Time magazine has the latest on the quest for a liberal news network. Al Gore "has been devoting considerable time" to the "dream" of "creating a media enterprise that could challenge the dominance of conservative voices in cable television and talk radio":

Numerous sources in Hollywood and Washington tell Time that Gore has been quietly sounding out potential financial backers for a cable television network. Separately, Gore has helped arrange meetings between key Hollywood figures and a wealthy Chicago couple who have publicly announced plans to invest $10 million in a liberal radio network.

The obvious rejoinder is: What market would this network serve? After all, we already have an alphabet soup of liberal radio and TV networks: ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS. On the other side, all we have is a few very popular talk-radio shows, Fox and lately MSNBC--though one suspects the latter network's turn to the right will prove to be a temporary phenomenon, just like all its previous reinventions, unless the ratings improve very soon.

Yes, there are those who deny that the "mainstream" media are liberal, or even assert they tilt to the right--a laughable claim by our lights, but if there's an underserved market for unabashedly left-wing news and commentary, we can hardly begrudge Gore or other entrepreneurs from trying to meet it. We just doubt that such a market exists.

In the late 1980s we worked briefly for the Heritage Foundation, the Washington think tank best known for its aggressive marketing of conservative ideas. In those days we read lots of news articles about folks who hoped to establish a liberal counterpart to the Heritage Foundation. The other week we were in Washington and dropped in on Heritage, where a friend in the PR department told us that nothing's changed: Liberals are still trying to figure out the secret of Heritage's success and imitate it. Why haven't they been able to do it?

Here's why: Heritage was founded in the early 1970s, when liberalism reigned so supreme in American politics that the Democrats had dominated Capitol Hill almost continuously for 40 years. Like Fox News Channel today, Heritage owed its vitality in large part to its role as an alternative to the establishment. Liberal Democrats today, by contrast, still have an establishmentarian mindset, and one can't really blame them: Although the Republicans now hold the White House and both houses of Congress, the Dems are within striking distance of recapturing at least the Senate, and the GOP hasn't won a decisive victory in a presidential election since 1988. One good election, and the Democrats would be back in power, where they feel they rightfully belong. On the other hand, if the Republicans are en route to becoming America's undisputed majority party, it'll take a lot for Democrats accept their minority status--at the very least, a loss in the 2008 presidential election.

As a consequence of this uncertainty about their future, today's Democrats are intellectually stagnant. They are the conservative party--not in the ideological sense, but in the sense of being opposed to change: Leave Social Security alone. Don't cut taxes (but don't raise them either). Roe v. Wade is sacrosanct, and anyone who questions it is unqualified for the federal bench. Affirmative action? Defend it, don't end it. And on foreign policy, the top liberal priority is the maintenance of Cold War-era institutions and alliances. Only on a few fringe issues (gay rights comes to mind) can liberals and Democrats be said to have any sort of agenda other than the preservation of the status quo.

It's understandable that liberals are suffering from Heritage and Fox envy. But setting up Heritages and Foxes of their own will require more than imitating their techniques. It will take ideas, and it's a lot easier to come up with bold ideas when you have nothing to lose. The Democrats still have a lot to lose, and we probably won't see an intellectual revival on the left until they've lost it.