I was conflicted as I watched Rush Limbaugh address the CPAC convention. There were times when he got my adrenalin pumping and I wanted to stand and cheer. There was much in his speech with which I agreed. Then, his attack on John McCain and, without naming them by name, George Will, David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer brought me back to reality.
I suspect that if William F. Buckley, Jr. were alive today that Rush would denounce him and read him out of the conservative movement also. Buckley was the person most responsible for defining post World War II conservatism until Rush Limbaugh redefined it. Buckley and those around him like Russell Kirk. James Burnham, Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, L. Brent Bozell, and Whittaker Chambers were educated men and political theorist. They not only opposed something; they also stood for something. They made reasoned arguments. They challenged people to think.
Today we have Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter as leaders of the movement and their stock in trade is to insult, belittle, and rant. They don’t appeal to people’s reason but to their emotions. You don’t have to exercise your intellect to enjoy Rush Limbaugh. Much of the Limbaugh appeal is an appeal to class envy. He excels at pitting the beer and pretzel crowd against the wine and brie crowd. That is not ideology but class warfare. It should be beneath us. Limbaugh and Hannity even brag about the fact they do not have a college education as if too much education will corrupt you.
If we accept Limbaugh as the leader of the conservative movement, I fear we will become the movement of the peasants with pitchforks. We will become the movement of the stupid. We will have an angry and motivated but shirking base. I do not want to overstate my case against Limbaugh. I was once a fan. He made people unashamed to be conservative. He poked fun at liberal pretensions and I enjoyed it. He can be cleaver and entertaining. However, enough is enough already. He is the conservative’s equivalent of the liberal’s Michael Moore or Al Franken. He is preaching to the choir. He is rousing the rabble. The conservative movement does not need more Limbaugh; we need another William F. Buckley.
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I have issues with associating Rush to the rest of the talk radio crowd.
ReplyDeleteAs a loyal Rush listener, I can honestly say that I believe he is much smarter, more conservative, and a better arguer than Hannity, O'reilly, and especially savage. Rush occasionally will go off the deep end, but a good solid majority of the time, he is bright, on his toes, and most importantly, RIGHT.
I'm learning that most people who hate Rush don't actually listen to him, but base their opinion of him on what they have heard on the news. and by doing that they are buying into the notion that the media are right, which means in essence that we should care what the left thinks about us.
Rush and many conservatives share a belief that liberals are the enemy of America, because what they want is so obviously wrong. this may seem extreme, but so is politics. The only way that conservatives can win is for liberals to lose. no claim of "bipartisanship" is going to change that.
As a liberal who is committed to informed democracy, I believe our country would be better off with more pundits, on both the left and the right like William F. Buckley, and less with Rush and his counterparts on the left.
ReplyDeleteGood post, disgruntled guy. I agree with you. Limbaugh's behavior, demeanor, bluster, and bull has totally turned me off. Additionally, one can tire of his endless "stretching" out of a single point just to fill a time slot in his program. Endless? No. The END period.
ReplyDeletePart I:
ReplyDelete"Much in his speech with which [you] agreed"? And yet you imagine him denouncing Buckley? Before you go too far in your imagining Rush as being divisive you need to go back and look at the history of the conservative icons you noted. Kirk, Kendall, and Bozell were quite divisive in their day and were very much conservative purists.
And by lumping Rush with Savage, Hannity, and Coulter I believe you seriously underestimate Rush. Hannity's "debating" consists in making the same childish points over and over, and both he and Coulter engage their opponents like sixth-graders reduced to name-calling, and Savage is, well, a savage. Limbaugh, on the other hand, can carry his intellectual weight. I recall hearing a 30-minute monologue on the subject of same-sex marriage several years ago which none of the others can compare to. And that, I believe, captures the issue as Rob put it so well above, that most of Rush's critics don't even listen to him. IMO, most of them are simply upset that he has such a large audience.
