How Radio Wrecks the Right (Don't barf, it's by John Derbyshire!)

You can’t help but admire Rush Limbaugh’s talent for publicity. His radio talk show is probably—reliable figures only go back to 1991—in its third decade as the number-one rated radio show in the country. And here he is in the news again, trading verbal punches with the president of the United States.

Limbaugh remarked on Jan. 16 that to the degree that Obama’s program is one of state socialism, he hopes it will fail. (If only he had said the same about George W. Bush.) The president riposted at a session with congressional leaders a week later, telling them, “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.” Outsiders weighed in: Limbaugh should not have wished failure on a president trying to cope with a national crisis; Obama should not have stooped to insult a mere media artiste, the kind of task traditionally delegated to presidential subordinates while the chief stands loftily mute. Citizens picked sides and sat back to enjoy the circus.

For Limbaugh to remain a player at this level after 20-odd years bespeaks powers far beyond the ordinary. Most conservatives—even those who do not listen to his show—regard him as a good thing. His 14 million listeners are a key component of the conservative base. When he first emerged nationally, soon after the FCC dropped the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, conservatives for the first time in decades had something worth listening to on their radios other than country music and bland news programs read off the AP wire. In the early Clinton years, when Republicans were regrouping, Limbaugh was perhaps the most prominent conservative in the United States. National Review ran a cover story on him as “The Leader of the Opposition.”

Limbaugh has a similarly high opinion of himself: “I know I have become the intellectual engine of the conservative movement,” he told the New York Times. This doesn’t sit well with all conservatives. Fred Barnes grumbled, “When the GOP rose in the late 1970s, it had Ronald Reagan. Now the loudest Republican voice belongs to Rush Limbaugh.” Upon discovering that Limbaugh had anointed himself the successor to William F. Buckley Jr., WFB’s son Christopher retorted, “Rush, I knew William F. Buckley, Jr. William F. Buckley, Jr. was a father of mine. Rush, you’re no William F. Buckley, Jr.”

The more po-faced conservative intellectuals have long winced at Limbaugh’s quips, parodies, slogans, and impatience with the starched-collar respectability of the official Right. American conservatism had been a pretty staid and erudite affair pre-Limbaugh, occasional lapses into jollification on “Firing Line” being the main public expression of conservatism’s lighter side.

Now the airwaves are full of conservative chat. Talkers magazine’s list of the top ten radio talk shows by number of weekly listeners also features Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, and Mark Levin. Agony aunt Laura Schlessinger and financial adviser Dave Ramsey are both in the top ten too, though their conservatism is more incidental to the content of their shows.

Liberal attempts to duplicate the successes of Limbaugh and his imitators have fallen flat. Alan Colmes’s late-evening radio show can be heard in most cities, and Air America is still alive somewhere—the Aleutians, perhaps—but colorful, populist, political talk radio seems to be a thing that liberals can’t do.

There are many reasons to be grateful for conservative talk radio, and with a left-Democrat president and a Democratic Congress, there are good reasons to fear for its survival. Reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine is generally perceived as the major threat, but may not in fact be necessary. Obama is known to have strong feelings about “localism,” the FCC rule that requires radio and TV stations to serve the interests of their local communities as a condition of keeping their broadcast licenses. “Local community” invariably turns out in practice to mean leftist agitator and race-guilt shakedown organizations—the kind of environment in which Obama learned his practical politics. Localism will likely be the key to unlock the door through which conservative talk radio will be expelled with a presidential boot in the rear.

With reasons for gratitude duly noted, are there some downsides to conservative talk radio? Taking the conservative project as a whole—limited government, fiscal prudence, equality under law, personal liberty, patriotism, realism abroad—has talk radio helped or hurt? All those good things are plainly off the table for the next four years at least, a prospect that conservatives can only view with anguish. Did the Limbaughs, Hannitys, Savages, and Ingrahams lead us to this sorry state of affairs?

