Talk Radio & The American Dream
With a keen eye for the alienated voter, Levin was one of the first political scientists to notice the role talk radio was playing in American politics. Talk radio shows were articulating the rage of what President Richard M. Nixon called "The Silent Majority" and others eventually described as "Joe Six-Pack" and "Reagan Democrats": the alienated working class that once made up the New Deal-Fair Deal-New Frontier-Great Society coalition. Levin realized that by the late 1970s and early 1980s, this once reliable base of support for the Democratic Party were ripe pickings for reactionaries who could articulate their rage.
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Famous quotes containing the words talk, radio, american and/or dream:
“Radio put technology into storytelling and made it sick. TV killed it. Then you were locked into somebody else’s sighting of that story. You no longer had the benefit of making that picture for yourself, using your imagination. Storytelling brings back that humanness that we have lost with TV. You talk to children and they don’t hear you. They are television addicts. Mamas bring them home from the hospital and drag them up in front of the set and the great stare-out begins.”
—Jackie Torrence (b. 1944)
“Now they can do the radio in so many languages that nobody any longer dreams of a single language, and there should not any longer be dreams of conquest because the globe is all one, anybody can hear everything and everybody can hear the same thing, so what is the use of conquering.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“...it is decidedly an advantage to American homes that so many of the wives and mothers have served as teachers before becoming house-directors. ...”
—Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)
“Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)