The “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy”: Media and Conservative Networks

Death and Taxes: Issue Framing and Conservative Coalition Maintenance

“…While not the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that critics have often denounced, American conservatives form a loosely coordinated but extended network of policymakers, think tanks, advocacy organizations, and media outlets. 95 Conservatives of all stripes meet often, whether at public events like the Conservative Political Action Conference, or at the more-private weekly meetings hosted by anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and, until his recent death, Paul Weyrich. These networks were helped along by rightwingleaning foundations, who sought to build movement infrastructure during the 1980s and '90s.…”

How inequality fuels climate change: The climate case for a Green New Deal

“…108 Moreover, as wealthy elites have gained disproportionate influence over the means of cultural production, such as news media, some have used this power to stoke social divisions and foment a sense of zero-sum competition among subordinate groups. 109,110 For example, wealthy conservatives in the US have promoted the belief that government takes from the ''hard-working'' white working class to give handouts to the ''undeserving'' poor, immigrants and people of color. 111 Such beliefs weaken the bonds of solidarity that are needed for cooperation across groups.…”

The online anti-public sphere

“…The growing hegemonic power of the post-normative anti-public sphere long predates the Internet and has been facilitated by the growth, out of the purview of many commentators, of a highly influential conservative media-policy sphere that disintermediates traditional ‘elite’ gatekeeping functions and remediates traditional media forms such as news outlets, to create new, conservative-friendly platforms that eschew ‘liberal’ conventions. In the United States, where this process is most advanced, this has involved the creation from the late 1940s onwards (Hemmer, 2016), of a highly integrated alternative conservative media sphere comprising direct mail, book and magazine publishers, televangelism, cable news outlets, think tanks, bespoke public relations (PR) and communications companies and websites such as Townhall.com (one of the earliest online communities), the Drudge Report and Breitbart.com (Meagher, 2012; Sherman, 2017). More recently troll and meme wars spreading from bulletin boards such as 4chan into social media (Nagle, 2017), and groups such as the ‘alternative influence network’ that use YouTube to ‘sell’ White supremacism, among other far right ideologies, have reached a new, young audience (Lewis, 2018).…”

“…My argument is that while we tend to think of extreme and irrational online discourse as aberrant and alien to everyday democratic discourse, such discourse in fact is a precise reflection of an everyday democratic discourse that has itself become deeply inflected with reactionary and populist themes (Mudde, 2004, 2010; Müller, 2014). The current proliferation of extreme online discourse, I argue, reflects the development in the US since the late 1940s of a highly tribal, reactionary media sphere (Meagher, 2012), self-consciously distanced and ‘insulated’ from ‘mainstream media’, with its own ‘ingroup language’, internal logics and ‘shared definitions’ (Jamieson and Cappella, 2010: 179). This includes the growing dominance of conservative media by ‘culture wars discourse’ (Davis, 2014), designed to highlight cultural-ideological-values differences using starkly oppositional ‘we versus they’ discourse (Van Dijk, 1995, 2000).…”