The liberal echo chamber was a boon for Republicans through Reagan’s 1984 win, Scarborough said. Tearing down the GOP echo chamber

A “Morning Joe” discussion from Tuesday is sure to set off extremists within the Republican Party who remain more interested in defending the GOP’s losing ways than charting a new course to victory. After Chuck Todd concluded that Republicans are afraid to leave the safe confines of conservative media outlets, I explained that such a response was short-sighted. After all, it was the Conservative Entertainment Complex that led Republican thought leaders, grass-roots activists and even the presidential candidate himself into believing that a GOP victory was imminent on Election Day. The Romney team was so isolated deep inside this conservative media bubble that they continued to believe victory was theirs well into the evening.

That embarrassing political tale proved that conservatives had finally become what they had once mocked: an insular movement so lost in its own echo chamber that it rarely made contact with those who didn’t share their world view. This is, of course, the same trap that liberals fell into in Manhattan newsrooms and on college campuses throughout the 1960s and 70s during the rise of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the Silent Majority. And yes, there was a silent majority that liberal newspapers and TV anchors were blind to for the better part of a generation.


Middle-class Californians were so set on edge by the Watts riots and Berkeley protests of 1965 that they elected an aging actor as California’s governor in 1966. Reagan was dismissed as an extremist and a lightweight by the national media. In fact, he was considered to be such a marginal figure that his Democratic opponent, the legendary Pat Brown, aided Reagan’s cause in the GOP primary so the popular governor could face off against this extremist dunce in the general election. But with Watts and Berkeley as the backdrop to a radically changing political landscape, the cloistered liberal elite awakened to find that it was Democrats who voters began to view as extreme and out of touch.

Two years later, the radicalism of Chicago helped elect Richard Nixon and set American liberalism back on its heels for a generation. But the liberal elites were the last to take notice, in part, because they controlled major news networks and dominated the newsrooms of the major dailies to such a degree that they could construct their own self-reinforcing echo chamber. Perhaps that explains how they could be blindsided yet again by Ronald Wilson Reagan, the amiable dunce who just so happened to start a political revolution that crushed a sitting Democratic president and wiped out most of the Senate’s most liberal icons in his 1980 Republican landslide.

That liberal echo chamber remained a boon for Republicans through Reagan’s historic 49-state win in 1984 and George H.W. Bush’s landslide victory over Michael Dukakis four years later. Despite the left’s control of The New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, ABC and NBC News, the GOP won five of six presidential races from the rise of Reagan in 1966 to the election of his vice president in 1988.

Despite this electoral dominance, conservatives remained shut out of Hollywood, academia and the news media. The rise of an alternative conservative media in the early 1990s was hailed by Republicans like myself as a needed check on the left-wing biases of American media. Rush Limbaugh went national in 1990 and immediately caused a sensation. He led conservative opposition to the Bush tax increases in 1991 and after Bush the Elder lost, Limbaugh played a big role in helping elect conservatives like myself in the off-year election of 1994.

Fox News exploded onto the scene two years later and was a game changer for conservatives who had long been forced to watch the evening news broadcasts of anchors who had never voted for a Republican presidential candidate in their lives. Matt Drudge brought this alternative conservative revolution to the Internet a few years later and constantly exposed liberal hypocrisy and double standards in newsrooms across America.

The conservative alternative media machine was now firmly in place and all things were right in the Republican world. Democrats then proceeded to win the popular vote in five of six presidential presidential elections.

Why is Rush Limbaugh batting one for six in presidential races? Why is Fox News one for five? Perhaps it is because two decades later, what many of us once considered to be an important balance to left-wing media bias have become the only outlets conservative politicians and thought leaders consider legitimate. That has proven to be a terrible calculation.

This assumption has now become so widespread on the right that any news analysis or media poll that runs counter to Republican interests is dismissed by the right as biased and irrelevant. This mindset took firm hold in 2012 so that the echo chamber syndrome that once made fools of left has now come back to undermine the right. Not only does this approach distort political reality by only reinforcing pre-existing worldviews, it also stifles intellectual debate inside the party. This in turn creates the kind of stale political environment that has been criticized of late by conservative thought leaders like Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz and Pete Wehner. Mr. Wehner wrote a column today in “Commentary” calling for the “intellectual unfreezing” of the right.

Conservatives should celebrate the gains they have made in the media world over the past two decades. But their greatest challenge moving forward is to begin breaking down the walls they have built that keeps them locked inside a comfort zone that distorts political reality and cedes great advantages to Democratic candidates. What conservatives must do instead is dare to think different, apply eternal truths to current realities and then start spreading their gospel of conservatism to the swing voters who have rejected them in five of six presidential races.

Two decades of losing should be evidence enough that simply talking to ourselves is not a winning strategy if we ever want to run the country again.

A guest columnist for POLITICO, Joe Scarborough hosts “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and represented Florida’s 1st Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2001.