They surely did. At the very least, by yoking themselves to the clueless George W. Bush and his free-spending administration, they helped create the great debt bubble that has now burst so spectacularly. The big names, too, were all uncritical of the decade-long (at least) efforts to “build democracy” in no-account nations with politically primitive populations. Sean Hannity called the Iraq War a “massive success,” and in January 2008 deemed the U.S. economy “phenomenal.”

Much as their blind loyalty discredited the Right, perhaps the worst effect of Limbaugh et al. has been their draining away of political energy from what might have been a much more worthwhile project: the fostering of a middlebrow conservatism. There is nothing wrong with lowbrow conservatism. It’s energizing and fun. What’s wrong is the impression fixed in the minds of too many Americans that conservatism is always lowbrow, an impression our enemies gleefully reinforce when the opportunity arises. Thus a liberal like E.J. Dionne can write, “The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity. … Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans.” Talk radio has contributed mightily to this development.

It does so by routinely descending into the ad hominem—Feminazis instead of feminism—and catering to reflex rather than thought. Where once conservatism had been about individualism, talk radio now rallies the mob. “Revolt against the masses?” asked Jeffrey Hart. “Limbaugh is the masses.”

In place of the permanent things, we get Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar. Gone are the internal tensions, the thought-provoking paradoxes, the ideological uneasiness that marked the early Right. But however much this dumbing down has damaged the conservative brand, it appeals to millions of Americans. McDonald’s profits rose 80 percent last year.

There is a lowbrow liberalism, too, but the Left hasn’t learned how to market it. Consider again the failure of liberals at the talk-radio format, with the bankruptcy of Air America always put forward as an example. Yet in fact liberals are very successful at talk radio. They are just no good at the lowbrow sort. The “Rush Limbaugh Show” may be first in those current Talkers magazine rankings, but second and third are National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” with 13 million weekly listeners each. It is easy to mock the studied gentility, affectless voices, and reflexive liberalism of NPR, but these are very successful radio programs.

Liberals are getting rather good at talk TV, too. The key to this medium, they have discovered, is irony. I don’t take this political stuff seriously, I assure you, but really, these damn fool Republicans... Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert offer different styles of irony, but none leaves any shadow of doubt where his political sympathies lie. Liberals have done well to master this trick, but it depends too much on facial expressions and body language—the double-take, the arched eyebrow, the knowing smirk—to transfer to radio. It is, in any case, not quite populism, the target audience being mainly the ironic cohort—college-educated Stuff White People Like types.

If liberals can’t do populism, the converse is also true: conservatives are not much good at gentility. We don’t do affectless voices, it seems. There are genteel conservative events—I’ve been to about a million of them and have the NoDoz pharmacy receipts to prove it—but they preach to the converted. If anything, they reinforce the ghettoization of conservatism, of which talk radio’s echo chamber is the major symptom. We don’t know how to speak to that vast segment of the American middle class that lives sensibly—indeed, conservatively—wishes to be thought generous and good, finds everyday politics boring, and has a horror of strong opinions. This untapped constituency might be receptive to interesting radio programs with a conservative slant.

Even better than NPR as a listening experience is the BBC’s Radio 4. One of the few things I used to look forward to on my occasional visits to the mother country was Radio 4, which almost always had something interesting to say on the 90-minute drive from Heathrow to my hometown. One current feature is “America, Empire of Liberty,” a thumbnail history of the U.S. for British listeners. The show’s viewpoint is entirely conventional but pitched just right for a middlebrow radio audience. Why can’t conservatives do radio like that? Instead we have crude cheerleading for world-saving Wilsonianism, social utopianism, and a cloth-eared, moon-booted Republican administration.

You might object that the Right didn’t need talk radio to ruin it; it was quite capable of ruining itself. At sea for a uniting cause once the Soviet Union had fallen, buffaloed by master gamers in Congress, outfoxed by Bill Clinton, then seduced by the vapid “compassionate conservatism” of Rove and Bush, the post-Cold War Right cheerfully dug its own grave. And there was some valiant resistance from conservative talk radio to Bush’s crazier initiatives, like “comprehensive immigration reform” and the Medicare prescription-drug extravaganza.

