In ''South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias,'' Brian C. Anderson, an editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, charts the rise in respectability -- or, at least, of visibility and audibility -- of ''proudly anti-elitist'' right-wing thought in America's public dialogue over the last two decades, a development that was spearheaded by Rush Limbaugh in the late 1980's on talk radio and has since spread to other media in a process Anderson calls ''FOXification.'' To him, the popularity of the stingingly anti-P.C. cartoon series ''South Park'' signals the advent of a new generation of Americans who refuse to accept public censure for their scornful attitudes toward gay men and lesbians, Native Americans, environmentalism and abortion rights. In an effort not to gloat, he cloaks his descriptions of this triumph in the humble fleece of the common man (Limbaugh is, for example ''a college dropout'' who ''had put himself through a rigorous self-education, mastering an array of issues'') and champions talk radio as ''the first media forum in which ordinary Joes can actually get a hearing for their complaints about what liberals have wrought in America since the 1960's.''
South Park Conservatives
In ''South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias,'' Brian C. Anderson, an editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, charts the rise in respectability -- or, at least, of visibility and audibility -- of ''proudly anti-elitist'' right-wing thought in America's public dialogue over the last two decades, a development that was spearheaded by Rush Limbaugh in the late 1980's on talk radio and has since spread to other media in a process Anderson calls ''FOXification.'' To him, the popularity of the stingingly anti-P.C. cartoon series ''South Park'' signals the advent of a new generation of Americans who refuse to accept public censure for their scornful attitudes toward gay men and lesbians, Native Americans, environmentalism and abortion rights. In an effort not to gloat, he cloaks his descriptions of this triumph in the humble fleece of the common man (Limbaugh is, for example ''a college dropout'' who ''had put himself through a rigorous self-education, mastering an array of issues'') and champions talk radio as ''the first media forum in which ordinary Joes can actually get a hearing for their complaints about what liberals have wrought in America since the 1960's.''
