On the Unpopularity of Leftish TV shows....

RE earnest at tallynet.com
Tue Sep 10 18:46:25 PDT 2002


Recap: We got into this by discussing why left TV shows seem to bomb. You made the broad contention that it's because "the American public tends to be very conservative." Doug referred to some missing aspects of left TV, humor, nastyness. I'm saying that if you want to find out why people watch or don't watch a show, try to understand what they go through when they watch, or even *think* about watching it. I think that's preferable to making generalizations that would explain the viewing preferences of a union member, a day laborer, and a real estate agent all with reference to the lack of legitimizing institutions (btw, didn't Moore's show TV Nation at least do ok?).

Beyond trying to explain TV preferences, this question is important -- or at least the potential answers raise important questions -- because explanations like yours tend to make us blind to very different ways that people come to do conservative-looking things. From my own experience organizing and working as a therapist, and from man other writings list (Lillian Rubin's "Worlds of Pain" comes to mind, but there are a bunch more) Ehrenreich's conjectures about why some of her workmates really care about their boss' opinion of them and tend to try to accomodate themselves to hardship are just dead on. They want to give their jobs some value, they don't want to be seen as "lazy troublemakers," and the very intensity of their dissatisfaction can make them cling to authority. This can't simply be reduced to a correlate of a lack of left institutions; more positively, it may be possible to talk with them before those institutions exist. Randy


>
> Yes, but how that counter-movement is channelled makes all the difference
> in the world. .... There is no political institution in the US
> that is able to effectively channel these discontents to the left causes
> and policies. I once thought that Labor Party may become such an
> institution, but apparently it was dud.
>
> The left will be politically meaningless in this country as long as it
does
> not have a mainstream institutional representation.
>
> wojtek
>
>



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