(Ben Shapiro – Dailywire) On Tuesday night, Roseanne’s reboot premiered — and it blew up in the ratings. Fully 18.2 million Americans between the ages of 18-49 watched the show. It received a 5.1 rating. It was the best Tuesday night premier for ABC since 2006. Americans tuned in in shocking numbers.
Many conservatives are overjoyed at this — they see it as a cultural moment of great import, because Roseanne’s character is a Trump supporter. She shellacks Hillary on the show. Her sister, a purported Hillary supporter, couldn’t even bring herself to vote Hillary — she voted for Jill Stein.
Conservatives are celebrating because they believe that Roseanne is helping to cure the culture by depicting a Trump supporter as something other than a rube or an idiot. There’s some truth to this: Roseanne’s character is whip-smart and unwilling to take crap from anyone — she’s sort of a female mini-Trump in terms of personality.
But there’s something else going on in Roseanne that should disturb conservatives: the redefinition of Trump supporters as blue collar leftists rather than conservatives. Roseanne’s character is pro-gay-marriage, pro-abortion, feminist, and pro-transgenderism — and the implication is that she is a good person because of these views. The real difference between Trump voters and Hillary voters are economic in nature, not cultural.
This was the original concept of the Roseanne character. I interviewed Marcy Carsey, the woman behind the original Roseanne, for my book Primetime Propaganda. Carsey called herself a Democrat who grew up in an Eisenhower Republican household, and said that she understood Republicans, but that the show was written about working women: “A working-class heroine to represent the difficult lives that so many millions of women were leading.” Roseanne featured one of television’s earliest same-sex weddings, the title character considering abortion, the title character asking her virgin daughter to use birth control, her daughter Darlene using pot, speed, and acid, and the title character routinely and vulgarly describing genitalia.
Television hasn’t featured a respectful depiction of a typical Republican-voting woman in decades. And Roseanne isn’t it. Roseanne could just as easily have been a Bernie supporter as a Trump supporter, because she is a class heroine, not a cultural one — and the Left believes that the only path to unity between Right and Left is to cast out the cultural right. That’s what Roseanne does implicitly.