As to Rush's pointing out that he doesn't have a college education I don't recall ever hearing him belittle those who do. But surely he is to be commended for having the influence he does without one. I think his point is rather that wisdom doesn't necessarily come with degrees. See Angelo Codevilla's recent American Spectator essay on "The Ruling Class".
I know you have tired at his poking fun at liberal pretensions but those pretensions persist and the dangers of the liberal vision remain and grow more threatening, actually, with the White House being occupied by a radical socialist. Rush sought to warn us that we would ill serve ourselves as Republicans by nominating John "cap and trade, immigration 'reform', campaign speech censor" McCain. What did Republicans get in the White House instead? Cap and trade, immigration "reform", and campaign speech censor Obama. Limbaugh fervently tried to help conservatives see that voters needed a choice in the election. And that is what his followers in the Tea Party and his fans such as Sen. Jim Demint (head of the Senate Conservative Victory Fund) seek to give us, conservatives in office, not milquetoasts with an "R" after their name.
And, by the way, if you believe that Rush would have denounced WFB you obviously haven't listened to Rush much. Rush has frequently stated the debt that conservatives owe to Buckley and often touted Buckley's National Review as a fount of conservative wisdom. And Buckley liked Limbaugh, as pointed out by Sam Tannehaus, biographer of Buckley (http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/qa-with-sam-tanenhaus-on-william-f-buckley/). It is therefore fitting that Limbaugh was the recipient of the Media Research Center's first annual William F. Buckley, Jr. Award for Media Excellence. In his comments on receiving that award he reminded the audience that "There are many godfathers of this movement. You could say Goldwater and Reagan, but if Bill Buckley hadn't done what he did, none of the rest of this would have happened." That certainly doesn't read to me like Limbaugh denouncing Buckley to me. You might also listen to an interview between them as when WFB interviewed Limbaugh on Firing Line.
Part I:
ReplyDelete"Much in his speech with which [you] agreed"? And yet you imagine him denouncing Buckley? Before you go too far in your imagining Rush as being divisive you need to go back and look at the history of the conservative icons you noted. Kirk, Kendall, and Bozell were quite divisive in their day and were very much conservative purists.
And by lumping Rush with Savage, Hannity, and Coulter I believe you seriously underestimate Rush. Hannity's "debating" consists in making the same childish points over and over, and both he and Coulter engage their opponents like sixth-graders reduced to name-calling, and Savage is, well, a savage. Limbaugh, on the other hand, can carry his intellectual weight. I recall hearing a 30-minute monologue on the subject of same-sex marriage several years ago which none of the others can compare to. And that, I believe, captures the issue as Rob put it so well above, that most of Rush's critics don't even listen to him. IMO, most of them are simply upset that he has such a large audience.
As to Rush's pointing out that he doesn't have a college education I don't recall ever hearing him belittle those who do. But surely he is to be commended for having the influence he does without one. I think his point is rather that wisdom doesn't necessarily come with degrees. See Angelo Codevilla's recent American Spectator essay on "The Ruling Class".
I know you have tired at his poking fun at liberal pretensions but those pretensions persist and the dangers of the liberal vision remain and grow more threatening, actually, with the White House being occupied by a radical socialist. Rush sought to warn us that we would ill serve ourselves as Republicans by nominating John "cap and trade, immigration 'reform', campaign speech censor" McCain. What did Republicans get in the White House instead? Cap and trade, immigration "reform", and campaign speech censor Obama. Limbaugh fervently tried to help conservatives see that voters needed a choice in the election. And that is what his followers in the Tea Party and his fans such as Sen. Jim Demint (head of the Senate Conservative Victory Fund) seek to give us, conservatives in office, not milquetoasts with an "R" after their name.
