Rush is Right - Part 1

Once upon a time, a significant portion of Rush’s listeners were liberals, but those days are long gone. I’m probably one of few liberals who still hang in there, not because I enjoy it, but because Rush mirrors the views of a good many Americans, including some of my best friends. El Rushbo is worth an estimated $330 million; he didn’t acquire that fortune by challenging his listeners. He does not shape their opinions so much as articulate them.

Arguably there is an exception to this: Rush excels at playing upon the emotions of his listeners. His basic frame is that liberals are willfully, knowingly wrong. Liberals don’t have policy differences with Republicans. Rather, they are intent on taking your freedom and establishing a totalitarian regime in which everyone must embrace their ideology or else. This is a modern expression of a trope that has existed since the American Revolution. Historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed it “the paranoid style in American politics.” It is a continuation of the revolutionaries’ conviction that the British government was a threat to liberty. Thus, throughout our history, one’s political opponents have been depicted as a threat to liberty as well.

A basic tool in Rush’s arsenal is mockery. He not only excoriates liberals, he caricatures them, typically by impersonation. Apparently liberals habitually speak in an indignant, flustered tone. This mockery is especially pronounced when he touches upon diversity. He has a pet term for feminists—“feminazis”—but other groups attract his scorn without even the honor of a pejorative tagline. Essentially diversity has no purpose other than bashing white males and indeed, the “diversity police” have no tolerance for any viewpoint that does not wholly conform to theirs. Rush takes particular umbrage in multiculturalism and particular glee in mocking it.

There are nonetheless two respects in which I agree with Rush. In my previous posts I have outlined them. To begin with, according to Rush, in the cosmos of diversity’s proponents, “The only people that are racist are white men — and, even further, white Christian men.” This is an extreme formulation of an argument I have advanced that diversity’s dominant trope is the Exodus: the liberation of people long oppressed. This narrative requires a Pharaoh, and the role is thrust upon heterosexual white men. That is what once annoyed me about the work of Jamaica Kinkaid in "A Small Place" and Malek Alloula’s "The Colonial Harem."

One available response is to just suck it up and listen to what they have to say. A better response—although difficult to pull off—is to reject whiteness as a core feature of one’s identity. If you don’t think you’re white, you’re not going to feel targeted by the world’s Kinkaids and Alloulas. But it is really no wonder that a good many white males just get angry and resentful and switch off. Rush faithfully reflects their sense of alienation.

I’ll explore my second area of agreement with Rush in my next post.