Year in Review
By Kelly Jane Torrance

Will 2005 be seen as a watershed year for conservative books? It certainly looks like it. And not just because conservatives seem to have beaten liberals in sales (although liberals did very well, at least when it comes to the most overtly political books).

Amazon.com has posted a list of the Top 50 bestselling books of the year. At Number 21 is Mark Levin’s Men In Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America. Two places down is The FairTax Book by syndicated radio host Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder (R-GA).

Liberal books—by which I mean polemics, as it’s probably the case that most of the books on the list, like novels, were written by liberals—didn’t fare so well. In fact, the highest one on the list was Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It at Number 13. But the book, as noted in the subtitle, takes liberals to task almost as much as it does conservatives.

100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken Is #37) by Bernard Goldberg, author of the bestselling Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, made the cut, at Number 27. But Al Franken’s own The Truth (with jokes) didn’t.

How did these books sell so well? After all, conservative books weren’t getting glowing reviews in the New York Times or the Washington Post. The authors of The FairTax Book, for example, advocate replacing income taxes with a national sales tax. The New York Times reviewer declared, “No reputable economist of any political stripe would support it.” But his very next sentence was puzzling: “The honest truth is that replacing the current tax system with any system that raises the same amount of revenue (as Boortz and Linder claim their plan does) may make us better off, but only by redirecting our resources away from dealing with complex filing requirements and improving our incentives to work, save and innovate—not by creating the kind of free-lunch miracle suggested here.” Sounds pretty good to me—but I guess I’m not a “reputable economist.”

The New York Times didn’t even review Mark Levin’s Men In Black. But books like these found an audience anyway. By 2005, conservatives had learned to market their ideas without having to rely on the mainstream press that historically hasn’t been sympathetic. Regnery, the conservative publisher of Men In Black, has created bestsellers primarily by preaching to the choir. The company’s public relations firm markets directly to conservatives through talk radio and television hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity. It worked for Men In Black and found particular success before last year’s election with the influential Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.

The New York Times itself took notice. The annual Year in Ideas issue of the Magazine declared that “Conservative Blogs are More Effective.” Writer Michael Crowley of The New Republic says “what really makes conservatives effective is their pre-existing media infrastructure, composed of local and national talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, the FOX News Channel and sensationalist say-anything outlets like the Drudge Report—all of which are quick to pass on the latest tidbit from the blogosphere.” It’s this same network that has made books by, for example, Michelle Malkin, so successful—and it doesn’t hurt that she has her own blog as well.

Of course, Crowley doesn’t like conservatives, so he can’t resist finding other, more sinister reasons for this success. “Liberals use the Web to air ideas and vent grievances with one another, often ripping into Democratic leaders,” he claims. “Conservatives, by contrast, skillfully use the Web to provide maximum benefit for their issues and candidates. They are generally less interested in examining every side of every issue and more focused on eliciting strong emotional responses from their supporters.” Apparently Crowley missed one of the biggest stories of the year—how conservatives forced Bush to withdraw Supreme Court pick Harriet Miers.

One book released this year did a good job of explaining how this new infrastructure came into being. South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias, written by Brian C. Anderson and published by Regnery, details how those on the Right became tired of being vilified by the mainstream media and so decided to create venues of their own. It certainly worked. As Anderson notes, even “aging liberal grandee Bill Moyers devoted his final PBS program to ‘the biggest story of our time’: the arrival of conservatives in media.”

Conservatives made their revolt through newer forms of media—particularly talk radio and the Internet. But perhaps 2005 will go down in history as the year that conservatives made it in New York. That’s where almost all the big publishers are located. And they’re finally beginning to warm to the Right.

The biggest story in conservative publishing this year may have been the announcement that Simon & Schuster is starting a new conservative imprint. Republican Mary Matalin, best known as Clinton strategist James Carville’s wife and host of the now-cancelled Crossfire, is in charge of the project. Threshold, as the imprint will be called, will publish around eight books annually, starting in 2006. Its first will be a memoir by Mary Cheney, Vice President Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter.

This isn’t the publisher’s first foray on the Right. Simon & Schuster had a conservative imprint before, The Free Press, which published Robert Bork, George Will, and David Horowitz. But it morphed into a general interest imprint that now features a variety of titles.

So it certainly means something that S&S is trying again. They’re not the only big name that wants to publish more conservatives. Penguin started a conservative imprint two years ago. Sentinel has published Edward Klein’s The Truth About Hillary and Mona Charen’s Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim To Help (and the Rest of Us).

Random House’s Crown Forum is another conservative line. The imprint started as Prima Forum, and Random House snapped up the successful publisher. Now the big house publishes as polarizing a figure as Ann Coulter. Coulter actually made her name with books published by Regnery before she moved on to Crown.

Regnery shares much in common with other conservative publishers—like Spence and Encounter—because it’s not located in New York City, and it’s actually run by conservatives. But the big New York publishers are now willing to hold their nose and publish people like Coulter. They’ve discovered that these people actually sell books. A lot of them. Publishers, like all other businesses, are driven by profit. So the fact that they’re starting conservative imprints means there must be a big audience out there for conservative books.

How long these books will be read is another question. “Political tactics are ephemeral. Books last,” Matalin said in an interview. But will a book skewering a second-rate ideological director still be relevant even 25 years from now? Bestsellers of any genre are not particularly known for their literary qualities, whether it’s chick lit or ideological rants. Style often triumphs over substance in the marketplace.

Conservatives may finally have made the big time, culturally speaking. But if they want to cement their place in literary history, they should use their gains to improve the quality of the debate. Perhaps 2005 will be known as the year of conservative media. Let’s hope a future year will be known as the one in which the Right finally shrugged off the name-calling and offered its audience some new ideas.

 
Kelly Jane Torrance is a book columnist for The American Enterprise Online.