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The Rush Impediment
The most frustrating argument is the one you agree with but is made badly. With the death yesterday of Rush Limbaugh, NRO’s Michael Brendan Dougherty reflected on the division between the Rush Limbaugh-wing of conservatism and Roger Scruton-wing; and how they will always have an uneasy alliance. He also laments, “If anything, considering the place of Rush Limbaugh in his nation’s political life is to realize that conservatism has been late to develop a voice that cuts in somewhere between its aloof intellectuals and aggro broadcasters. Conservatism is still searching for a middlebrow voice.” Alas, he fails to see his own role in finding the middlebrow voice, and blames Rush Limbaugh for the failings of institutional conservatism, Michael Brendan Dougherty very much included. Rush Limbaugh fulfilled a specific role in conservatism, and he fulfilled it very well. Scruton, likewise, fulfilled a specific role, and did so very well. Leftists are well aware of the idea of “Diversity of Tactics,” and letting different people use their talents in different ways to get effect. The failure on the right was of those who thought there was only one way to do things -and refused to adapt either to the success of Limbaugh, the critiques of Scruton, or the manifest failures of conservatism.
I came to Rush when I was a kid. I think I was home sick, or it was a weekday holiday -but I remember my Mom vacuuming and listening to Rush on the radio. I was already trending pretty conservative as it was, but it was the first time I remember hearing a conservative voice in media. As I got older, I recorded his shows to listen to when I got home. When I was in college, I planned my road trips home for the 11-2 slot so that I could listen to his show. In grad school, the best part of my cross-country drives was the Rush Limbaugh show.
I also remember when I stopped listening to him. It was a number of years after 9/11, it must have been between 2007 and 2012, as I was working on my Ph.D. at the time. He was reading an excerpt from a news story looking back at the attempts to track Al Quaeda, a subject I happened to know something about. The news story quoted FBI agents angry that, when they needed anti-terrorism experts, they were given forensic accountants -and Limbaugh ripped into the idiots at the Justice Department who were more interested in money laundering than terrorism.
The thing is: the most successful anti-terrorism program from the Bush years was the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. That is, the FBI guys were completely clueless that the way you find terrorist leaders is to track their money. And Limbaugh didn’t know enough to recognize the FBI were the fools in this story. I remember being so annoyed at this, I turned the show off.
I didn’t stop listening all at once. I would turn the show on, and he would talk about a topic I knew, but do so with such a surface level of understanding that he would end up being actively counterproductive to conservative ends. He’d end up arguing positions that liberals would prefer, or he’d argue for doing nothing while a particular problem festered, or not revising programs that were clearly failing. He was a fairly good barometer of where uninformed conservative opinion was at a time when we really needed conservatives to understand how the government worked, what it did, and how to use it. In short -he wasn’t the policy wonk we needed.
With age and time, I realized this was because Limbaugh’s job wasn’t to be a policy wonk. Don’t get me wrong, I’d have preferred him to have a deeper understanding of many of the topics he discussed, and I ultimately found him unlistenable as the Obama years wore on -but it is actually really hard to be a policy wonk on every topic, and Limbaugh was doing 3 hours of media criticism a day. Not knowing the intricacies of every policy was just going to happen.
His real value, as a thousand people have pointed out, was that he was on the air, every day, voicing conservative opinion. Thousands of people who would have drifted left in college heard him on the radio and were steeled to stay conservative a little longer. Thousands of people who didn’t have strong feelings about politics, but leaned conservative, became reliable conservatives rather than drifting left because they heard his voice on the radio.
By the time I was finishing my Ph.D., I couldn’t listen to Rush because I wasn’t his audience. I was looking for the conservative movement’s technical and detailed conversation -not general public opinion. And you know what? I never found it. I found bits and pieces -a think tank talk here, a conference presentation there, a book every once in a while. But sustained, expert knowledge on a particular policy topic? I think I heard Avik Roy talk about healthcare once on the Ricochet podcast, and I think he got laughed out of the room for suggesting that conservatives should consider universal healthcare a good thing to pursue -but that we should try to pursue by non-state means.
