Even more insidious was the manner in which Phil would approach, and reproach, any member of his studio audience who dared question the ethos that permeated the show.
Far from trying to browbeat dissenters, Donahue employed an essentially theatrical approach made all the more effective by its subtlety; he was, in fact, nothing less than masterful in the sly use of the raised eyebrow, the rolling eyes, the imploring voice.
In short order his audience was trained to instinctively recognize those responses that pleased Donahue and those that triggered his facial contortions, and soon it was commonplace for sweet little old ladies in the studio to raise their hands and deliver themselves of the sort of New Age psychobabble guaranteed to warn Donahue’s liberal heart.
And thus was born on the Donahue show that peculiar sport of liberal one-upmanship that is now such a staple of television talk programs as audience members battle it out to see who can come off looking the most tolerant; of course, any discerning viewer watching at home knows — absolutely, positively knows — that those sentiments in no way reflect what the speakers are really thinking as they behold the representatives of whatever “alternative lifestyle” is being championed on that particular day.
However disingenuous the responses from the studio audience, they served Donahue’s purpose by strengthening the message of non-judgmental open-mindedness (to the point of empty-headedness) pushed so relentlessly on his show; even the most independent-minded viewer could not help but be influenced by the day-in, day-out exposure to the sight of nice, polite, salt-of-the-earth Americans genuflecting before people who in a saner, less politically correct time would have been scorned, without guilt, as freaks and misfits.
Politically Correct Before The Term Existed
Donahue’s enthusiasm for behavior once considered out of the mainstream was of a piece with his politics, and one need only consider the haste with which liberals like Donahue embraced a values-free rhetoric and an anti-American worldview to understand how and why mainstream liberalism lost its way.
Racism, specifically white racism, was one of Donahue’s consuming passions — a worthy concern to be sure, but Donahue assuaged his own feelings of racial guilt by routinely conjuring up a vision of a racist America so hellish and detached from reality that it no doubt prompted even such accomplished practitioners of the race hustle as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to snicker with contempt.
In the fevered recesses of Donahue’s mind, every problem afflicting African Americans was to be blamed, in one fashion or another, on white folk; as he saw it, the more a white person sincerely believed himself to be free of racist attitudes, the more of a racist he really was — as evidenced by his very failure to recognize the fact.
Absurd? Not to Donahue, whose sensitivity had been raised to such Alpine heights that he reveled in black hostility and actually seemed to glow in the presence of self-styled “racial awareness counselors” who would use their countless appearances on his show to heap calumny on white America — in terms that if used by whites against blacks would have immediately unleashed the canned outrage of the NAACP, the ACLU, the ADL, and all the rest of the nation’s “progressive” press release factories.
On matters of foreign policy and America’s place in the world, Donahue’s views can best be described as unreconstructed leftist; his scorn for the Pentagon was for years equaled only by his indulgence of the former Soviet Union.
Donahue’s trademark retort throughout the Seventies and Eighties to any mention of Soviet misbehavior or the need to maintain a strong American military was to shoot the camera a bemused look and mutter, in a tone oozing sarcasm, “Yeah, we know — the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming!”
