BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, April 29, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
In 1987, Rush Limbaugh sat down at a microphone at radio station KFBK-AM in Sacramento and began broadcasting something called "The Rush Limbaugh Show."
The rest is history.
The "rest"--the inexorable 15-year rise of conservative ideas and clout across what Howard Stern calls "all media"--is described in a provocative new book by Brian C. Anderson, "South Park Conservatives." What was once a mostly exclusive liberal country club--television, the press, book publishing, even the campuses--has become heavily integrated with aggressive, even crude, conservatives.
As described by Mr. Anderson, a writer with the Manhattan Institute, conservatives established their first beachhead in the early 1990s with talk radio. Then Fox conquered cable news and finally a virtual Mongol horde of conservative-to-libertarian bloggers swept across the Internet. In the 2004 election, these electric horsemen (apologies to Jane Fonda) pulled down Dan Rather and haunted John Kerry's war hero with Swift-boat ghosts.
It is no news that America has become a big backyard pool of opinion, awash with Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Ann Coulter, Dennis Prager, the Drudge Report and, I'm told, Al Franken.
Contrary to myth, Roger Ailes didn't do this. Ronald Reagan did. Ronald Reagan may not make it to Mount Rushmore for winning the Cold War. But he secured his place in the conservative pantheon for tearing down another wall: the Fairness Doctrine.
The Fairness Doctrine was a federal regulation, dating to 1949, which mandated "contrasting viewpoints" from broadcasters. In reality, the Fairness Doctrine ensured that incumbents got "free" TV coverage across their terms while challengers got crumbs. The Fairness Doctrine was also an early nuclear option: If a local broadcaster's news operation made the local congressman or his party look bad, Washington could threaten to blow up his broadcast license.
Ronald Reagan tore down this wall in 1987 (maybe as spring training for Berlin) and Rush Limbaugh was the first man to proclaim himself liberated from the East Germany of liberal media domination.
It wasn't obvious that conservatives soon would dominate talk radio. Radio programming has always been a soulless decision based on ratings. If programmers thought they could win the drive-time slots with Don Imus reading "Das Kapital," that would be on the air and advertisers would support it. But it's not.
What worked after speech became free in the spectrum ozone was hyper-articulate conservative hosts opening their microphones to millions of hyper-angry conservative voters--not least in such liberal bastions as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles.
In 1994, Newt Gingrich, his Contract With America and the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1952--the years in which the Fairness Doctrine largely kept politics off the air. This didn't happen because the Gingrich candidates were getting their message out in the Los Angeles Times or Boston Globe.
The conservative media ascendancy chronicled by Brian Anderson has driven many liberals nuts. The liberal media-advocacy group FAIR wants a new Fairness Doctrine to repair "broadcast abuse." Just months ago, FAIR cited "the immense volume of unanswered conservative opinion heard on the airwaves."
What goes around comes around, I suppose. Conservatives would say they're now using radio, TV and the Web--all of it free from political control--to give as good as they got from the 1960s onward. For years, they claim, liberal managers in broadcasting, journalism, publishing and academia marginalized them. Were conservatives imagining that?
Maybe not. Mr. Anderson cites left-wing philosopher Herbert Marcuse (who taught at Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis) urging liberals back then to practice active "intolerance against movements from the Right" in the name of "liberating tolerance." Thus, for example, liberal academics would vote to deny tenure for conservative colleagues--and still do--believing that this is a morally mandated act.
Liberals now marvel at the energy and output of the conservative "movement"--the talk shows, the think tanks, the blogosphere. No need to wonder; they compressed the rocket fuel for the inevitable explosion.
But a price has been paid. What got lost during the years of liberal exclusionism, according to Peter Berkowitz of George Mason University, was "guidance for the negotiation of disagreement in a democracy." No more perfect example of the price the political system has paid for years of conservative shunning exists than the Senate's standoff over judges. You can find the reasons Democrats are shunning the Bush nominees to the appellate bench by consulting the Web site of People for the American Way--abortion, corporate law, minimum wage, Social Security, environment. They disagree with these nominees on--everything.
For Democrats, judicial philosophy is a cultural Armageddon. Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy have turned the Senate into a Branch Davidian compound. No one in the liberal cult is allowed to leave, including the hostage nominees--unless they recant their conservatism. How many Senate Democrats plan to be in this bunker when Bill Frist's ATF squad detonates the "nuclear option"?
Time was, "choice" for conservatives mainly meant accepting one's lot in life. Now they have options, lots of them.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
