Liberal Talk Radio

About a month ago, The Professor wrote a thought-provoking post, entitled Liberalism /= Relativism, where he argued that Liberals need not be moral relativists.

In fact, recent events show that it is Conservatives who, ironically, are today’s relativists. Read this piece by E. J. Dionne, and, more importantly, the followup at The Slant.

The bottom line, as Dionne writes, is that “today’s conservative activists have become the new postmodernists.” This idea is central to David Foster Wallace’s article on conservative talk radio in The Atlantic. He spends a lot of time with John Ziegler, host of the new drive-time slot on the local right-wing station in LA. And basically he makes the same point: how ironic it is that those who have attacked postmodernism most vociferously are in fact the biggest relativists.

Accuse your enemy of your own worst crime.

In attacking the “liberal media,” conservative activists have argued that there is no absolute truth, that everything is biased. They’ve helped fragment the media audience and accelerated the “cocoon” effect, whereby people only get news from a person with whom they already agree.

Bill O’Reilly spends countless hours bashing the post-modern relativism of B-grade college profs, but fails to realize that he himself is the king of all relativists. His show is a discourse on the promise and peril of post-modernism that does justice to his Harvard pedigree. The faculty should applaud him.