The Election

In the free-for-all of political spin, Americans may lose sight of the real issues.

George Bush and John Kerry can be forgiven if their campaigns seem a bit unfocused of late. After all, no one seems able to agree even on where the electorate's sympathies lie. Some see a disaffection with the administration over its Iraq misadventure and for neglecting kitchen-table concerns. Others see a 50-50 nation, ideologically polarized, with a sliver of independents holding the balance. Still others perceive a newly conservative mood after Sept. 11, in which toughness will carry the day.

The public pulse is elusive partly because every piece of news we receive today is immediately hurtled into a cyclotron of spin. Party mouthpieces, line-toeing columnists, television pontificators and attitude-heavy reporters all interpret each political development so relentlessly that many citizen bystanders wind up more confused than enlightened. Instead of forming opinions based on information from the media, we have to search for needles of information in a haystack of supplied interpretation.

Several new books from leading journalists promise to help untangle the web of ideology, rhetoric and instant messaging that defines politics today. In some cases, however, their efforts to distill the public temper only add more glib judgments to the fray.

In The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (Penguin Press, $25.95), John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, writers for the British newsmagazine the Economist, hope to use their transatlantic remove to offer perspective on the American mood. They don't seem to realize, though, that their warmed-over analyses may strike many Stateside readers as familiar and outdated.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge endorse the picture of the United States as a bastion of conservatism, especially when compared to European nations. "America tolerates lower levels of government spending than other advanced countries, and far higher levels of inequality," they note. Yankees are more punitive concerning crime, keener to use armed force and stingier in providing public benefits. We love God and guns.

To explain this anomaly, Micklethwait and Wooldridge excavate from the 1950s hoary notions about "American exceptionalism": once-fashionable theories, that for one reason or another -- its abundant land, its religious diversity, its lack of a feudal past -- the United States never experienced the socialist agitation or suffered the ideological bloodshed that roiled modern Europe. America is conservative, they suggest, because it was born that way.

Alas, the authors don't seem to know that since the 1950s, reams of scholarship have refuted, or at least rendered naive, these old chestnuts. Many historians, for example, debunked the frontier thesis that saw the West as an easy outlet for expansion; others have pointed to a robust American tradition of radicalism that gives the lie to notions of a trouble-free political evolution. Besides, if America's conservatism stems from time-honored national traits, how to explain what almost everyone in the '50s and '60s -- including the exceptionalism school -- took to be the nation's pervasive liberal character? Indeed, the authors themselves argue that the American citizenry has been lurching rightward for decades; when the authors aren't borrowing from the mid-century Tocquevillians, they're plundering the work of the new wave of historians who have proficiently chronicled the right's recent ascent. Micklethwait and Wooldridge never say whether they consider American conservatism a timeless national hallmark or a post-1960s trend.

There's another possibility, too: that America isn't as right-wing as today's conventional wisdom supposes. As Hendrik Hertzberg has reminded us with commendable regularity since November 2000, "More people voted for Vice President Gore than for Governor Bush [in 2000], and they didn't do so because Gore had the more pleasing personality."

That gem -- underscoring through subtle but trenchant implication that "liberalism"(or some variant of it) outpolled "conservatism" in the last election -- appears, along with a haul of other brilliantly wrought insights, in an indispensable new collection of Hertzberg's writings called Politics: Observations & Arguments, 1966-2004 (Penguin Press, $29.95). Throughout these 30-plus years, Hertzberg has been one of the left's most eloquent voices, mainly at the New Yorker and the New Republic magazines.

Long after we've forgotten Pat Robertson's presidential bid or John Tower's confirmation battle, these essays will bear rereading (and not just because Hertzberg's warnings about the violation of Tower's privacy, along with Gary Hart's, in 1987, presaged the frenzy of prurience that befell Washington in 1998). They're keepers because they don't just plead the case for contemporary liberalism but -- with their wit, humanity and exquisite understatement -- illustrate it.

Hertzberg jokes self-effacingly about his "boringly moderate and consistent" views, and he's not one of those pundits who try to gain readers and buzz through calculated ideological surprises, like David Brooks defying expectations to back gay marriage or Thomas Friedman supporting the Iraq war. But if Hertzberg's stands are seldom shocking, you want to read him anyway for the cleverness and elegance with which he makes his points, and for the profound reasonableness that he reminds you lies at the heart of liberalism. Who else during the 2000 campaign flap over Bob Jones University's prohibition on interracial dating had the discernment to see that liberalism had actually won a profound, irreversible victory, in that even the most conservative Republicans weren't defending the ban?

Quiet voices like Hertzberg's, alas, usually get drowned out in today's cacophonous political debates, dominated as they are by the right-wing news media -- what journalist David Brock calls The Republican Noise Machine (Crown, $25.95). A former lieutenant in the vast right-wing conspiracy, Brock traces how, since Richard Nixon's day, conservatives have worked to delegitimize the mainstream media while building their own alternative network of foundations, think tanks, newspapers, TV channels, publishing houses and the like. This media operation is one reason that, despite America's ideological equipoise, conservatism often appears to predominate. Through its coordinated use of this media machine, Brock shows, the right now routinely reframes political discussions to its own advantage.

Brock has been working of late with Democracy Radio, a group that, like the liberal network Air America, is seeking to offset the right's supremacy in the talk-show market. For years liberals have struggled to find a rabble-rousing broadcaster (first on radio, now also on cable) to counterbalance loudmouths like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews. The failure has been ascribed to a dearth of financing or a paucity of sufficiently belligerent hosts, but even some of the left's sharpest polemicists, such as Mario Cuomo and Alan Dershowitz, have tried and fallen short.

As it happens, Hertzberg weighs in on this question in another piece reprinted in Politics. "The main obstacle, probably, is neither financial nor ideological, but temperamental," he notes. By and large, liberals news junkies "wouldn't think it was fun to listen to expressions of raw contempt for conservatives -- oh, maybe for a little while now and then, just as some occasionally tune in Limbaugh to give themselves a masochistic thrill or to raise their blood pressure, but not enough to sustain an industry." Responding less to rage, bullying and simple moral edicts than to irony and felicitous argument, liberals will typically turn not to Democracy Radio but to essays like Hertzberg's.