A Little Sound Advice for Liberals

Jonah Goldberg has some great advice for liberals...

The liberal Center for American Progress was founded explicitly to be the Left's answer to the conservative Heritage Foundation. The lefty radio network, "Air America," was launched to copy the success of Rush Limbaugh & Co. Today, deep-pocketed liberals are scrambling to copy conservative foundations, even though liberal foundations have always had more money.

Most conservatives I know snicker at all this. It's not that talk radio, think tanks, and foundations haven't been essential to the rise of American conservatism in the last five decades. They have been (see my colleague John Miller's excellent new book, A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America, for a window into that effort). But liberals are emphasizing hardware because they don't want to question the validity of their very outdated software.

Look, conservatives would love to switch places with liberals. We'd get the universities, Hollywood, the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie and Pew Foundations, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the New York Times, National Public Radio, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, CBS, including 60 Minutes and Dan Rather's thousand-fingers massage chair, and so forth. Liberals, meanwhile, would get the Washington Times and Fox News, along with a few conservative foundations. I guess National Review and The New Republic would switch offices, which is fine by me. It'd make my commute easier.

And that sort of makes the point: Not only does the Left have better stuff, but even if that weren't the case, the Left's problem isn't a lack of mechanisms to "get their message out." Megaphones matter, but not as much as what you say into them.

If liberals really want to emulate conservative successes, I have some advice for them: Get into some big, honking arguments — not with conservatives, but with each other. The history of the conservative movement's successes has been the history of intellectual donnybrooks, between libertarians and traditionalists, hawks and isolationists, so-called neocons and so-called paleocons, less-filling versus tastes great. Liberals would be smart to copy that and stop worrying how to mimic our direct mail strategies.

It's essential to liberalism that it rediscover a few things -- their belief in the fundamental decency of their own country would be a start. But to get there, they need to have an internal debate and quit shouting at the moderates and conservatives. The moderates don't really care (they want peace and quiet) and the conservatives aren't going to be convinced by volume. But as Goldberg notes, the Dems seem obsessed with the size of their megaphones.

And no, that was not a veiled reference to Bill Clinton.