Trashing the People's Tribune
Topic: Decline of the West
I suppose we should be grateful that President Obama & Co. have taken a break from demolishing the nation’s economy to attack Rush Limbaugh. And the adolescent silliness of this onslaught—which magnifies the importance of Limbaugh while diminishing the stature of the Administration—has proved useful to the opposition in an unexpected way. From the various reactions of conservatives, we get a pretty good idea of who is and is not the genuine article.
I should begin by stipulating that I've never been a Rush Limbaugh fan. Some of the criticisms leveled against him—lowbrow coarseness, incendiary rhetoric, etc., etc.—though ludicrously exaggerated, do to some small extent resonate with me. In many ways, Limbaugh simply isn't my kind of conservative. Sometimes it's what he says, but mostly it's just the way he says it. On the rare occasions when I have a chance to listen to him, I generally enjoy the show. I tune out, though, with the feeling that enough is enough.
On the other hand, I understand and sympathize with Rush and his audience. For years he's been the standard bearer and public face of American conservatism—not the conservatism of intellectuals and pundits, but that of average, put-upon people who are sick of being hosed by the IRS and condescended to by this country’s elites. William F. Buckley, Jr., may have been the father of the modern conservative movement, but it was Limbaugh who became our tribune of the people. Over the years, his services to conservatism have been invaluable. Think tanks and journals of opinion are all very well, but without a strong dose of populism, the conservative movement is going nowhere.
For obvious reasons, progressives loathe and fear Limbaugh. Over the years they’ve made repeated attempts to destroy him. But Rush always comes roaring back. And I doubt that such criticisms from conservatives as we’ve seen in recent days from people like Kathleen Parker and David Frum will make much a dent in his armor either. But the mean-spiritedness and intellectual dishonesty of this friendly fire betray a kind of snotty elitism that bodes ill for conservatism.
As her recent Limbaugh-bashing column shows, Ms. Parker is basically a lightweight. Frum, on the other hand, is a consequential personage. By all accounts, the man is a serious conservative. How, then, to account for this attack on Limbaugh? Here’s a sample:
A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word—we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.
What is striking about the above passage is its nasty personal tone—given which, Frum’s criticism of Limbaugh as “cutting and sarcastic” strikes an unintentional note of comedy. But really, it’s easy to see why Kathleen Parker and David Frum dislike Limbaugh. They imagine that they own conservatism—that the “philosophy” of the thing is something to be handed down from on high. No doubt Frum in particular would protest that he imagines no such thing—but in his vicious personal criticism of Rush Limbaugh, Frum’s fear and loathing of conservative populism is clearly manifest.
The trouble with people like Kathleen Parker and David Frum—the flaw that keeps them from striking a balance between Buckley and Limbaugh—is their own unacknowledged preference for the elitism of the Left. No doubt they’d prefer conservative policies to those of the Obama Administration—but they wish such policies to be promulgated at the summit, preferably by some guy as charming as Barack. And Limbaugh’s audience? They should just shut up and let the grownups run things.
That’s no way to revitalize the conservative movement.
Posted by tmg110
at 6:39 AM EST