Right-wingers redux: are we a conservative nation? Does it matter?

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Book Review

The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, by David Brock, New York: Crown Publishers, 420 pages, $25.95

The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, New York: Penguin Press, 450 pages, $25.95

THE POLLS AS I write make it a mug's game to bet on the outcome of the presidential election. But the decision of the Americans who bother to vote this year is, to hear some tell it, a referendum on the direction of America. A victory for Bush, in the eyes of many supporters and opponents, would lock in a right-wing counterrevolution against the New Deal and Great Society values that have defined America for the last half-century.

Two new books promise enlightening looks at this supposedly dominant conservative establishment. David Brock, an apostate right-wing bomb thrower, looks primarily at that establishment's effect on news and opinion media in The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy. Brock is still more attack dog than thinker, so his book provides only a smattering of understanding--but plenty of opportunities to slake partisan bloodlust. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, respectively U.S. editor and Washington correspondent for The Economist, try to chronicle and comprehend America's right wing, not merely deride and defeat it, in The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America.

Taken together, these two books demonstrate, with both their faults and their virtues, that obsessing about a right-wing/not-right-wing divide misses much of what's most interesting about the contemporary American conversation. It also obscures what's really important about America's present and future.

Brock's book is a headache. There's nothing wrong in principle with hundreds of pages of hateful invective, but The Republican Noise Machine has the added detriment of being humorless. Brock has never learned to be anything other than a partisan smear artist; he has merely switched sides. He appears to have no real interest in, or insight into, ideology or policy. All he knows is that he has evil people in his sights and it's time to attack, bludgeons flailing, wit and balance and perspective held in abeyance.

Brock is alarmed and incensed that in the past 20 years people have gained access to new tools for influencing the national political conversation: talk radio, a variety of cable news and opinion channels, the Internet. He correctly notes that many of the people using these tools are Republican partisans, spreading analysis and opinion that succor the GOP.

In Brock's telling, the cloud that darkened the sunlit realm of sweet reason that was America's press first appeared with the launching, via Edith Efron's not-widely-remembered 1971 book The News Twisters, of a deliberate and organized three-decade-long conservative march. The right-wing legions include the Murdoch media empire, think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, talk show hosts from Morton Downey (the mostly forgotten '80s TV loudmouth, who blitzkrieged himself in a faked Nazi assault, gets a whole chapter) to Chris Matthews, and TV journalists like the libertarian John Stossel of ABC News.

Brock sees the political conflict in contemporary America starkly: mainstream facts vs...