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Red Like Me
A Review by Gerry Donaghy

No matter what side of the political spectrum you reside, there is a lot of material out there to re-affirm your belief structure. Unfortunately, very little of it seeks discourse between the two sides. There are, of course, Thomas Frank's excellent What's The Matter with Kansas, and Jim Wallis's God's Politics, but these were written in the aftermath of the 2004 election, and were more of a quest to see what it was that liberals didn't understand about conservatives and how that cost them the election.

John Moe's Conservatize Me: How I Tried to Become a Righty with the Help of Richard Nixon, Sean Hannity, Toby Keith and Beef Jerky enters this discourse with an admittedly lighter and more flippant approach. In Conservatize Me, Moe decides to turn himself into a human political guinea pig by immersing himself into the world of conservative culture. Cutting himself off from NPR (whose Seattle affiliate employs him), the New York Times, and other bastions of the allegedly liberal media, Moe imbibes Rush Limbaugh, country music, and copious amounts of beef jerky. The results aren't as hilarious as the author probably thought they would turn out, but they still yield amusingly trenchant insights into the cultural division in America.

Starting off with visits to the National Review and the Weekly Standard, Moe visits three of the more articulate standard-bearers of conservatism: Rich Lowery, William Kristol, and Jonah Goldberg. When discussing conservative and neoconservative goals, all three come across as reasonable people who share many of the same objectives as liberals, but feel, as Al Capone did in The Untouchables, that you get a lot more results with a kind word and a baseball bat then you do with just a kind word. This gets the author thinking that maybe the two sides aren't all that different, but attempts are made by the subjects to distinguish themselves from what they perceive to be a blurring of conservatism and the Republican party. For example, Goldberg of the National Review online tells Moe, "Maintain a distinction in your mind between Republicans and conservatives. I have no great pride in being a Republican. None whatsoever. I have great pride in being a conservative".

Moe's descriptions of these conservative scions, and his interactions with them make for enjoyable reading. People who are easily demonized come across as affable and more interested in similarities with their liberal counterparts than inflaming the differences. Even when the author scales down from the heights of the East Coast conservative establishment to mingle with the residents of an Idaho town that Bush carried with a ninety-two percent majority, his treatment of the subject, while at times glib, is well meaning and open minded.

But, there are some terrors to behold in Conservatize Me. Moe visits the College Republican National Convention and witnesses first hand the training grounds for the dirty pool that politics often becomes. Picture your typical drunken frat boy bacchanalia populated by god-fearing and gay-hating preppies and you get an idea. Another particularly creepy moment happens when the author attends a rodeo, where the crowd is singing along with a recording of Lee Greenwood's Proud to Be an American. When the PA system dies, the crowd continues to sing along, although soon they begin to mumble because they've forgotten most of the lyrics beyond the chorus.

As interesting as Conservatize Me is to read, it can often be a frustrating book. Perhaps Moe's humor plays better in a broadcast medium, but on the page it is often flat and unfunny, like the guy in the summertime saying "how about this heat?" I'm firmly liberal in many of my beliefs, but his attempts at this sort of "nudge nudge" school of humor felt more like an elbow in the solar plexus from a roller derby player. Another aspect of the book is the author's need of endnotes to finish a thought or a joke. With very few exceptions, they could have all been eliminated with no negative effect to anything but the author's ego. Can this be a consequence of having super-intelligent humorists like John Hodgman; that all humorous prose now must read like a doctoral dissertation?

One thing that is addressed, although I wish it were a bit more thorough, is the disconnect between the pundits and their audience. While every subject, even male escort/White House press corps resident softball questioner Jeff Gannon, appears to be a reasonable, decent human being when spoken to face-to-face, when allowed to hide behind their institutions, be it a website, a magazine, or broadcasting, the gloves come off and politics becomes for them a matter of performance to their audience and pandering to the base. Moe writes, "It also made me wonder about the power of actually talking to people. I had read things by [Lowry, Kristol, Goldberg] that raised my blood pressure, but when I met them, they were nice guys and possessed of the ability to reasonably present their opinions." While I wish this tangent was further explored, it nicely opens a possible discussion on how conservative or liberal media outlets insulate their listeners from each other.

With these objections duly noted, Conservatize Me does serve a valuable function in the ongoing debate of red versus blue. It explores how we wound up in whatever camp we're currently in and how it's possible to see the other perspective.