More Thrilling Tales of True Conservatism! Vol 27: Bret Stephens Once Again Really, Really Wishes Imaginary Conservatism Was Real

From Bret Bug Stephens yesterday:

The Tragedy of Fox News

April 24, 2023

By Bret Stephens

In the summer of 2011, Rupert Murdoch stopped by my small office at The Wall Street Journal, where I was a columnist and editor...

Stephens proceeds to tell the story of Murdoch making sure his employee, Bret Stephens, fully understood that the new policy was not to put anything in email:

...but I do remember the gist of what he said about the fiasco: Never put anything in an email. His private takeaway, it seemed, wasn’t to require his companies to adhere to high ethical standards. It was to leave no trace that investigators might use for evidence against him, his family or his favorite lieutenants.

And then, realizing he was part of a vast, wingnut propaganda operation so dirty that The Boss wanted to make sure that nobody wrote nuttin' down, Stephens' sense of moral rectitude kicked in and he immediately resigned from Murdoch's WSJ to go and do good work elsewhere, right?

Nah.

Bret Bug stuck around Murdoch's WSJ for another six years and only quit once the Sulzberger family offered him the opportunity to spout his claptrap on the even bigger and more influential platform at The New York Times.  

And now?  Now, Stephens takes out the by-now-familiar can of True Conservative whitewash to reshape the history if the modern GOP as a Reaganesque utopia that fell from grace into the pit of "the angry populism of Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay":

But there’s also the sense of what Fox might have become. Murdoch had an opportunity to build something the country genuinely needed in the mid-1990s, when the G.O.P. was moving away from the optimistic and responsible party of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush toward the angry populism of Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay: an effective center-right counterbalance to the overwhelmingly liberal tilt (as conservatives usually see it) of most major news media.

Which, even if it were true, begs an ominously larger question: how did Stephens manage to not just sleep through all those decades between Gingrich and DeLay and the rise of hellbeasts like Limbaugh...and the arrival of Donald Trump, but remain a loyal and aggressive stooge for that party until Trump ran him out?

But let's gat back to Stephen's fairy tale of a Conservative media that never was:

In other words, instead of trying to surf a killer wave, Murdoch could have purchased a ship and steered it. It might not have had the ratings that Fox would get — though Fox was always about influence, as much as money, for Murdoch. But, executed well, it could have elevated conservatism in the direction of Burke, Hamilton and Lincoln, rather than debase it in the direction of Andrew Jackson, Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan.

But of course that is exactly what Murdoch did, but in a way that was ultimately much broader and more toxic than a "Coffee Talk with Edmund Burke" cable station, or whatever Stephens has in mind. 

You might not remember it now, but those sorts of programs already existed on PBS and elsewhere.  Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, Ethics in America, Credibility in the Newsroom, Race to Execution, That Delicate Balance II: Our Bill of Rights, The McLaughlin Group, Firing Line and on and on like that.  I enjoyed them at the time, but they weren't exactly setting the political world on fire, and they weren't dragging the Overton Windom to the Right as fast as Conservatives wanted.

So, in 1995, Murdoch showed up with a big bag of money and hired Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes to create a high-end Conservative media platform that would have the clout to shift the elite media landscape in the direction Murdoch wanted.  And what came of that project wasn't  a "Shootin' the Shit with Alex Hamilton" cable station, but as a high-end Conservative journal of influence called The Weekly Standard. Which ran at a loss of a million dollars a year and never had much more than 55,000 subscribers, but its existence makes perfect sense when you understand that Conservatism has always been about the hierarchical relationship between the rulers and the ruled. 

Those at the top -- the ruling class, the Brain Caste of the Right -- existed to cook up and disseminate up Big Terrible Ideas.  Those at the bottom -- the base of the Republican party -- existed to provide the Brain Caste with a political mandate to enact those Big Terrible Ideas by winning elections.  

Outfits like The Federalist Society, The Weekly Standard, The National Review, The American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, The Hoover Institution, The Manhattan Institute and so forth?  Those were the Brain Caste part of the hierarchy, and the whole point of Murdoch's creation of the Standard was to become the bible of the apex of that Conservative hierarchy.

From Wikipedia:

Many of [The Weekly Standard'] articles were written by members of conservative think tanks located in Washington, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Hudson Institute, and the Foreign Policy Initiative. Individuals who wrote for the magazine included Elliott Abrams, Peter Berkowitz, John Bolton, Tucker Carlson, Ellen Bork, David Brooks, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Christopher Hitchens, Harvey Mansfield, Cynthia Ozick, Joe Queenan, and John Yoo. The magazine's website also produced regular online-only commentaries and news articles. 

 

The Standard was viewed as heavily influential during the administration of president George W. Bush (2001-2009), being called the in-flight magazine of Air Force One.[14] In 2003, although the magazine's circulation was only 55,000, Kristol said that "We have a funny relationship with the top tier of the administration. They very much keep us at arm's length, but [Vice President] Dick Cheney does send over someone to pick up 30 copies of the magazine every Monday."[15]

Collectively, these organizations were much more successful than Stephen's dream of a "Thinkin' with Lincoln" cable station ever could have been, because, first, they gave the Right enough money and clout to be taken seriously and, second, they used their money and their clout to colonize the mainstream media.  They made sure that every op-ed column in every venerable newspaper felt obligated to overstuff their pages with the likes of David Brooks and George Wills and Jennifer Rubin and Michael Gerson and so on.  They made sure that every Sunday show was also overstocked with Brookses and Hewitts and Gingriches, and that actual Liberal voices were, at last, completely shut out of the "Center/Left, Center/Right" panels that were never any such thing,

This was what Murdoch and his fellow travelers were getting for their money at the top of the pyramid.  But none of it would amount to anything -- none of the Brain Caste's Big Terrible Ideas would ever become the law of the land -- if the angry, racist, dumbass base of the GOP didn't turn out to vote, which is what Conserative Hate Radio was all about, and what Murdoch's investment in Fox was all about:  to control the whole supply chain of Big Terrible Conservative Ideas, from inception to enactment. 

From his bowdlerize version of  the "optimistic and responsible party of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush" Stephens conspicuously omits the fact that Ronald Reagan didn't begin his 1980 campaign by reading aloud to the people of Philadelphia, Mississippi from the Collected Works of Edmund Burke.  Instead he went to the site of three of the most infamous murders of the civil rights movement and spoke to his very white, very bigoted audience about "states rights" because Reagan damn well knew what it was going to take to get elected in the Southern Strategy Republican Party that Nixon had left behind.

And when G.H.W. Bush was floundering when he ran to warm Reagan's chair in 1988, he didn't turn to a Lincoln scholar to turn things around.  He put his fate in the filthy, racist hands of Lee Atwater, because Atwater knew how to get the bigots fired up and voting.  

But the actual history and trajectory of the modern Republican Party is a subject that scares the hell out of Never Trumper's like Stephens because of how deeply it either implicates them as complicit, or indicts them as incompetent.  So instead, from the safety of their sinecures at the apex of elite American media,  they comfort themselves with mournful musings about a Conservatism that never was -- 

Such a channel would still have been plenty conservative, in a way that most liberals would find infuriating. But it would also have defended the classically liberal core of intelligent conservatism...

 --  and never could have been.

Burn The Lifeboats