The Politics of Rush Limbaugh: The gloomy people vs. the happy people

A writer's best ideas or thoughts are based on inspiration and more often than not, that inspiration comes from other people. Some may be loath to give credit where credit is due but I am not.

So this piece is brought to you by blogger Daniel Larison (www.larison.org) courtesy of fellow blogger Clark Stooksbury (www.clarkstooksbury.blogspot.com)

Limbaugh it seemed, during one of his interminable rants, did actually say something profound or at least gave some insight on his primitive political philosophy. And no, this has nothing to do with Michael J. Fox. This actually occurred during a broadcast just after the Mark Foley scandal broke. To quote El Rushbo:

"You know, Republicans are said to be racist and sexist and bigoted and homophobic. The liberal policy, liberal philosophy is to assume bad behavior, bad human behavior. They assume it, they have a condescending look toward people in general. It’s what makes them liberals. People are incapable of doing the right thing without liberals’ guidance, people are incapable of making the right decisions to get ahead in life without liberal guidance, they’re incapable of earning a decent living. . . Liberalism assumes bad human behavior and then coddles it as imperfect. After they coddle imperfect, bad human behavior, they are able to say those who judge imperfections in people and come out strong for right and wrong, the simplistic black and white, good versus evil, people who come out for law and order and so forth, they’re the sinners, because none of us are perfect. The liberals understand this, they coddle the imperfections, they create victims out of those who are imperfect, turning them into a cause celebre, and blaming the right, these Draconian, intolerant, inflexible people who judge others while ignoring their own foibles."

Such a statement is an interesting one coming from someone heading up the EIB Network's Advance Institute of Conservative Studies. For any instructor at such an institute would know that the early philosophy of the conservative movement had very much to do with man's imperfections, especially given the many Catholics who were conservative intellectuals back in the 1950s and 60s. Indeed, Larison's initial take on this is as one just dumbstruck at Limbaugh's idiocy, until he stumbles onto the answer to the politics of Rush Limbaugh:

"It will hardly come as news to anyone here that Limbaugh’s conservatism was never, ever all that terribly similar to Burkean-Kirkian conservatism. It was originally, back in the old days of the early ’90s, a rehashed low-tax, pro-market conservatism that was good on mocking bureaucratic absurdity and Clintonian pretenses but basically superficial and empty. It could even occasionally border on a sort of populism given its medium on the radio, but as Limbaugh became more successful he increasingly embraced the establishment GOP views on everything and frequently became their willing propagandist in a way that was not the case when he began. Once the debate over Iraq started, he was no longer funny and became something like a WSJ-programmed robot, reaching a particularly low point when he lent his name and popularity to the lie that Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague to help solidify the fraudulent claim in the public mind that Al Qaeda and Iraq were working together.

For a time, to the extent that he had a touchstone, it was Reagan, which meant that conservatism was made up of Reagan (and more broadly, Republican) apologetics in the same way that it has become Bush apologetics in the new generation. There was always the sickening emphasis on optimism as the core of this “conservatism” and Limbaugh never tired of reiterating (and I should know, since I listened to him often when I was growing up) that Reagan was successful because he was optimistic and that Americans love optimists (this may unfortunately be true), and liberals are tiresome and oppressive because they are not. It was always a struggle of the happy people vs. the gloomy people, which somehow translates into believing that the gloomy people think that man is flawed–because, well, that is a gloomy thing to think. If man is fallen, flawed and imperfect, optimism doesn’t seem very reasonable, but if he is perfectible and can make progress towards that perfectibility optimism is the essence of common sense.

In this sense, there is nothing surprising about Limbaugh’s embrace of the old liberal conceit that everyone is basically OK. He would almost have to think that if we just create the right conditions (for a right-liberal, this typically ought to mean less government regulation) everything in society will work out just fine. It is perhaps why Limbaugh has had no difficulty switching gears and getting on board with the Iraq project and the “freedom agenda,” since he would have no strong, principled reasons to object to social engineering as such–he just doesn’t want social engineering run by Democrats–since he must think that injustices and imperfections in the world are the result of having the wrong kinds of structures and environments around us rather than permanent features of life here below. Give people “freedom,” make the environment optimal for “opportunity” and stand back! And throw in the occasional war or two for the sake of American greatness and the glory of the superpower. That seems to sum up Limbaugh’s worldview pretty well. It says volumes about modern “conservatives” that millions of them listen to this man daily and take what he says as some kind of wisdom; it says plenty about the vapidity of popular conservatism if Limbaugh is one of its representatives."

