It’s also a fitting end-point for the Republican Party in this cycle. For years the party and the conservative intellectuals had what they thought was a workable relationship with the “entertainment wing,” of the party. The entertainers needed ideas, which could be generated in new formulations endlessly by the conservative movement’s scribblers. The scribblers needed mass media air time with right-leaning audiences in order to sell books. And the politicians wanted direct access to their voter base without the filter of The New York Times or The Washington Post mangling their message. The price was an occasional freak-out.
But the truth is, at some point, elected Republicans let themselves be henpecked by media personalities who have no real interest in ever implementing these ideas in the long term. In Washington, money flows to partisan media more freely when it’s in opposition to the executive branch of government. Ratings, clicks, and donor interest all go down when you’re out there defending the president. They go up when you’re attacking a president. Breitbart has the best of both worlds in that it is in opposition to both the White House and to the Republican congressional leadership.
The best defense of populist right wing media was that it was merely lowbrow. It was a bullhorn that pitched conservative ideas in a crude way, to a mass audience that is only receptive to crude messages. But it isn’t a surprise that in a democratic polity, the purveyors of crude media would confuse their numerical reach with significance. And also that they would begin to think that the ideas were starting to distract from the important thing, which was the volume of the bullhorn.
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