Part of the blame here falls on Limbaugh. As the great popularizer and indicator of conservative opinion, too many people heard “universal healthcare,” automatically assumed it meant what Limbaugh meant when he said “universal healthcare” and “socialism,” and our experts could barely get a hearing on any manner of potential healthcare reforms. This blew up in our faces quite spectacularly in 2017 when, having gotten the trifecta, the Right could not consolidate around any particular reforms, and the ObamaCare repeal failed. And yeah -some of the blame falls on Limbaugh for popularizing a species of Conservatism that simply doesn’t know anything about policy.
But only part.
I’m reminded of the author of Hebrews, who wrote:
11 About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. 12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, 13 for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. 14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.
The conservative movement of Rush Limbaugh was subsisting on milk. But Limbaugh is an evangelist and an encourager, not a prophet or a pastor. The failure of the conservative movement was in not having people at the ready to take the new conservatives attracted by Limbaugh and actually teach them how conservative policy, politics, and activism works. And the supposed flagship of that enterprise was National Review.
What did National Review, as exemplified by Michael Brendan Dougherty think was most important to do? To not associate with the new uncouths. Notably, Dougherty admits he wasn’t shunning them for anything they actually did, but because he had a caricature in his mind, one produced by conservatism’s enemies. His reason for having to get over Limbaugh wasn’t because Limbaugh’s oversimplified lectures were an impediment to real activism -it was because Dougherty felt dirty having to stand up to liberals who insulted dittoheads. Dougherty castigates Rush listeners for thinking Scruton was too deferential in the same paragraph he admits that the bare minimum of “check with your friends before believing the accusations of their enemies” was apparently too much work for him.
And so with the passing of Rush, I agree with Dougherty -it is a shame that conservatism was never able to capitalize on the EIB network’s success. But this wasn’t Limbaugh’s fault. Limbaugh did all he was expected and able to do. It was the fault of those, like Dougherty, who thought it was far more important to keep themselves in mainstream polite society than actually exploit the successes of the hoi polloi.
Dougherty’s argument is a more fitting eulogy for his own work.
Published in General
Amen.
RUsh should have been the gateway drug, and then the wonks could do the hard part of education. But the harsh reality is, they would rather not be ruled by the first 5000 people in the Topeka phone book, but by Harvard and Yale Trained elites .
Sabrdance,
Thanks, I think this is one of the most profound pieces on one of the most important pragmatical questions of the day for the American Republic–how can the Americans, the conservative liberal movement, organize itself to succeed–that I’ve ever seen on Ricochet.
I hope that you write more, and that you join the weekly calls on Monday nights, where we are technologically more free to communicate ideas, in one way. Roundtrip time.
This is a good piece, but I think you’re asking for something impossible. Conservatives, almost by definition, are not people with a particular talent for either politics or activism. Conservatives aren’t joiners. They’re curmudgeons. They’re pigheaded. They’re hard to corral. It’s precisely these traits which keep them from jumping on whatever bandwagons the left summons at any given moment, but these traits have a cost, and that cost is . . . well, a failure to take the necessary steps to acquire and exercise bona fide political power.
Rush provided one form of entertainment for one audience. People like Michael Brendan Dougherty provide a different form of entertainment for a different audience. But the notion that the entire right can be knit into some grand political project — something akin to the decades-long takeover of high society by the left — is a pipe dream. It’s just not in the right’s nature.
I would put it as a military/sports analogy: Rush was the assault against the leftwing propaganda, pointing out inaccuracies, contradictions, and counterproductive dogma. He was able to penetrate the surface by ridicule and hyperbole. Just as a penetrating assault against an opposing force cannot have lasting success unless there is also an exploiting force able to take advantage of the opening, conservatives needed a following exploitation to secure the gains. Or, if you prefer football, it doesn’t do much if the line opens a hole unless there is a good running back to follow through. To expand on that, if running backs etc are contemptuous of mere linemen, they will never deign to recognize their contributions. That our “elites” do not want to associate (or be associated with) with the common people is a fatal flaw in a political party. The great historical fusion of Libertarian, National Defense, Religious, and Economic “conservatives” was notably only a fusion of the respective elites among themselves. They were just as susceptible to the for-their-own-good flavor of “leadership” as the leftwing; they were unable to evangelize to the common folk they disdained.
