The Collapse Of Conservative Opinion

A news item yesterday was American Thinker's retraction of allegations against Dominion Voting Systems that it acknowledged were "completely false". But this wasn't the end of the story. At the same time, alhough apparently for reasons umrelated to Dominion, the site deleted its comment section. And although there doesn't seem to have been an announcement, the site no longer carries ads.

My reaction to this is somewhere between "no great loss" and "good riddance", and I characterize myself as conservative. I used to visit it now and then, but I never did during the 2020 election cycle. The pieces there showed no particular insight and usually amounted to just preaching to the choir. In fact, the site has a lot in commom with the other currently popular sites like Breitbart, Red State, Conservative Treehouse, and so forth -- it runs hysterical headlines about days-old news and reiterates same old-same old viewpoints. What we aren't seeing, at least so far, is any attempt to regroup after\ the Trump defeat, recalibrate, and recover.

This brings me back to what I think is a key year, 1976, and what conservatives did to prepare for a Reagan victory in 1980. In the 1970s, I read both Rolling Stone and the Wall Street Journal, especially its editorial page. (I voted for Carter in 1976, but by 1980, I'd dropped Rolling Stone and voted for Reagan.) WSJ at the time was intellectually stimulating: it nurtured supply side economics, while Benjamin Stein wrote for them as well. It tackled current issues like the fuel crisis and stagflation with innovative policy recommendations that worked when Reagan applied them.

So far, I'm seeing nothing like that in the wake of 2020. If there were an equivalent of Robert Bartley's Journal now, it would be publishing influential critiques of COVID policy and serious discussions of Persian Gulf stragegy. Instead, it's simply gone never-Trump, which isn't what we need. Let the Democrats self-immolate over Impeachment II and start to ask serious questions about why Trump couldn't expand his base and why he lost with an unimaginative replay of his 2016 campaign.

Nobody's doing this. The most respectable conservatives right now appear to be unserious people like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. Rush Limbaugh is on his deathbed, figuratively at least, but he's always suffered from the need to fill three hours a day when there's only 20 minutes of good material.

How to address issues like big tech censorship is a separate but related question. It seems to me that there are two parts to it. One, as only a few commentators have pointed out, is that Parler neglected a basic business duty by not planning for contingencies. If your business requires a vendor to supply servers, as Parler did with Amazon, you absolutely need to have a backup vendor, and not just in your Rolodex -- you need to have someone on contract, and you need to test yuur ability to recover on the backup, like twice a year. Yeah, Amazon can break its contract on a whim, but a hurricane or earthquake can take them out, too. Parler was an amateur show on that basis.

The other question is the income stream. Talk radio hosts now and then speak of their problem getting out of the painkiller-and-erectile-dysfunction ad market, where many are stuck. Most of the conservative web sites rely on hysterical clickbait headlines to pay the bills. Some of these people need to work out a better ad strategy.

The same applies to YouTube, since the YouTubers are mostly doing this as their main job and supporting themselves by letting YouTube sell ads for them. If YouTube doesn't think ads on their channel will sell, they won'tt run them. This is no different than if you were trying to sell stories to the Saturday Evening Post back in the day. Some YouTubers are willing to experiment, and many are doing the essential business task of planning for contingencies.

But the fact remains that old venues like National Review and the WSJ are no longer markets for innovative thinking, while the list of commentators who've flamed out over the past several years, like Jonah Goldberg and Michael Medved, is lengthening. Dr Sebastian Gorka is not a credible replacement. Buckley is long dead.