Via Derbyshire, this Terry Teachout column makes an important observation that relates back to Derbyshire’s criticism of the influence of talk radio and my recent post on community:

The information age offers something for anybody: Survivor for simpletons, The Sopranos for sophisticates. The problem is that it offers nothing for everybody. By maximizing and facilitating cultural choice, information-age capitalism fused with identity politics to bring about the disintegration of the common middlebrow culture of my youth.

Technology has provided a greater diversity of media and allows for communicating vast amounts of information, which necessarily disperses and scatters attention in myriad directions, and the elevation of choice as one of our chief cultural goods (endorsed by almost everyone regardless of conventional political affiliations) has helped make sure that eclecticism and eccentricity tend to prevail. Online fora, including blogs, are obviously also a product of this. One of the things that we constantly hear in praise of talk radio hosts is that they are effective communicators. This is ironic, given the almost reflexive disdain for community, both as a word and as a reality, that so many of these hosts seem to have. Little remarked on from Limbaugh’s speech was his passing shot at the idea of community: “Remember the root word there is “commune”.” Taken together with his glorification of individualism, his hostility toward possessing and being defined by something held in common seems clear.

Since the word communication refers to providing listeners with a share in the discussion, it implies at least a common language, which suggests that there is also a common culture whose values are being conveyed through that language. These would be common cultural values formed in communities. Yet at every turn, we see radio hosts make an idol out of choice and stress, as Limbaugh repeated, that “we are all individuals.” More harmful than the quality of discussion in these broadcasts, talk radio shows in practice nurture the very forces of cultural dispersion and disintegration that make a broad common culture that much harder to cultivate and sustain.

It is not merely that these programs distract from creating middlebrow conservatism, as Derbyshire argued, but that they feed into the forces that eat away at whatever remains of a common culture while also creating their own sub-cultural ghetto to which conservatives seem only too inclined to retreat. Following Lukacs’ observation about real, personal communication that I mention in the other post, it seems to me that the more conservatives define themselves in relation to these radio communications from fervent individualists the less likely they are going to be to engage in the kind of hard cultural work of building up their own communities and laying the foundations of the common culture they wish to pass on to their children.

Cross-posted at Front Porch Republic

Besides, since when did hoping for the failure of ideological agendas you disagree with become unpatriotic? ~Jonah Goldberg

It was somewhere around 2003. It is rich to hear these complaints now from many of the same people who nodded along with Frum as he dubbed antiwar conservatives would-be collaborators with jihadism and specifically declared them to be “unpatriotic” people who had “turned their backs on America.” Here was Frum almost six years ago: “Since 9/11, by contrast, the paleoconservatives have collapsed into a mood of despairing surrender unparalleled since the Vichy republic went out of business.” By “despairing surrender,” of course, Frum meant that we did not want to invade another country on the other side of the planet without cause. In this warped thinking, non-aggression was counted as surrender.

For years mainstream conservatives have denounced people who hold different policy views on the war, anti-terrorism and treatment of detainees as “anti-American” and worse, and not because they actually wished for Bush’s failure but because they opposed government policy, questioned the honesty of its leaders and condemned its illegal and immoral acts. In other words, these critics dissented and tried to hold the government accountable, and for the most part the people now trying to wrap themselves in the mantle of patriotic dissent ridiculed and denounced them for claiming that their dissent was patriotic. In much the same way, loyalists who defended one executive usurpation after another have started to transform almost overnight into vigilant watchdogs worried about an overreaching President. The principles involved are valid ones–checking abuses of power, holding government accountable, and refusing to endorse policies that you know will probably only make things worse. The problem is that many of the people now “rediscovering” them have a lot of nerve to lecture anyone else about them after all the things they have justified and enabled.

Opponents of the war did not wish for Bush to fail in matters related to national security, but rather wished for him not to make colossal blunders that would undermine national security, weaken and strain our military and needlessly compromise constitutional protections and the nation’s reputation. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that Bush’s critics on the war wished that he not embark on a course of action that was bound to fail on the administration’s own terms. When Mr. Bush ended his second term as a failed President, it was his supporters who continued to back him in every bad decision he made who had ensured that he failed. In other words, in resisting the policies the President wanted and implemented his critics were actually serving the President’s best interests, and he would have been wise to heed their warnings. Perhaps then he would not have left office as one of the most-loathed and discredited Presidents in history. Obviously, Limbaugh has never argued anything remotely like this, and even if he does mean something other than what he said his statement will not be received that way.

Of course, it is possible that when someone expresses the desire for Obama to fail, he means to say that he believes the President’s current course is ruinous and will make matters worse, but to say simply, “I want the President to fail” is to make it seem as if one wants the country to endure yet another four years of the sort of failed leadership we have experienced for the last eight. It may be the case that this is what we will have, but this is not something that any of us should want.