Why is it that leftism is not fully discredited by now? I have become cynical enough to think that the alleged “leaders” of the “right” actually prefer the comfort of visible and ineffective token opposition among the social circle they are permitted to join — on condition of proper behavior, of course.
I am sympathetic to your point, if we focus on the way things are. But I know from facts that you are wrong about how things could be, under competent conservative leadership. Right here on Ricochet, I have seen more than one potential leader of a winning Conservative movement. I won’t embarrass them.
WFB was the very definition of a conservative but he was the consummate joiner: “I vote for the most conservative candidate who has a chance of winning.”
Reagan was the very definition(2) of a conservative, and he was a great joiner/leader.
That’s a good article even though I have no idea who Michael Brendan Dougherty is. The name sounds vaguely familiar, but I don’t associate it with anything, left or right.
Good analogy. Someone just yesterday posted an article about how our running backs can start hitting the hole. Grass roots activism in Republican politics.
He writes for National Review. Amusingly enough, he’s one of the NR writers most sympathetic to Trump-style populist conservatism . . . but he’s not sympathetic to Trump, which is why he rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
He wants a “respectable” populism. But can populism be “respectable”? That’s the million-dollar question.
No. PM me for where to send the million.
No, populism can’t be respectable. We have nothing to say about that–no control over it. Populism can be conservative and Constitutional.
Conservative intellectuals can certainly respect pro-American populists. Americans aren’t Americans unless they are pragmatists, and don’t love America just as it is.
Without Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty, the abstract ideas of cousin John Adams, and Madison would just be words on paper.
Pro-American populists could certainly respect Conservative intellectuals, if the latter were just a bit less isolated and obnoxious.
Your ark with Rush pretty much paralleled my arc with Sean Hannity. Sean’s last radio assignment was here in Atlanta. He left here and went to New York to work with Fox News. His talkshow here in Atlanta was always reasonable, he was open to all comers, even those that didn’t agree with him, and he was polite. I could take him on Fox as long as he had a counterbalance. I thought that the old Hannity and Colmes show was pretty good. Alan Colmes wasn’t exactly the best foil for Hannity but he did OK. Around 2008 I began to feel that Hannity was just too blunt and had a little or no feel for the nuance of some of the policy issues, like immigration, that he was pounding on the desk about. It’s probably been 12 years since I’ve seen a complete Sean Hannity show in the end.
Ditto
I don’t recall Rush explicating legislation. I do recall him accurately predicting the political games Democrats would play to gain advantage over Republicans. Rush was a fair middle ground between Trump and McConnell. He was more focused on the competition of narratives than on negotiation of the ever fewer interests Democrats and Republicans share.
We need both wonks and populists. Unfortunately, they tend to disagree on estimation of problems, priorities, acceptable tradeoffs, and whom to trust. One wonders if McConnell and Cruz would have passed more legislation than McConnell and Trump, for all they share.
I think the biggest failing of the conservative movement was the rise of the professional pundit. You need to keep grounded in reality, with some connection to normal people, or you start to share your neighbor’s dislike of conservative riffraff.
Right now, if you are a conservative, there’s not a lot of trust for the supposed intellectual wing, thanks to them often hating the popular wing.
The second generation professional pu dits were not a great thing.
Its almost like thomas sowell wrote a book about it.
That cuts both ways.
The populist wing openly despises the intellectual wing, and you can see this in the OP and in the comments where there are already multiple snipes about “cocktail parties” and other accusations of “isolation” or cultural separation. Frankly, that’s just another form of snobbery – populist snobs are still snobs, and whinging about “cocktail parties” year after year sounds less and less like a put-down, and more and more like actual envy. Just as you suggest intellectuals need to stay grounded, the populists need to likewise connect with the wonks and get into the policy and cultural weeds with them. Each side has valid concerns, worries, and policy ideas, and each side has gaping blind spots and a tendency to be tone-deaf. Sometimes the populists get their dander up for good reason, but other times in ignorance, just as the wonks will run with a bad policy fad for a while, until checked by hard reality.
