So ... over the long weekend I journeyed southward from Pittsburgh to Montgomery, AL.
I had the good fortune of listening to a fair amount of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and their various acolytes in the wonderful world of AM radio.
One of the things that struck me as I listened to the spew emanating from my rental car speakers was that, rather than advancing a conservative agenda per se, these guys were serving as catharsis for their main audience -- the frustrated white male.
I think the nut of the problem is that the white male has seen his prestige and unique priveleges steadily erode since the second world war. At the same time, blue collar labor has become less secure and less lucrative. Gone are the days when one could get a job at the mill straight from high school, mary one's sweetheart, and settle down to a comfortable middle class existence.
As such, railing against feminazis, multiculturalists, homosexuals, and the liberals who harbor them -- the people to blame for his loss -- are the way the angry white male copes with this loss of status. Every once in a while, a caller metnions an economic problem like outsourcing or high taxes, but generally speaking its liberals that are the bogeymen.
Now, one can't exactly rail against these things on the Op-Ed pages of major newspapers or on network television, which have generally banned this kind of hate-mongering. That's one of the reasons Rush is constantly bashing the "mainstream media" for "not covering" whatever he wants them to cover; talk radio is a secret outlet where all of these people can go to vent, because they're denied that opportunity in the more public sphere.
(Yeah, there's FOX News and cable shows now, which complicate this analysis, I suppose. I'm going to ignore them for the sake of argument).
But the feelings evinced on right-wing radio are real, and they aren't going to go away because David Brock embarrasses the Republican party into distancing itself from Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage. They'll just find another underground outlet.
So the question I ask is, is there another but less harmful way to let these people have their emotional release? How can they be brought into mainstream society?