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In reality it ranks on the same level as those who proclaim only trailer trash and rednecks voted for Bush.
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actually, seaver, it doesn't.
what smooth is talking about is a simple matter of respect at the interpersonal level....indications that folk on the right actually read what the rest of us post, a kind of minimal quid pro quo given the fact that "the left" in here does bother to read conservative posts.
second--the air america failure is more interesting than it is complex--at the simple level they didn't make enough money to cover their debts. this was apparently more an organizational problem from the outset than an advertising revenue problem generated by low listenership. but obviously low listenership didnt help.
and again for the record, i did not and do not listen to air america.
it does not interest me.
it is the mirror image of conservative radio, which also is not interesting at the level of content.
HOWEVER:
both are kinda interesting at the level of tactics.
because both are about trying to fashion and maintain what you could think of as a discursive space--they are adaptation machines that take the general political line of the moment and bend it around to encompass shifting information.
so listening to conservative radio--which at one point i did quite intensively (though i confess that i preferred the really whacked out conservative stuff like militia and/or christian identity programming you can hear still on shortwave, mostly because it was like watching a really bad horror film as opposed to watching a consistently mediocre film, which would be analogous to limbaugh--this despite the fact that limbaugh was much more important analytically) was interesting an an ongoing experiment in ideological adjustment.
a highly centralized type of ideological adjustment no less--within which it was required that reference be made to how indepedent minded everyone is. it was--and remains--kind of surreal.
you can listen to this stuff and think about it without bothering to try to figure out why individual conservatives listen--it almost doesn't matter why, simply because the relevant motivations were provided by the adjustment procedures themselves.
limbaugh would give you a good idea of what the assumed motives were. that he had a listenership indicated that some of these motives resonated somewhere.
but you can have complexity at the level of audience motives and real simplicity at the level of ideological claims without any contradiction.
it's kind of a routine feature of thinking about a mass media operation.
air america was set up on conservative ideological grounds, as a response that from the outset conceded the framing of its politics (liberal) as conservative radio/media outlined it and tried to "fight back" from within that framework.
to my mind, that is a big reason why it failed--the folk who got it up and running actually believed that conservative ideology was an accurate index for thinking about politics beyond its borders.
well, it isnt.
at one level the failure of air america proves that it isnt.
so what i think is that the failure of air america shows that conservative politics does not even provide an accurate description of the reality it is part of. "liberal" in conservativeland is a projection, a fantasy. "liberal" denotes a unified group in conservativeland, a discrete position. "liberal" is the reverse of conservative, which would mean that "liberals" are as centrally organized as conservatives are in ideological terms.
and that is nothing more than projection, and one way of seeing the failure of air america is as a confirmation of that.
i know this does not fit into the ultra-simplistic take that you would prefer to have of this, but frankly, it is not important to me that it does. in fact, i would obviously concede your point and would then argue that it is so obvious as to be thoroughly banal and from there i would ask you what makes you think that folk who oppose you politically are so stupid that they cannot see the obvious--particularly when you have post after post from them above that say air america is not interesting, i do not listen to it, it says nothing to or for me or anyone that i know.
and i would also ask you, seaver, why it is that you cannot seem to process what the actual arguments in the posts from "the left" in tfp land above really are about this.