The OP cites a key example in looking at how Rush railed against anti-terrorism efforts in the last 2000s, but did so in ignorance – that sort of railing on Rush’s part was actually damaging to the FBI efforts because it eroded popular trust in law enforcement when it was actually doing something correctly. You see a similar phenomenon today (magnified into a national hysteria) with the “defund the police” nonsense on the Left, where their populists absolutely gutted support for police work with disastrous results – the Left’s intellectuals, terrified by their populists, absolutely rolled over on that one, instead of doing their job and slamming the brakes.
Class envy isn’t an exclusive bailiwick of the Left, nor is rampant suspicion and accusation that other classes hate one’s own. But it isn’t healthy, and if you suspect your group is hated by others, perhaps you should examine whether your group is actually contributing to the divide by expressing hatred the other way, and doing so only because you suspect them. Envy and suspicion are toxic and divisive, and create division where none was actually present. See also: Othello.
I can go along with that, so long as I don’t have to waste my time listening to Pundit-Americans or reading them.
It does not cut both ways. It is the job of the leader to lead. It is not the job of the followers to lead. Those who claim to be the intellectual elite of the party have more obligation to address the concerns of the people they claim to represent than the reverse. Those who wish to be elevated must actually discharge the duties. It’s not a social position -it’s a leadership position.
Yes -it’s the envy of being listened to. Heaven forfend that those who claim to speak for conservative rank and file might actually care what the rank and file have to say. I’m a professor of poor, rural students. I can explain establishment concerns to the sons of coal miners with little difficulty. They understand quite quickly even though they don’t agree. On the other hand, explaining the concerns of coal miners to PhDs and wonks is apparently like speaking Latin to a dog. The populists understand the establishment quite well. The establishment have no clue.
Backwards. Rush was backing the FBI against the Treasury, and the Treasury was right. I don’t know if this is a misread, or a demonstration of my point. And the FBI’s trust ought to be eroded -they have sucked at their job for decades, as their fight with Treasury demonstrated.
Again -Rush did his job. He brought the people in. It is a category error to blame him that -once he had brought the audience -there was no one to take them to the next stage. Plenty of people claimed to do that. All of them failed.
As others have pointed out, this is true -at most -of only some sections of the Right. The SoCons and the WarHawks are more than capable of institution building. (I’ve argued before that the SoCon abandonment of the Fusionist project can be understood as a reaction to the realization that us SoCons were being asked to build a house the FiCons and WarHawks had no interest of actually letting us live in. And the ensuing collapse of the FiCon/WarHawk leadership structure, when they attacked Cruz, forcing the SoCons threw their lot in with Trump was a predictable consequence.)
But it is also learned behavior. For 200 years Americans were notable for their ability to build communities, industries, militaries, clubs, churches, and families. Either America had no conservatives before 1960, or since 1960 the conservatives have lost that ability.
I am not asking for the right to be built into a single grand political project. The left hasn’t done that, either. But I am asking for those who claim to be the leaders on the Right to do their jobs and help us organize and build the institutions we’ll need. I’m harping on NR because Dougherty published his article there, but it isn’t just them. The best organized faction on the right is the Proud Boys and QAnnon Shaman. Which, since they only managed to accidentally storm the Capitol building, indicates exactly how low the bar of organization on the right is.
Ironic, the creator of National Review liked the hoi polloi better than the writers of that organization do today.
Morning Sabrdance,
Peter posted an interview with Rush on Firing Line. Thinking about the comments from Rush where he says that we can’t afford our current debts, and WFB asks will people balk at the extremism of the left as it becomes more visible, I am discouraged at how foolish those questions seem now. I wonder who are those teachers who aren’t subsisting on milk? I am not sure I can think of anyone besides VDH whose intellect and life experience have provided him with an understanding of what has happened in America. This is depressing even more so because I can not think of any leftist thinkers who are wiser than their conservative counter parts. This leads me to think that conservative philosophy has little value. To change social life and policy the marxists seem to know the hearts of men better and seem to know how to manipulate govt policy and have created a satisfying substitute for religion which produces devotion. In these areas conservatism has failed completely and at all levels been charmed by philosophy and rather indifferent to the nature of men’s hearts and how culture responds to change and innovation. In this sense all of our conservative leaders are subsisting on milk and not fit for teaching.
people who live with all the power and money and platform, then make promises to their voters and then do not deliver. Their lives continue to be ones of privilege, while their voters suffer from their policies.