But there was not much confrontation with other deep social and economic problems. The unholy marriage of social engineering and high finance that ended with our present ruin was left largely unanalyzed from reluctance to slight a Republican administration. Plenty of people saw what was coming. There was Ron Paul, for example: “Our present course ... is not sustainable. ... Our spendthrift ways are going to come to an end one way or another. Politicians won’t even mention the issue, much less face up to it.”

Neither will the GOP pep squad of conservative talk radio. And Ron Paul, you know, has a cousin whose best friend’s daughter was once dog-walker for a member of the John Birch Society. So much for him!

Why engage an opponent when an epithet is in easy reach? Some are crude: rather than debating Jimmy Carter’s views on Mideast peace, Michael Savage dismisses him as a “war criminal.” Others are juvenile: Mark Levin blasts the Washington Compost and New York Slimes.

But for all the bullying bluster of conservative talk-show hosts, their essential attitude is one of apology and submission—the dreary old conservative cringe. Their underlying metaphysic is the same as the liberals’: infinite human potential—Yes, we can!—if only we get society right. To the Left, getting society right involves shoveling us around like truckloads of concrete; to the Right, it means banging on about responsibility, God, and tax cuts while deficits balloon, Congress extrudes yet another social-engineering fiasco, and our armies guard the Fulda Gap. That human beings have limitations and that wise social policy ought to accept the fact—some problems insoluble, some Children Left Behind—is as unsayable on “Hannity” as it is on “All Things Considered.”

I enjoy these radio bloviators (and their TV equivalents) and hope they can survive the coming assault from Left triumphalists. If conservatism is to have a future, though, it will need to listen to more than the looped tape of lowbrow talk radio. We could even tackle the matter of tone, bringing a sportsman’s respect for his opponents to the debate.

I repeat: There is nothing wrong with lowbrow conservatism. Ideas must be marketed, and right-wing talk radio captures a big and useful market segment. However, if there is no thoughtful, rigorous presentation of conservative ideas, then conservatism by default becomes the raucous parochialism of Limbaugh, Savage, Hannity, and company. That loses us a market segment at least as useful, if perhaps not as big.

Conservatives have never had, and never should have, a problem with elitism. Why have we allowed carny barkers to run away with the Right? __________________________________________

John Derbyshire is a contributing editor of National Review and the author of, most recently, Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra.

“but how do they help the old lady down the street who really is trying to find some way to pay for her prescriptions?”

Well you just made my point. The Medicare Drug issue like the universal health care issue was lost long before the bill was written. The left started with the grandma eating dog food stories back in the 90’s. It became a throw away comment on many TV shows, dramas and comedies. Oprah and her ilk made sure that at least a couple of times a year they had a sob story on to humanize the issue. By the time it came to vote it was no longer a question of whether it was a good idea to offer the program, or whether there was better ways to address the issue than another huge expensive government handout, but rather how big a program we were going to be saddled with and who was going to be taxed to pay for it.

By your argument every liberal agenda item makes sense and should be passed. We can always find someone who is hurting that a government program could help. Lord they included $90M in the stimulus program to provide one-on-one education to people having trouble dealing with the digital TV change, because after all everyone deserves to have good TV reception. I am sure my friend is elated that Obama won. She will soon see all her liberal concerned addressed at the expense of the “evil” rich.

“I think I’m like most people, in that I tend to be more favorably disposed toward the person who offers to help me solve my current problem”

Well then you should be very comfortable with OBama and Nancy because as long as you are not “wealthy” they are going to help you solve all your problems, of course at someone else’s expense. Oops there I go again with another one of those nasty little conservative theories, personal responsibility.

By your argument every liberal agenda item makes sense and should be passed.

I didn't come close to saying that. You're presenting a strawman.

What I said was that old folks really are having trouble meeting their medical expenses, and that's a fact. And that fact has serious political implications.

