What’s wrong with Rush Limbaugh conservatism

A reader in Southern California sent these excellent observations about El Slowbo:

Just listening to Rush at 10:30-45 Pacific time. He was making the democracy case, telling his listeners how we’re nothing “special,” “same DNA” as everyone else in Iraq, Afghanistan—what sets us apart is freedom.

How can this man look back on history and say “we’re nothing special.” If every conservative listening to that show didn’t feel sick at that moment they’re fools. Special is exactly what we “were.” I suggest we all pitch in and by Rush a history book.

Then he went on as to how we trusted in “freedom.” The Founding Fathers did not exactly trust in freedom. Write a hundred times, Rush—“checks and balances, separation of powers.”

I think today’s conservative movement should come together and author “Democracy for Dummies” because that seems to be their specialty.

In his defense he did say it could take a long time. This is simply the neocon “parachute.” When the policy fails they will all bail out and say we didnt stay long enough. We needed to stay 25 years didnt Bush tell us that before he went in? Unbelievable.

This makes me realize something. When Rush appeared on the national scene back in 1988, he wasn’t classified as a neoconservative. He was just a plain, generic conservative, or maybe a Ronald Reagan conservative. He was from the heartland, Missouri, from a town right on the Mississippi River, and he expressed himself in a full-bodied, patriotic way, with a feeling and enthusiasm for America as a country that was not what one thinks of as neoconservatism. Even then, however, the over-simplification in Rush’s view of America—that America is all about “freedom,” period, full stop—was annoyingly apparent. Yet that was something that was common to many “generic” conservatives, so one didn’t necessarily think of it as neoconservatism per se. Neocons had certain characteristic phrases, like saying that America was just founded on an idea and had no ethnic or cultural identity; and that was different from the way Rush expressed himself. Rush’s focus was on America the country, a country created by freedom, rather than on America the idea. Yet now, in the age of George W. Bush, when a vulgarized form of neoconservatism (not that it was so great before) has become the ruling ideology of the United States, with its spokesmen, led by the president, announcing that it is America’s mission to bring freedom and democracy to every country on earth, we realize that Rush’s simplified view of America is neoconservatism. Conservatism is the movement to articulate, preserve, and restore the essential elements and principles of our civilization. Neoconservatism consists of abstracting out one aspect of our civilization and treating it as the whole. The entirety of America and the West is boiled down to a slogan—“freedom,” which gets endlessly pounded into our ears and our heads, and which carries the significance that there is nothing particular about America, we’re just like everyone else, plus freedom, which means that if other people become free, they will become 100 percent like us. Thus Bush World and Rush World and Krauthammer World all end up as the same One World.

The reader who wrote the original comment has added:

Thanks, and thanks for your work. I guess we can be happy Rush didn’t come in on the Fourth of July to give his nothing special speech.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 07, 2005 06:11 PM | Send