The very fact that these populists loved a wealthy New York City man shows it is not about wealth envy. It is not snobby. It is the feeling that powerful people make deals with each other at the expense of those who are locked out of power.
Indeed. I do not believe the conservative elite would be willing to be led by Hicks and rubes from the phone book.
Misread on my part.
Like you I have feet firmly in both worlds – you in academia, me in manufacturing and with my own family and friends. You’ve seen what you’ve seen, I’ve seen what I’ve seen, and in my experience many populists often have no clue and actually do not want to understand things beyond their concerns – it’s easier to wallow in victimhood, stereotype “the establishment” (without defining who is in it), and blame others for their situations than it is to try to understand that governing or running a business are not simple affairs.
And keep in mind, in your environment, the coal miners’ sons you’re teaching are self-selected, and have chosen to pursue higher education. Ask how they fare trying to explain things to their friends and family back home and I’m sure you’ll get a different story. My own best friend grew up hanging siding with his father and grandfather, but both he and his brother went off to college – he on academic scholarships, his brother on the GI bill, and both are engineers today. Their sister and their childhood friends from the inner city, by contrast, veer between living on government assistance and taking sporadic work while raising their own kids to spurn the notion that they should do any better (that would be “selling out”). And the sister demeans her brothers for looking down on her, for not helping her more (last time one of them bailed her out when her power was cut off, she blew the money on a $2000 macaw), and for somehow now being “too good for the rest of the family.” I’ve got plenty more stories from within my own extended family like this.
This isn’t the “envy of being listened to”, it’s just plain old-fashioned material envy.
If social conservatives are more than capable of building institutions, why is it that people who grew up in serious, engaged, well-catechized Christian households, went to classical Christian schools, and graduated from Christian colleges are running in droves into the arms of the cultural left? I went to Hillsdale. You should see the things the Hillsdale intellectual elite — the people who should be conserving and building institutions — is saying on social media. It’s obvious, to me, that the right is fighting a war of attrition, and that it can’t trust the people on its own side to stay engaged in the long term. For most, the siren song of social acceptability is irresistible.
The only groups who’ve successfully built institutions outside the American mainstream are the Amish and some Orthodox Jews. And maybe the Mormons, too. The current conservative institutions aren’t “sticky.” People cycle in and out, but there’s not much in the way of intergenerational continuity.
I have plenty of material wealth and I envy people getting listened too, but that does not count for you for some reason?
Trump is rich. That sort of blows up your theory.
It’s a classic example of the crab mentality common among socially dysfunctional subcultures.
My sister and her husband graduated from Hillsdale. I myself went to Grove City College. I can tell you in part why these places aren’t “sticky”, and it actually has little to do with social acceptability, and more to do with social isolation.
These schools, and others like them (including Christian primary and secondary schools) tend to be insular monocultures. When you’re in places like those, and that’s the only world you’ve ever known, those places aren’t about to burst your bubble. In fact, they tend to be so terrified of corrupting the students in their care that they actively shield such students from serious exposure to the wider culture, what it thinks, how it argues, or why they do what they do. So when they finally get out of that bubble they are unarmed and unprepared to confront the outside world and its culture – all they ever had was a flat caricature. For most of their years, they have been sheltered, have never had to seriously argue for their beliefs (just repeat them back by rote, without understanding), or be made to suffer (and thus learn endurance) for those beliefs. And they break. You can see this very clearly in the various celebrity Christian apostates out there – they are repudiating a thin and flat bubble gospel.
I went to a private but secular school before college. I was one of the few “out of the closet” Republicans around, and had to argue and fight all the way through with teachers and classmates both. I nicknamed one teacher “Left of Lenin”. GCC was, frankly, a relief for me, but for many of my classmates it was a stifling social and intellectual box. After 16 years in Christian schools and Christian college they went absolutely wild once out. Hillsdale was a similar experience for others.
To be sticky, these places can’t be bubbles, and must teach resilience and character – they don’t right now.