Interview with Brian C. Anderson, author of South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias
Howdy, Mr. Anderson. Congratulations on a fine and funny book and thanks for taking the time to answer some questions.
Question: The concept of South Park Conservatives/Republicans has been kicked around a bit, I wonder if you could tell us how you define them and why you think they're an important political phenomenon?
Brian C. Anderson: The term "South Park Republican" was originally coined by the writer Andrew Sullivan, and written about by Tech Central Station contributor Stephen Stanton and then myself, in the widely discussed late 2003 City Journal article my book grew out of: "We’re Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore." As I loosely use the term, it refers to someone who isn’t necessarily an across the board conservative, especially when it comes to matters of censorship and popular culture, but who recoils from today’s liberalism, with its political correctness, its illiberalism, its elitism, and its feckless response to the War on Terror.
In the book, I find growing evidence of this anti-liberal attitude among college kids—the final chapter is based on more than 50 interviews with students and professors—and in a new kind of comedy that takes aim at the Left, and not just at bourgeois conventions, as topical comedy has often done over the last several decades, most famously with Norman Lear’s 70s’ sitcoms All in the Family and Maude. The wickedest, funniest example of this politically incorrect humor, of course, is South Park itself, now in its ninth season. But I also consider Dennis Miller, stand-up comedians like Nick Di Paolo and Julia Gorin, and Web-based humorists like Scott Ott and the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto. One of the most pleasurable aspects of writing South Park Conservatives was working through the comedic material. I hope readers have similar fun reading about it.
The anti-liberalism reflected in the attitudes of some students and in this satire is just one aspect of a much-more widespread shift right in our political culture that is being driven, at least in part, by the new media of political talk radio, cable news—above all Fox—and now the Internet, which is the overarching theme of my book.
Q: When you wrote the original essay out of which the book grew, We’re Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore, some critics on the Left and Right suggested that you were saying the Right had triumphed in the Culture Wars. Do you think that's the case?
BA: I make it quite clear in the original article, and again in this book, that the new media are allowing conservative and libertarian arguments and perspectives at last to make it into the public debate, with enormous implications for our politics and culture, but that the Left still controls the university faculties, the network broadcasts, , law schools—it’s far from vanquished, in other words. But it’s worth keeping a few things in mind. The average age of a network news viewer is now 60. The New
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