposed is passed. In fact, I’ve lived in four states and six cities in the last ten years, and I don’t recall once where a millage was turned down.
People didn’t want Bush’s plan because they didn’t like the plan, not because of some nefarious scheme. Even the elderly said they wanted a change, they just didn’t want the change he proposed. There was a variation by age, but even the elderly (over 55) wanted partial privatization by 56%. I think the big problem was the lack of a safety net. (a random cite)
This is bullshit. I think the prevailing feeling is now that we’re there, someone has to clean up the mess. It sure ain’t going to be that half-wit in the white house who got us there in the first place.
light strand: I didn’t agree with everything you posted on page one of this thread, but I appreciated your point of view. Your contributions to the thread were meaningful and we were interacting like civil adults.
Why the change?
If you disagree with me about the public view on taxes, social security, and the war you could do so without coming across like such a jerk.
I’ve already got Pochacco banging the “conservatives are all teh evil” drum, and simply blindly lashing out at me whatever I post. Did you really need to join him?
I’m going to wait to respond to the substance of your post until tomorrow. I want to give you a chance to consider your tone first.
I have not yet seen anyone define “successful.” Before you can argue about why something is successful, don’t you have to establish that it is successful? This story debunks a claim that Air America beat Limbaugh. The story points out that Limbaugh’s show has a 4.4% share. Of radio. I couldn’t find any raw numbers, but it couldn’t be a whole lot.
Limbaugh is on 600 stations, according to his website. That means that the majority of his carriers serve markets under 100,000 (There simply aren’t that many markets over 100,000). It does raise the question of what exactly these stations would be doing if it weren’t for Rush. The broadcast quality is unsuited to playing music. Only one station in each market can carry Jim Rohm. There’s not a whole lot else out there for AM radio. I also noticed that you will find no mention of any raw numbers on Limbaugh’s website. He’s up 37% in market share since the article linked above was published. 1.37 x 4.4= a whopping 6.06% market share! Of Radio!
I remember Howard Stern always claimed that he never had a smaller listening audience than Rush Limbaugh. He had huge shares in the biggest markets in the country. This just goes to show that the great movement conservatives believe they’ve created pales before naked lesbians on the radio.
One clarification: the term “neoconservative” was coined to describe Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the late 1960s. My father considered himself a covsernative Democrat up until ten years ago, when it was obvious that he was a liberal democrat. He hadn’t changed, but the political culture had and these labels are by definition relative. Compare the first Clinton term to the first Nixon term and tell me who was more liberal.
What I said was based on actual poll results. E.g., those from the 2004 National Election Survey discussed in this article:
And those from the May 2005 Pew survey discussed in this article:
Doing the math, those add up to the following:
Support increased spending on Social Security: 58% of all voters
Support increased funding for education: 73% of all voters
Support increased funding for child care: 55% of all voters
Support more aid to the poor: 50% of all voters
Support the Bush tax cuts: 46% of all voters
Support universal health insurance, even at the cost of higher taxes: 65%
Support raising the minimum wage: 86%
Sorry, but my grasp on reality is looking pretty good there. What people believe, on average, aligns more with liberal positions than with conservative ones, irrespective of the fact that more of them self-identify as “conservative” than “liberal”.
If people tend to think that they’re “conservative”, but tend to agree with liberals on actual policy positions, then they must be getting misleading ideas about what the terms “conservative” and “liberal” actually mean.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to come off as a bitch. I didn’t make any remarks toward you as a person, but the Flip-flopper thing is just plain bullshit. It just a meaningless sound-bite, and it pisses me off.
If those numbers are accurate, you still have 42% who don’t suport increased funding on Social Security, 45% who don’t support increased funding for education, etc. So, opposing those things are still not “out of the mainstream”. They may be minority positions, but they’re positions held by a large enough minority.
Sure. Remember, I’m not the one who claimed that conservative positions on these issues are “out of the mainstream”. I just noted that they don’t actually have majority support—certainly nothing like the majority support that would be implied just by looking at who uses the labels “liberal” and “conservative”.