And, by the way, if you believe that Rush would have denounced WFB you obviously haven't listened to Rush much. Rush has frequently stated the debt that conservatives owe to Buckley and often touted Buckley's National Review as a fount of conservative wisdom. And Buckley liked Limbaugh, as pointed out by Sam Tannehaus, biographer of Buckley (http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/qa-with-sam-tanenhaus-on-william-f-buckley/). It is therefore fitting that Limbaugh was the recipient of the Media Research Center's first annual William F. Buckley, Jr. Award for Media Excellence. In his comments on receiving that award he reminded the audience that "There are many godfathers of this movement. You could say Goldwater and Reagan, but if Bill Buckley hadn't done what he did, none of the rest of this would have happened." That certainly doesn't read to me like Limbaugh denouncing Buckley to me. You might also listen to an interview between them as when WFB interviewed Limbaugh on Firing Line.
Part I:
ReplyDelete"Much in his speech with which [you] agreed"? And yet you imagine him denouncing Buckley? Before you go too far in your imagining Rush as being divisive you need to go back and look at the history of the conservative icons you noted. Kirk, Kendall, and Bozell were quite divisive in their day and were very much conservative purists.
And by lumping Rush with Savage, Hannity, and Coulter I believe you seriously underestimate Rush. Hannity's "debating" consists in making the same childish points over and over, and both he and Coulter engage their opponents like sixth-graders reduced to name-calling, and Savage is, well, a savage. Limbaugh, on the other hand, can carry his intellectual weight. I recall hearing a 30-minute monologue on the subject of same-sex marriage several years ago which none of the others can compare to. And that, I believe, captures the issue as Rob put it so well above, that most of Rush's critics don't even listen to him. IMO, most of them are simply upset that he has such a large audience.
As to Rush's pointing out that he doesn't have a college education I don't recall ever hearing him belittle those who do. But surely he is to be commended for having the influence he does without one. I think his point is rather that wisdom doesn't necessarily come with degrees. See Angelo Codevilla's recent American Spectator essay on "The Ruling Class".
I know you have tired at his poking fun at liberal pretensions but those pretensions persist and the dangers of the liberal vision remain and grow more threatening, actually, with the White House being occupied by a radical socialist. Rush sought to warn us that we would ill serve ourselves as Republicans by nominating John "cap and trade, immigration 'reform', campaign speech censor" McCain. What did Republicans get in the White House instead? Cap and trade, immigration "reform", and campaign speech censor Obama. Limbaugh fervently tried to help conservatives see that voters needed a choice in the election. And that is what his followers in the Tea Party and his fans such as Sen. Jim Demint (head of the Senate Conservative Victory Fund) seek to give us, conservatives in office, not milquetoasts with an "R" after their name.
And, by the way, if you believe that Rush would have denounced WFB you obviously haven't listened to Rush much. Rush has frequently stated the debt that conservatives owe to Buckley and often touted Buckley's National Review as a fount of conservative wisdom. And Buckley liked Limbaugh, as pointed out by Sam Tannehaus, biographer of Buckley (http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/qa-with-sam-tanenhaus-on-william-f-buckley/). It is therefore fitting that Limbaugh was the recipient of the Media Research Center's first annual William F. Buckley, Jr. Award for Media Excellence. In his comments on receiving that award he reminded the audience that "There are many godfathers of this movement. You could say Goldwater and Reagan, but if Bill Buckley hadn't done what he did, none of the rest of this would have happened." That certainly doesn't read to me like Limbaugh denouncing Buckley to me. You might also listen to an interview between them as when WFB interviewed Limbaugh on Firing Line.
Part II:
ReplyDeleteOf course the two of them were different. Buckley certainly had more elegance; no serious Rush fan would dispute that. But they were both conservative cheerleaders and uniters of the best kind, in seeking to unite true conservatives. Buckley was a fusionist to the core, bringing together traditionalists, libertarians, Cold Warriors, etc. But he also knew who didn't fit when he read Ayn Rand and the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement.
Now, if by lumping Michael Moore and Al Franken with Limbaugh you would rather substitute McCain, Nixon, or Bush 41 or 43 for Limbaugh I think you would find most conservatives understanding their own principles far better than that.
'Sorry 'bout that. I tried a couple of times that I didn't think it went through.
ReplyDelete