In commemoration of its tenth anniversary, the Weekly Standard has published a symposium entitled “Older & Wiser?” The contributions, as the title suggests, are reflections on the lessons learned in the past ten years and are gratifyingly free of the triumphalism that characterized the conservative movement at the time of the magazine’s founding.
Even by the sober and chastened standards of the symposium, Andrew Ferguson’s contribution was a downer. To state it simply, Ferguson sees a movement in intellectual decline. Whereas William F. Buckley and his allies were “were trying to maintain some kind of threshold of intellectual seriousness,” today’s conservative institutions have become “self-perpetuating, churning their direct-mail lists in pursuit of cash from the orthodontist in Wichita and the Little Old Lady in Dubuque, so the activists can continue to fund the all-important work of . . . churning their direct-mail lists.”
Within a generation, we’ve gone from “The Conservative Mind to Savage Nation; from Clifton White to Dick Morris; from Willmoore Kendall and Harry Jaffa to Sean Hannity and Mark Fuhrman . . .” As Ferguson puts it, “whatever this is, it isn’t progress.”
The obvious question is “why?” Part of it is the corruption of power. But Ferguson is right when he insists that there’s something else at work:
Marshall McLuhan was righter than anyone ever would have guessed. The medium really is the message. Conservatism nowadays is increasingly a creature of its technology. It is shaped–if I were a Marxist I might even say determined–by cable television and talk radio, with their absurd promotion of caricature and conflict, and by blogs, where the content ranges from Jesuitical disputes among hollow-cheeked obsessives to feats of self-advertisement and professional narcissism (Everyone’s been asking what I think about . . . You won’t want to miss my appearance tonight on . . . Be sure to click here for my latest . . . ) that would have been unthinkable in polite company as recently as a decade ago. Most conservative books are pseudo-books: ghostwritten pastiches whose primary purpose seems to be the photo of the “author” on the cover.
What’s true of the broader conservative movement is doubly, perhaps even triply, so of its Christian branch. In my role as a writer for Chuck Colson’s Breakpoint broadcast, I get an “up close and personal” look at the forces Ferguson decries. Scarcely a week goes by when I don’t get an unsolicited package from someone who wants to use Breakpoint – whose purpose is to shape the Christian mind — as a vehicle to sell something: books, DVDs, curricula and even investments. 
While Chuck is careful about self-advertisement, there are plenty of people who wish ($$$$) he weren’t.
Then there’s the Christian Media & Industrial Complex. (TM) Again, scarely a week goes by without our being told by some station that Breakpoint is “too sophisticated” or that it asks too much of listeners. Instead of four minutes and approximately 515 words, they’d prefer 1 minute, 150 words and three minutes of ads for Royal Bee Jelly.
I’ve seen the future of “Christian Radio” and it makes me so happy that I’m an XM Radio subscriber: wall-to-wall CCM with blocks of talk featuring “personalities” that are as bright a compact fluorescent bulb and for whom complexity is a BLT on whole wheat. Not exactly the stuff of a healthy Christian mind.