That brings to mind one of Saul Alinksy's central insights, which was that real problems, if left unaddressed by "the establishment," can be exploited for one's own political ends.

The left knows that, but we conservatives tend to address such real issues with some lofty theory or other -- the correctness of which does nothing to help the old lady who's having money trouble today. She doesn't give a damn about your theories, and neither do her family and friends. What they do care about, is that gramma gets the medical attention they think she needs.

As a matter of politics -- not to mention moral responsibility -- conservatives need to find some way to address that kind of dynamic without sacrificing the essential principles of conservatism (whatever they may be). Unfortunately, we haven't figured out a way to do that.... It's a tremendously thorny problem.

That leaves the field open for liberals who promise to "help." (And for "conservatives" who try to fix things by acting the same way.)

That doesn't mean that their "help" will actually solve the underlying problem, and you're quite correct that it almost certainly leads worse problems than the original.

But to the old lady down the street, and her friends and relatives, there is still that present problem of how to afford (say) her prescription. Those issues, not your conservative theories, are what define how a lot of folks vote.

For conservatives to be successful -- as Reagan was -- the old lady's problem has to be addressed by something other than theoretical pronouncements. We've so far failed to do so, and your friend knows it. She sees a problem in need of a solution; you see a theory that ought to be implemented. What you call her "emotional" argument is actually something more than that: it's a recognition of a real problem that you (we) are inclined to gloss over.

It matters where you are on the curve. When Rush was picking up steam, 1992-1994, talk radio and conservatism were both in a lull or stall.

Conservatism had had successes in the eighties and fell into a slump in the GHW Bush years. Talk radio was also in a rut, so there was plenty of room for growth for both conservative politics and radio.

At some point in the new millenium that potential was exhausted. Conservatism's back in a slump, and talk radio's pretty well saturated the market and begun to produce diminishing or negative returns.

You can also look at it in McLuhan's terms. The Internet is a "cooler" medium, not as intense as talk radio. The web's dominance affects the style of public discourse, so we may see a turn to less intense media for a while.

Of course if the politics start getting heated up, talk radio will be there, if the Democrats don't change the rules.

Well then you tell me how would you have solved my friends problem without instituting a new expensive government program? You are good at talking around the point, but in fact you are saying exactly what my friend was saying. Grandma can’t afford her drugs and you are a mean, cruel person for not wanting to tax the “rich” to pay for it. After all it is a problem that has to be solved, not a theory to be discussed. I think it is interesting that for 160 years this country was able to deal with these types of issues without big new expansive government programs, then all of a sudden we had the New Deal followed by the War on Poverty and Medicare and government became the solution. And since then the Left has found one new problem after another that only government spending other people’s money can solve.

I hate to drag something as dirty as money into the discussion, but do you realize the legacy of these compassionate programs is a looming $45T bill coming due soon that doesn’t even include the cost of the new drug program. Whose going to pay for that. That is not conservative theory that is reality. It is easy to come up with answer for all the worlds problems when money is no object as is the case for the Left. Are there a conservative answers to these problems that does not involve expensive, expansive new programs, not unless we are willing to go back to the days when families and communities took care of grandma and that is not likely to happen. If everyone is entitled to top notch health care then someone is going to have to pay for it. Since you seem to have all the answer how do you propose that we as conservatives tackle this “new” problem identified by the Left? Since conservatives espouse personal and fiscal responsibility how do we make people pay for what they say they can’t afford, but liberals say they are entitled to? I’m open to suggestions. You talk about conservative theory versus liberal reality, well give me some conservative reality that tackles this problem without taking from those that have and giving to those that don’t, because the Left’s emotional appeal to an Oprahized America to save grandma will always trump the conservative call for less government spending, lower taxes, smaller government and individual freedom.

