Nate Silver argues that the answer seems to be yes:
This might be the key passage of my interview with John Ziegler on Tuesday, for it is, in a nutshell, why conservatives don’t win elections anymore. It is not that conservatism generally permits less nuance than liberalism (in terms of political messaging, that is probably one of conservatism’s strengths). Rather, the key lies in the second passage that I highlighted. There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.
John Ziegler is a shining example of such a conservative. During my interview with him, Ziegler made absolutely no effort to persuade me about the veracity of any of his viewpoints. He simply asserted them — and then became frustrated, paranoid, or vulgar when I rebutted them.
Quite honestly, this shouldn’t be surprising, because it’s pretty much what you hear on a daily basis from the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, and Levin. Because their primary purpose is providing entertainment rather than providing information or thoughtful discussion, they all tend to follow the same pattern of repeating, with little theoretical or evidentiary support, the talking points of conservatism as they happen to be at the time. Those talking points can change on a dime — remember how quickly Rush Limbaugh’s utter disdain for John McCain during the Republican primaries turned to adulation once he won the nomination, only to turn back to disdain after he lost — with almost no recognition of the fact that the host may be contradicting themselves from one day to the next. All that matters is that they’re mindlessly repeating something, day after day, to which the audience can respond “Hell, yeah”
One could say much the same thing about one of Sarah Palin’s stump speeches during the campaign, but that’s just a recognition of the fact that the base of the Republican Party and the audience for conservative talk-radio are, increasingly, the same thing. It’s no surprise that something that works well in one medium would work well out on the campaign trail.
It’s easier to build an audience by serving up healthy chunks of red meat, generating faux outrage, and flaming the passions of a single minded audience than to persuade people towards your point of view.
The thing is, as November seems to have shown, you can’t win elections that way.
Now, its true that one sees much the same thing from liberal talk show hosts, and from the online liberal bloggers, but the Democratic Party seems to have had much better success containing the rabid-
