Ann Coulter and the Demise of Liberal Cultural Hegemony

Forget the rest---this is why liberals hate Ann Coulter:

"It is extremely interesting how people react to the telling of the truth," Buckley wrote in an introduction to a 1970s edition of his classic. Indeed. What seemingly frightens liberals is the penetrating questions and different policy proscriptions that challenge their once secure worldview. As time has moved on and liberal solutions have been tried and found drastically wanting, the American public quite naturally has looked elsewhere for answers.

For the liberals of 1951 the truly frightening aspect of Buckley's book was not just what it said but how it sold. It became something new in America -- a conservative bestseller. In the words of its publisher, God and Man at Yale was "a sensation." The same phenomenon happened again in 1960 when Goldwater wrote a 123-page book entitled The Conscience of a Conservative. Ignored by the mainstream media, with a first printing of a mere 10,000 copies, it sold more than four million in hardback and paperback. By now this pattern is familiar. Coulter's latest book is number one on Amazon and -- teeth-gratingly for liberals -- zooming up the New York Times bestseller list. Fox News is so popular that Kofi Annan's deputy accuses both Fox (and Limbaugh) with undermining the United Nations simply by being on the air.


MAKE NO MISTAKE. The furious reaction to Coulter in this latest episode is not about her manners but her willingness to, as liberals love to say, "speak truth to power" -- the power of the once mighty liberal establishment. From the moment Buckley's book first hit the stands, this is what these furious reactions to conservatives have been all about. And from the liberal perspective there is a true terror at what is yet to come. Buckley began by taking on the world of academia in book form, then established a conservative magazine. Now conservative books, authors and magazines abound. Goldwater paved the way in politics with a move on the presidency, something finally -- and spectacularly --accomplished by Reagan. Gingrich retook the Congress. David Horowitz zeroes in on the culture. Limbaugh spawned talk radio. Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, and now Alito sit on the Supreme Court, with enough conservative lawyers to fill Yankee Stadium waiting for seats on the once sacrosanct liberal precincts of the federal bench. Rupert Murdoch has had the gall to invent Fox News, a conservative TV channel, and, most humiliatingly, take over a Hollywood studio. Even the once safely liberal mainline Protestant churches -- the Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and United Church of Christ -- are alarmed to find conservatives in their pews not only speaking up but seeking power within church hierarchies traditionally filled by liberals. What's next? Conservative Spielbergs and Norman Lears? Ben Stein as Ben Bernanke? Statements from the National Council of Churches praising the liberation of Iraq?

Plus she's skinny.