Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 02:12 am
Republicans are so shaken by the Obama’s huge victory that some are calling for conservatives to escape from their self imposed Fox News/Rush Limbaugh/Drudge Report media bubble.
According to Politico,
A long-simmering generational battle in the conservative movement is boiling over after last week’s shellacking, with younger operatives and ideologues going public with calls that Republicans break free from a political-media cocoon that has become intellectually suffocating and self-defeating.
“What Republicans did so successfully, starting with critiquing the media and then creating our own outlets, became a bubble onto itself,” said Ross Douthat, the 32-year-old New York Times columnist.
“The right is suffering from an era of on-demand reality,” is how 30-year-old old think tanker and writer Ben Domenech put it.
The average Fox News viewer is 65 years old. The average Rush Limbaugh listener is 66. The average Drudge reader is 48 years old. According to Pew, the average age of a Republican is is almost 50 (49.7). Democrats are two years younger (47.7), and in the long term trending younger, thanks to their dominant level of support among Latinos and African Americans.
The young Republicans may have properly diagnosed the issue with their party, but the problem is that there aren’t enough of them to do anything about it. The rest of the country, with the exception of the mainstream media, has been aware for years that conservative media is leading the Republican Party. The Republican Party has no political leadership. The ideas, values, and positions of the party are being shaped by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the right wing Internet faction.
The GOP rank and file have become addicted to hearing only a reaffirmation of their beliefs, so diagnosing the addiction is much easier than treating it. (The left has its own media too, but the difference is that the Democratic Party is led by Barack Obama not MSNBC, Ed Schultz, and liberal websites.) Republicans have been taught by Fox News to only trust conservatives to deliver their “fair and balanced” facts. It took decades of brainwashing and propaganda to create this bubble. It might take equally as long to burst it.
The numerical reality is that the most stable and steady bloc of voters that the Republican Party has are older white men. They are the base of the party. Unless the GOP can convince Fox/Drudge/Limbaugh to move to the center (no, seriously), they have zero chance of breaking the propaganda shackles that are sentencing them to electoral defeat.
A lot of people make a lot of money off the right wing media complex, and they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. The right wing media and conservative corporate billionaires are running the GOP show. Until Republican political leaders take a stand against the conservative media dictatorship, Their party is going to mired in a cycle of national defeat.
The only thing young conservatives can do is wait for the party leadership to come into their hands through generational change. Republicans are dying off, but as the nation ages the change may not come fast enough to fix what is broken in today’s Republican Party.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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