As I've commented on before, there seems to be a definite shift in ideology from the center-left to the center-right. Not only with regards to TV news, but also with the way the public attempts to find out what the real truth is, as opposed to what Peter Jennings says the truth is. This is an historic change that may have far-reaching implications in the very near future. The conservative City Journal has an excellent article about this cultural change.

It's a long article but makes some unavoidable points about popular culture, cable news, and the Blogosphere. And, of course, South Park. Some excerpts:

But it’s not just Fox: liberals have been pooh-poohing all of these developments. Dennis Miller used to be the hippest joker around. Now, complains a critic in the liberal webzine Salon, he’s “uncomfortably juvenile,” exhibiting “the sort of simplistic, reactionary American stance that gives us a bad reputation around the world.” The Boston Globe’s Alex Beam dismisses the blogosphere with typical liberal hauteur: “Welcome to Blogistan, the Internet-based journalistic medium where no thought goes unpublished, no long-out-of-print book goes unhawked, and no fellow ‘blogger,’ no matter how outré, goes unpraised.” And those right-wing books are a danger to society, grouse liberals: their “bile-spewing” authors “have limited background expertise and a great flair for adding fuel to hot issues,” claims Norman Provizer, a Rocky Mountain News columnist. “The harm is if people start thinking these lightweights are providing heavyweight answers.”

Well. The fair and balanced observer will hear in such hysterical complaint and angry foot stamping baffled frustration over the loss of a liberal monoculture, which has long protected the Left from debate—and from the realization that its unexamined ideas are sadly threadbare. “The Left has never before had its point of view challenged and its arguments made fun of and shot full of holes on the public stage,” concludes social thinker Michael Novak, who has been around long enough to recognize how dramatically things are changing. Hoover Institute fellow Tod Lindberg agrees: “Liberals aren’t prepared for real argument,” he says. “Elite opinion is no longer univocal. It engages in real argument in real time.” New York Times columnist David Brooks even sees the Left falling into despair over the new conservative media that have “cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out.”

Here’s what’s likely to happen in the years ahead. Think of the mainstream liberal media as one sphere and the conservative media as another. The liberal sphere, which less than a decade ago was still the media, is still much bigger than the non-liberal one. But the non-liberal sphere is expanding, encroaching into the liberal sphere, which is both shrinking and breaking up into much smaller sectarian spheres—one for blacks, one for Hispanics, one for feminists, and so on.

It’s hard to imagine that this development won’t result in a broader national debate—and a more conservative America.

I love when the Left pulls out the "we're smarter than you are" card. They fancy themselves "The Elite" but come off as blowhards who have had the shit kicked out of their arguments. Take this blog for instance, I'm a center-right guy who didn't pay much attention in English class (but was an avid student of history). I'm sure any liberal who happened upon the mess that is this blog would dismiss it out of hand because of the bad grammar and poor sentence structure (but not bad spelling). But there are people who may come across this and say to themselves, "damn, that's how I view this situation" or better yet, someone who says "I disagree" but actually thinks about why they disagree instead of reflexively condemning it over ideology.

There's is hope for a national debate. If I could start out any conversation with a liberal that doesn't begin with "Al Gore was robbed", that'd be a start.