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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8915 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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I would read The Common Touch as referring to the ability to speak and relate to the common man, the ordinary sort of citizen, the "crowds" referenced in the prior line.

Yes, exactly. People who take their cues from the Cathedral cannot do that, because "the ordinary sort of citizen" has their views grounded in a mix of practical reality and community ingroup signalling, rather than taking their cues from universities, corporate news media, and DC elites.

Properly, I'd probably contend that French (and most conservative justices) didn't lose the common touch recently, he was never in the same zip code as the common touch.

For starters, "never" can't possibly be right. The first particularly stand-out thing French ever accomplished was to attend Harvard Law School, and even after that he did a lot more public interest work than most Harvard grads deign to undertake. I never got the impression, in 2015, that French was taking his cues from universities, corporate news media, and DC elites. Today, he is clearly taking his cues from the Cathedral, as McLaughlin articulates.

Writers for the National Review are no closer to the common man than is the NYT editorial page.

That may have been true in the era of William F. Buckley, Jr. but I don't think it has been true for, oh, three decades? By the mid 1990s at the latest, National Review was much, much closer to the "common man" than anything the New York Times had on offer. Fittingly, I think that becomes less the case around 2016, for much the same reasons that French goes off the reservation.

That may have been true in the era of William F. Buckley, Jr. but I don't think it has been true for, oh, three decades? By the mid 1990s at the latest, National Review was much, much closer to the "common man" than anything the New York Times had on offer. Fittingly, I think that becomes less the case around 2016, for much the same reasons that French goes off the reservation.

Thanks for picking that year, as that is the earliest Press Kit I can find for NR easily available online. It gives a breakdown of what their readership looks like* for the purposes of selling advertising. The NR audience is nearly three quarters men. 5% of their subscribers live in DC, less than a fifith of one percent of Americans do. The median NR reader is 66 years old, and 82% of them are over 55, as compared to numbers for America of 38 and ~30%. A little under 40% of Americans have college degrees, while 80% of NR Online readers have one. 43% of NR readers have a net worth over $1mm, only 5% of Americans meet that number. The NR represents a group that is vastly richer, older, more educated, more politically active than the Common American.

And that's what has made the NR an important publication! They've represented an alternative to the tides of mass opinion AND to the Cathedral. But the common man? They are not and haven't been. There are multiple ideological alternatives to taking orders from The Cathedral. A Catholic bishop does not represent "The Common Touch," and he doesn't take orders from that Cathedral; rather he follows his own intellectual tradition. Following any intellectual tradition ("If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue") in the face of popular opposition is admirable, and important for a publication to maintain intellectual integrity. But imagining that the National Review represents the common man's viewpoint is a very common error in assumptions that will produce bad conclusions.

To imagine that the Common Man looks like an NR reader requires excluding from your definition the vast majority of actual Americans, it makes "salt of the earth" an honorific rather than a description.

*I found a similar breakdown for the NYT here. Unfortunately, they don't use the same numbers in their statistics, so I'm not sure how to parse the comparison accurately. They list the number of 18-34 print subscribers (29% as compared to 20% nationally) and the median net worth for all subscribers ($508k, 54th percentile nationally). The gaps in the data are such that I'm not sure the two groups couldn't look more or less identical but reported differently, so I don't want to push the contrast analysis too far. It's reasonable to assume that both groups are wealthier, more educated than the median American, though the NYT numbers look much closer to "normal" there is some portion of their subscriber base that is looking for local NYC news, one can even imagine a guy who buys it primarily for the sports page, where the NR is essentially just the NYT Sunday magazine.

They've represented an alternative to the tides of mass opinion AND to the Cathedral.

That seems like a nicely succinct way of saying it talks with crowds but keeps its virtue, and walks with kings but keeps the common touch.

Retaining the "common touch" doesn't mean "to be the modal person." It means retaining an ability to relate to, and communicate with, people of no particular importance. Some examples of having lost the "common touch" in policy debates might be, say, pushing new identity terms on people who don't want them, or pretending that student loan forgiveness isn't a handout to the wealthy.

I don't know what I said to inspire such tenacious contrarianism in you, but like... at minimum, you could try disagreeing with me without putting words in my mouth.

Thanks for picking that year, as that is the earliest Press Kit I can find for NR easily available online. It gives a breakdown of what their readership looks like* for the purposes of selling advertising

You probably could have saved yourself some time, if you agreed on this metric ahead of time. Personally, it seems like a pretty bad approach to measuring who's more in touch of the common man.

Huh?

I might be misunderstanding the intentions in your previous comment, but I was under the impression you're trying to come up with some objective measure to see if this statement from Naraburns is true:

By the mid 1990s at the latest, National Review was much, much closer to the "common man" than anything the New York Times had on offer.

If that's what you're going for, looking at the demographics of each paper seems like a pretty bad approach.

My intention would be to show that neither paper particularly represents the point of view of The Common Man and that writers for both have lost the Common Touch. I'm not particularly arguing for the NYT having a more middle class readership, only arguing against the NR. Nara and I agree on the NYT afaict.

Why would you say that the demographics are a bad approach, and what would you consider a better approach?

Certainly, it's hypothetically possible to imagine a magazine that has a wealthy, elderly, male, highly educated readership that skews towards DC residents but represents in its content primarily the views of those less wealthy, less educated, younger, and more rural than the readership. But I would argue that the views of the readership are highly likely to skew the views represented in the content over time. It's really hard to resist readership capture.

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