The liberals fight back

A couple of years ago, I tried to cheer up a discouraged conservative friend of mine by pointing to the non-fiction best-seller list in that Sunday’s New York Times. Here was a rough-and-ready test of what America was reading, from a source hard to accuse of conservative bias. And yet, of the 15 titles on the list, half a dozen were bluntly conservative polemics, and most of the rest were calculated to warm the cockles of a conservative’s heart: biographies of various Founding Fathers, accounts of the Constitutional Convention, and the like. Scarcely a book on the list was written by, or seemed calculated to appeal to, a liberal reader. If that was what America was reading, I argued, all was not lost.

Only a couple of months later, I got the distinct feeling that somebody at the Times had noticed the same thing I had, and had moved swiftly to do something about it. Suddenly, the best-seller list began blossoming with argumentative tomes by liberal authors, and books on topics sure to attract liberal readers. This has continued to be the case ever since. Since how the Times determines which books get on its best-seller list is one of the best-kept secrets in American publishing, I was fairly confident that somebody on West 43rd Street was doing a little anodyne juggling.

Now, however, I’m not so sure. For there’s simply no doubt about it: The liberals have suddenly changed tactics and started pushing back at the conservatives with impressive ferocity.

Look at the Times’ best-seller list for Nov. 2. To be sure, the conservatives are still well represented: “Who’s Looking Out for You?” by Bill O’Reilly, the combative conservative commentator on the Fox News Channel, is No. 3. “Persecution,” by David Limbaugh (Rush’s brother), which according to the Times “argues that ‘liberals are waging war against Christianity,'” is No. 9. And “Shut Up and Sing” by Laura Ingraham, another conservative, which the Times describes as attacking “the ‘elites’ of Hollywood, Washington and New York,” clocks in at No. 14.

But “Dude, Where’s My Country?” by Michael Moore, the leftist demagogue who got his start with the documentary “Roger and Me,” is at the very top of the list, and “Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them,” by Al Franken, a liberal comic, is No. 2. What’s more, “Bushwhacked,” by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, which the Times calls “an indictment of the Bush administration,” is No. 6; “The Great Unraveling,” by liberal hysteric Paul Krugman, is No. 7; “Madam Secretary,” a memoir by President Clinton’s secretary of state, is No. 8; and (wouldn’t you know?) “Living History,” the reminiscences of Hillary, though down from its earlier heights, is still No. 12. Of the entire list of 15 books, three are conservative brickbats, four are leftist or liberal, and two more are the self-serving memoirs of prominent Clintonians.

This is hardly accidental. Time was – and not so long ago, either – when America’s liberals chose simply to disregard the conservatives, as if they weren’t there at all. And when they controlled practically all of the major sources of news and opinion – all three of the big TV networks, plus the New York Times and the Washington Post – that was certainly the sensible thing to do. Why respond to conservative criticism, when doing so merely advertised its existence and implicitly conceded its significance? Far better to treat it as beneath even the grudging courtesy of contempt.

But nowadays, with talk radio firmly in conservative hands and pounding the daylights out of liberalism; with the Fox News Channel giving full and equal voice to conservative spokesmen and dominating TV news as a result; with publishing houses creating whole divisions to publish the conservative books that are now in demand – the liberals have clearly decided they can’t afford to give conservatism the silent treatment anymore.

So the battle has escalated, and hostilities have become distinctly more mutual. Personally, I welcome the change. It will be a pleasure to demonstrate that the liberals’ arguments, now that we are privileged to hear them, are as phony as their previous lofty silence.