With Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, Ann Coulter has written a funny book—which is in no way to suggest she has produced an unserious book. Coulter’s purpose here is to expose, document, enumerate, and analyze the many sources and forms of the Left’s political lies.

Her central method in this task is to record, over and over and over again, what liberals actually say. And while individual examples may be hilarious (Bryant Gumbel to Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner in an interview during the 2000 presidential race: “In a macropolitical sense, do you think the Gore preoccupation with morality is a frightening turn for the party?”), the cumulative effect is deadly.

Ann Coulter has broken the code in dealing with typical liberal tactics, which consist mainly of labeling conservatives “dangerous,” “stupid,” or “mean.” The standard liberal technique, she writes, comes down to this: “Always advance as if under threat of attack.” Coulter herself advances by aggressively rejecting the Left’s labels (along with the defensiveness that can accompany being their object), then tenaciously scrutinizing the facts, the record, and the documented observations of selected liberals, Democrats, and lefties. Finally, she follows up with the one-two punch of applied logic and intellectual rigor. What Ann Coulter does in Slander is, in fact, hard work; and her ability to make it look easy suggests a high-energy sense of mental order.

Coulter’s talents merge to perfection in a chapter exploring what she calls “the apocryphal ‘religious right.’” In total, this exploration is a marvel: informative, persuasive, entertaining. Coulter’s contention is that the term “Religious Right” is useless in an objective sense (the Religious Right, she points out, is not an organization, has no members, and is not, if white Christians are the measure, a predictable voting bloc), yet powerful as a negative political weapon. (“Religious Right” generally serves not as a description but as a slur.) And because liberals, especially in the media, both hate and need the Religious Right, they are forever predicting the rise of its influence and the decline of its power. The innumerable contradictions and inconsistencies Coulter unearths on this subject are both comical and outrageous.

Near the conclusion of Slander, Ann Coulter lists a series of conservative ideas and accomplishments that are “changing the world,” among them: school vouchers, welfare reform, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and winning the Cold War. I would add one item to her list. Although I am not sure it is (yet) changing the world, conservatives also have accomplished this: In the past two decades or so, they have altered conventional wisdom—the general public perception—of what Coulter calls “the monopoly media” (television, newspapers, and magazines). What was once accepted as a trustworthy source of information is now largely viewed as a vehicle that serves the political ideology of journalists. This shift in perception is a huge and significant accomplishment, and it has been achieved by methods Coulter herself employs: the use of hard facts and numbers, the application of objective standards, and dogged repetition of the obvious. And this brings us to what Slander, for all its insights, overlooks.

So fixated is Ann Coulter on the product (the media) that she seems to have forgotten the role—and the power—of the consumer. “The wildly disproportionate percentage of liberals in the media is not an insignificant point,” she writes. “The media determine how the news will be served up, how the players are characterized, what news to report, and what news not to report. The same clichés, biases, and outright lies are constantly reinforced through the media sound chamber.”

But the assumption of “constant reinforcement” remains accurate only as long as the audience’s powers of discernment remain static. And these days, the discernment of news audiences is anything but static. News consumers are becoming more skeptical and sophisticated by the month—and they revel in their insider savvy. This shift in consumer awareness—which, again, is the result of years of conservative grunt work—does not change the fact of media bias. But it does, inevitably and without question, diminish the media’s power to influence an audience. The days of journalism as a priesthood are over—except, of course, in the minds of journalists. But that’s the point, isn’t it? They have become notorious for being behind the curve.

Enhanced consumer awareness also diminishes, as it turns out, the dominant media’s power to attract an audience. Many daily newspapers are experiencing a drop in readership. And ratings for the big three evening newscasts have for years been in steady decline. So the question becomes one of elementary (idea) marketing: If you can’t manage to draw an audience, how can you possibly influence an audience?

And then there is the issue of the political consumer. In Slander, Coulter seems most deeply offended by the Left’s mean-spirited and chicken-hearted reliance on invective and name-calling (although it should be pointed out that Coulter herself makes selective use of “dimwit,” “half-wit,” and “birdbrain”). She sees the insults—the knee-jerk hurling of “stupid” and “dumb”—as “part of the larger liberal tactic of refusing to engage ideas.”

In a chapter titled “The Joy of Arguing With Liberals: You’re Stupid!” Coulter exhaustively catalogs the many times and ways in which members of the elite media said or implied that Ronald Reagan was some version of “stupid.” She goes on to catalog, almost as exhaustively, the times and ways in which members of the elite media have said or implied that George W. Bush is some version of “stupid.” Her point is that “constant liberal browbeating demonstrably can persuade large numbers of people that Republicans are dumb, irrespective of cold, hard facts.” That is the beauty, she states, of controlling “all major sources of news dissemination.”

While I share Coulter’s indignation, I cannot share her conclusion. How successful could the Left’s Reagan-is-dumb propaganda have been if, as Coulter herself points out, Reagan won re-election by carrying 49 states, resulting in the largest electoral college landslide in history?

Ann Coulter is insulted by the intellectual arrogance of the Left’s refusal to engage ideas; and, of course, she is right. She is right again when she says the result of the Left’s tactics is nasty politics and despoiled political debate—all of which can be tiresome and dispiriting. But is it a threat? Can it really be a problem that some voters are being forced to become more resourceful and selective political consumers? Is it in any way ominous that other voters are turning a deaf ear to the yammering altogether and deciding simply to trust their own instincts? If this is what the Left’s retreat from genuine debate has wrought, I’ll take it. No, it isn’t pretty; but it does suggest a stubborn autonomy within the body politic.

The dominant media’s resistance over the years to objective reporting of conservative ideas, policies, and candidates has been neither enjoyable nor fair. But it has been useful. In order to get themselves heard, conservatives have combined energy with intellectual cogency, and they have maintained trust in that combination. With the media stacked against them, they have developed creative political strategies and have applied patience and perseverance to the execution of those strategies. They have seized opportunities where they could find them, and when they could not find them, they have created their own. And by all appearances, they have had a good time in the process.

Liberals, by contrast, have been ill-served by their free media ride. As a group, they have become intellectually lazy, politically sloppy, and morally indecisive. As Ann Coulter sums it up: “Bereft of winning issues, persuasive arguments, or real ideas, liberals are bitter.”

Bitter. Aside from its other negatives, bitterness is a real loser politically. How can you consistently attract voters when you are more obsessed with your opponents’ ideas than you are excited your own? How can you exhibit the joy of political and intellectual debate that a free country allows if you are consumed by the assumption that debate is beneath you and victory is no less than you deserve?

Bitter people don’t have any fun. Ann Coulter, on the other hand, does and in the process has written a consequential book. 
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Janet Scott Barlow is a regular contributor to Chronicles magazine and is the author of The Nonpatriotic President: A Survey of the Clinton Years (Chronicles Press).