In my family we all chip in to take care of my mother and aunt. We take care of any medical needs not covered by medicare and trust me there are many, pay for our own health care on top of what we pay to take care of others parents and grandparents through our taxes. We also maintain their homes, provide them with hired transportation and help them with other day to day expenses. Because of careful planning we can afford to do this and we feel it is the right thing to do. This is not a government program, this is how people used to handle the issues involving the elderly. My mom and aunt’s church also help out with daily getting to church and to the store needs since we all live 70+ miles away. This isn’t conservative theory this is real world reality and the reality is not many people are willing or able to offer this type of assistance to family members. In a perfect world there would be no need for money, everything would be free and provided for all, but again that is not reality. So if we are to accept the liberal argument that everyone is entitled to everything whether they can personally afford it themselves, then how do you suggest that big, mean, cold-hearted conservatives like me who are only interested in theory, provide that without going the route of big government? This is not a strawman, again this is reality because the Left can and has made that argument for everything from health care, to retirement benefits, to free lunches for poor children, to free college education, even to free basic cable as they do in the projects here in Indianapolis. Where does it end, and how much are you willing to spend to get conservatives out of their theoretical comfort zone and make them as compassionate as liberals?

...but in fact you are saying exactly what my friend was saying. Grandma can’t afford her drugs and you are a mean, cruel person for not wanting to tax the “rich” to pay for it.

Listen, Friend -- perhaps your real problem is that you have a tendency make things up. The extract above is a case in point. Did I say that? Nope. Not even close. But you're so busy justifying your theory to yourself that you apparently don't bother to pay attention to what others are actually saying. (I cannot claim superiority here, as I tend to do the same thing.)

To review, I was merely pointing out a rather obvious political fact: that folks who have problems are more likely to vote for those who appear to be interested in helping them, than for those who aren't. Shout all you like, but it's true.

And another political fact is this: a lot of those problems are real. In our example, the inability of an old lady to pay for her medical expenses is a real problem. To point out a problem is not to suggest a solution -- but you seem to have a tendency to fly off the handle at the mere mention of the problem. Again, your response to me is a case in point.

All of your talk is fine; I even agree with most of what you say. Unfortunately, most of what you say does not address the more important political aspects of the situation.

In particular, you're probably not going to get anywhere with words, when your opponent is offering tangible help (even if it's not "help" in a big-picture sense). All you're going to get, is the stuffings beat out of you at the polls. The last 45 years of US political history tend to prove the point.

The question is, then, what are some conservative alternatives to the liberal status quo?

You actually hit upon a few of them -- if only to say "they'd never work." For example, families and churches and charities and private foundations can do a lot to make up the difference -- but in order for them to be viable, the government equivalents need to be severely scaled back at the same time. In a political sense, some significant success in an effort to build the former, is a necessary precondition to scale back the current government programs.

It would be death to the conservative efforts if the government programs were killed without anything standing ready to take up the slack.

Another conservative approach is to adjust people's expectations for what government can and should provide. That's a very long-term project, of course, but a crucial one. At the same time, something must be done about people's expectations for things like medical care, and such. Those are cultural things that must be addressed by cultural means -- entertainment media, for example.

” Mr. Hannity’s tendency to get trounced by his liberal guests.)”

Hannity’s no brain surgeon. But his heart is in the right place.

“the Democrats’ perception of his irresponsibility”

Of course I understand that distinction. Now that you’ve made it.

” a good tactician could parlay that into something “in the lion’s den.”

Agreed. To be blunt...... who dat?

“it doesn’t do much to bring in new recruits. “

I don’t think Rush views himself a “recruiter”

“What conservatives need, is something that offers a “middlebrow” outlet for conservative thought”

Again...agreed. I just don’t think it’ll play on commercial radio.

There is plenty of thoughtful conservatism in print, but we’ve got a tough row to hoe bringing it to the mass media.

It would be something if one of our illustrious conservative congressmen stepped up to the plate and articulated a principled conservative message on a regular basis.......... Not sure if I should hold my breath.

Sorry about the delay in response. Had to work. Gotta write Uncle Sam a big check in a few weeks.

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