Come on Down to South Park - Conservative Movement's Mecca?

Fire of Liberty

Here's a good review over at Tech Central Station by Edward B. Driscoll Jr on Brian C. Anderson's new book South Park Conservatives, which shows a new generation of conservatives who abhor political correctness much like the gang on South Park. Though these foul mouth cartoon grade-schoolers are a long way from the likes of Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr, Phyllis Schalfly, Paul Weyrich and the countless other founders of the American Conservative movement, they have help to establish a new movement of the right.

As an editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, Anderson has spent a considerable amount of time pondering and writing on the ever present movements in the American culture. In the August 2003 issue of City Journal, Anderson would suggest that the right was gaining the upper hand in American culture in this article, which noted that the right seems to dominate many facets of our culture. Whether its cable news successful Fox News, AM Radio with superstars like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddey, Mike Gallagher, Neal Boortz, Michael Medved, Hugh Hewitt, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, Mark Levin, Larry Elder and many others, along with a bevy of think tanks, Internet sites, magazines(small numbers but many) as well as books, the right tends to dominate. While the right has only infiltrated Hollywood in a very minute area, it has had an impact on the animated antics of Stan, Kyle, Cartman, Kenny. Though the show's creators are far from being conservative, they understand the right's disgust of the madness of the PC ninnies who have infected our TV shows and Universities. Just read what Driscoll had to say about Anderson's new conservative sub-division:

"In my book", Anderson recently told me, "the term refers to a kind of irreverent post-liberal or anti-liberal attitude or sensibility, one very in tune with popular culture. But it's not a coherent, fully developed political philosophy. You do find this attitude among a lot of younger Americans, as I show in my concluding chapter, which is based on lots of interviews with right-of-center college kids."

Those right-of-center college students, for the most part, aren't Alex P. Keaton-clones, decked out in Ralph Lauren double-breasted navy blue blazers. They're more likely to look like every other college kid: jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts advertising their favorite rock groups. (On the other hand, as Anderson notes in his book, campus South Park conservatives usually smell better than their bathing-optional counterparts on the left). But there's one thing that South Park campus conservatives abhor: "Political correctness drives them nuts", Anderson says. "In interviewing students, for instance, it was clear how much the PC conformities of the campus Left turned them off."

Though this movement is a long away from producing earth-shattering treatises like Buckley's God and Man at Yale, Richard Weaver's Ideas have Consequences, Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, or Goldwater's Conscience of A Conservative, they definitely understand the ideas that these father's of the modern conservative movement were trying to disseminate. As long as these kids of the South Park generation continue to see beyond the PC filter that the Left seems to push down the mainstream cultures' throat in the TV shows, movies and the Universities, the conservative movement will endure. Thanks to Brian C. Anderson's observations, the conservative movement has discovered a new subset in the movement of the Right.

If you think your part of the South Park Conservative movement, please find time to read all of the books above. You'll thank me for such advice some ten years from now.