Thus the subtitle of this article: "The Gloomy People vs. the Happy People." Again, thanks both to Mr. Larison and Mr. Stooksbury for the inspiration.

Limbaugh once admitted during a broadcast that he wore a "WIN" button back in the 1970s. "WIN" stood for "Whip Inflation Now," which was Gerald Ford's attempt to solve the inflation problem of that time through the power of positive thinking. So you can see why "optimism" as an ideology has an appeal to Limbaugh. The problem is, there's no consistency to it. If we were living during the 1930s, Limbaugh would be on side of the Democrats and the New Dealers, because they were the ones back then who were "optimistic." In fact, it may not be a stretch that Limbaugh sees himself as a latter day FDR and his radio broadcasts a modern day version of the "Fireside Chats," dishing out the daily does of "optimism" to the American people. Meanwhile, the gloomy people were the conservatives and the Republicans and they had a lot to be gloomy about. If they were a small manufacturer, they were gloomy that their plant was going to be forcibly unionized. If they were a banker, they were gloomy about the fact that they were now going to be regulated by the federal government and have to pay a progressive tax rate of 90 percent. If they were religious, they were despairing at the march of Communism and if they were an intellectual, they despaired over never seeing the old republican form of government ever again. Yep, not exactly the fun-bunch here.

Conservatism's association with gloom lasted until the 1970s when new groups began to challenge it. One such group was the "fusionists," who believed that the American people were essentially good but were being turned bad by the government. Then there were the neoconservatives, many of them former Leftists, Socialists and New Dealers themselves who brought their 1930s cheer with them along with their faith in the "masses." And along with all of them came the politicians like Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp, who were tired of conservatives being portrayed as bunch of Ebenezer Scrooges or angry demagogues and were determined to put a 1970s-style happy face on conservatism.

What allowed the "optimists" to take control of the conservative movement back when it really was a movement was a philosophic vacuum that led to electoral success. The 1970s liberals began a downcast turn. They were becoming the gloomy people. It all began with the savage reaction from the chic New Left to Hubert Humphrey's "Politics of Joy," and has gone downhill ever since. Liberalism became identified with gloomy environmental forecasts about the destruction of the Earth, gloominess about nuclear war, gloominess about the economy and oil shocks and the increasing shrillness and divisiveness of the civil right movement. All of this was encapsulated in Jimmy Carter's singular "malaise" speech in 1979, which ultimately did much to undermine his presidency and liberalism in general because it gave an opening to Reagan and his Republicans charging that the Democrats and liberals had basically gave up on the American People and the American Dream and wished to live in a world of "limits." Since "limitation" was not something in the U.S. lexicon, whether as a pioneer, a homesteader or a Navy pilot, it was easy for Republicans to claim the "optimistic" label and carry it through 1984's "Morning in America," Reagan re-election campaign until the disastrous GOP convention of 1992, where the party lost the optimistic label and became not the gloomy party but the "angry party" of Clinton-haters in 1990s. That was until George Bush II's "compassionate conservatism," gave the GOP an optimistic sheen once again in 2000. Since Rush Limbaugh came to political consciousness in the late 1970s and early 1980s after his FM "stoned" age, it was natural for him to gravitate towards the happy people and thus, conservatism and the GOP. They were happy and the other side wasn't. It's that simple.

The splits within the Republican Party and within conservatism after Reagan left the scene in 1988 falls down in large part on an axis of optimist vs. gloomy, or, maybe a better term, optimist vs. realist. Gloom, for obvious reasons, is not much of a seller politically or, one would suppose, as a talk-radio radio format. The liberals can have the monopoly on gloom. But the problem the optimists have, as once described by David Frum during his better Dead Right days, is that "it prefers to avoid thinking hard about anything unpleasant." To think about anything unpleasant means being gloomy, not happy. This is why, I think, not much planning or thought was put into what a postwar Iraq would be like because the optimists naturally assumed Iraqis would welcome the U.S. liberation of their country with candy and flowers and thus all would be well after the war was over. No siren songs of warning were heeded because that would be "gloomy" thinking and that's not the way conservatives think. They think happy thoughts. And if you extend that logic even further, you can see why there was a slow federal response to Katrina, why today's so-called conservatives ignore the budget deficit and the growth of big government or the ill-affects of illegal immigration and the loss of the U.S. manufacturing base. All not happy subjects and therefore not discussed. Remember, only happy thoughts now.

So the politics of Rush Limbaugh, it seems, has nothing to do with any kind of "Burkean/Kirkian" conservatism, but a chorus of the song "Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy."

---Sean Scallon