In the American Enterprise magazine, Kelly Jane Torrance asks, "Will 2005 be seen as a watershed year for conservative books?"

It certainly looks like it. And not just because conservatives seem to have beaten liberals in sales (although liberals did very well, at least when it comes to the most overtly political books).

Amazon.com has posted a list of the Top 50 bestselling books of the year. At Number 21 is Mark Levin’s Men In Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America. Two places down is The FairTax Book by syndicated radio host Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder (R-GA).

Liberal books—by which I mean polemics, as it’s probably the case that most of the books on the list, like novels, were written by liberals—didn’t fare so well. In fact, the highest one on the list was Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It at Number 13. But the book, as noted in the subtitle, takes liberals to task almost as much as it does conservatives.

100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken Is #37) by Bernard Goldberg, author of the bestselling Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, made the cut, at Number 27. But Al Franken’s own The Truth (with jokes) didn’t.

How did these books sell so well? After all, conservative books weren’t getting glowing reviews in the New York Times or the Washington Post. The authors of The FairTax Book, for example, advocate replacing income taxes with a national sales tax. The New York Times reviewer declared, “No reputable economist of any political stripe would support it.” But his very next sentence was puzzling: “The honest truth is that replacing the current tax system with any system that raises the same amount of revenue (as Boortz and Linder claim their plan does) may make us better off, but only by redirecting our resources away from dealing with complex filing requirements and improving our incentives to work, save and innovate—not by creating the kind of free-lunch miracle suggested here.” Sounds pretty good to me—but I guess I’m not a “reputable economist.”

The New York Times didn’t even review Mark Levin’s Men In Black. But books like these found an audience anyway. By 2005, conservatives had learned to market their ideas without having to rely on the mainstream press that historically hasn’t been sympathetic. Regnery, the conservative publisher of Men In Black, has created bestsellers primarily by preaching to the choir. The company’s public relations firm markets directly to conservatives through talk radio and television hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity. It worked for Men In Black and found particular success before last year’s election with the influential Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.

The New York Times itself took notice. The annual Year in Ideas issue of the Magazine declared that “Conservative Blogs are More Effective.” Writer Michael Crowley of The New Republic says “what really makes conservatives effective is their pre-existing media infrastructure, composed of local and national talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, the FOX News Channel and sensationalist say-anything outlets like the Drudge Report—all of which are quick to pass on the latest tidbit from the blogosphere.” It’s this same network that has made books by, for example, Michelle Malkin, so successful—and it doesn’t hurt that she has her own blog as well.

As Patrick Ruffini noted this past February, during the astonishingly low-rated Oscars broadcast:

Liberals get all pissy when conservatives decide to tune out institutions that don't represent them and create new ones -- just look at the sneering at "Faux News" and Rush and homeschooling and values voters. In Hollywood as in mainstream media, there is a price to be paid when an institution decides to leverage its prestige to push a political position where none is warranted; it's a price that is paid in viewership, influence, and profit -- in this case, a 30% falloff in viewers.

What's curious is that shortly after 9/11, the left began copying these alternative networks with an infrastructure of their own, launching Air America to compete with Rush Limbaugh, Al Gore's Current television network as a sort of alternative to Fox, and so on.

At some point, it must be puzzling to the boys in the Manhattan skyscrapers why they can't please either side: the conservatives whom they tried to shut out, and the modern left, to whom the mainstream media isn't nearly leftwing enough.

The traditional components of the MSM will soldier on for quite some time of course--but it must seem strange to no longer always be able to control the arguments--or introduce all of the new ideas.