Regarding the Limbaugh-Steele tussle, there is not too much to say that hasn’t already been said. It is fairly disastrous for all involved when the chairman of the RNC and CPAC’s keynote speaker can create a controversy that understandably inspires multiplecomparisons to re-education camps. I am guessing that Steele’s faux pas in challenging the Man with the Golden Microphone (comparisons to Blofeld are too easy and obvious) will more or less smother the chances for any reform ideas he may have had, and now that he has been denounced as little better than a RINO his tenure as chairman will continue to be rocky and not very effective. Fundraising must already be difficult because of the recession, and now it is going to get even more so.

Despite his best efforts to toe the line, and usually saying absurd things in the process, Steele is succumbing to the structural pressures that have brought the GOP and movement conservatism to their present states. Incredibly, the man who was floating the idea of withholding RNC funds from moderate Republicans who voted for the stimulus is now regarded as some sort of Obama collaborator! Meanwhile, Obama is not just having a good laugh at the expense of his imploding enemies, but he has to be feeling very pleased with himself. It seems as if all he had to do was say, “Don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh,” and in classic knee-jerk fashion activists and pols have gone running into Limbaugh’s embrace, which is probably exactly what Obama wanted them to do. Now, thanks to the bizarre Limbaugh litmus test that everyone on the right is supposed to pass, conservative blogs are agog with their newfound contempt for the RNC chairman, which helps ensure that cooperation between the national party and online activists will continue to be poor. You might call this a triple bank-shot by Obama, except that all of it is self-inflicted by the Republicans.

I am participating in an interesting new group blog, Front Porch Republic, that is starting up tomorrow. Give it until tomorrow before trying to check the site. Many familiar TAC contributors and other bloggers well known to many of you will be joining in the discussions on localism, limits and liberty.

Frankly, basing the future of the Republican Party’s outreach to blacks and Hispanics on gay marriage is not, as Mr. Johnson suggested, “the future.” ~Zac Morgan

While I suspect that I am coming at this from a different angle than Morgan, he is quite correct. Even on those issues where you can identify strong support among minority voters for a socially conservative position, to say nothing of willingness to support specific ballot or legislative measures, there is simply no potential there for turning reliable Democratic voters into Republican voters. My guess is that Michael Steele is very much in agreement with Wayne Johnson’s proposal, which is another strike against it. Regardless, “gay marriage” is an issue that has been yielding diminishing returns for the GOP for several years now, which is more a function of the GOP’s lack of any other compelling message and a result of successful state ballot initiatives than it is evidence of national fatigue with the issue.

Even though Prop. 8 passed in California, there was no dent in traditional Democratic constituencies in the rest of the voting. This is an important lesson Republicans will have to learn: the relative unpopularity of “gay marriage” does not necessarily translate into Republican votes, because it is even less obvious today than it has been over the last thirty years that voting Republican is the natural thing for socially conservative people to do. Indeed, the concentration of Prop. 8 supporters among some core Democratic constituencies is proof that far more people would sooner oppose “gay marriage” in a state where homosexuality probably has more cultural acceptance than almost anywhere else in country than they would vote for Republicans to govern anything. If opposition to “gay marriage” is considerably lower in the rising generation, support for the GOP is lower still, and this is the effect of demographic and cultural changes that the GOP cannot pander its way out of without abandoning almost everything it purports to represent. The new generation is made up of considerably more singles and late-marrying couples, more secular people and more non-whites than previous generations, and the GOP simply does not represent their interests, because it has been and continues to be the party of white, married and religious voters.

Morgan also trots out the tired pro-immigration case for pandering to Hispanic voters, but this is not much more persuasive than the argument he is attacking. The pursuit of minority voters with these single-issue panders is futile. It’s not as if second-generation Mexican-Americans in L.A. are yearning to have capital gains tax cuts and foreign wars, but are discouraged from voting like white evangelicals because the Republican Party is allegedly too opposed to immigration*. Likewise, Jack Kemp and friends have been chasing after the other elusive “natural Republicans” in the black community for the better part of 25 years, and despite that and constant “outreach” the Republican share of the black vote is at historic lows. It is probably true that in their local and state politics these voters see Republicans as advocates for all of the policies that they regard as detrimental to their interests, and it seems likely that what the national party does or doesn’t do is irrelevant, which makes chasing after their votes even more pointless than it already was.

* I say allegedly, because the last time any Republican nominee or national leader spoke out against illegal immigration and insisted that it be stopped was…oh, that’s right, it has never happened. It’s a bit like saying voters were driven away from the Democratic Party because it has been too protectionist for the last decade, when the party has largely been moving in the opposite direction, much to the annoyance of some of its most reliable constituencies.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend, and I was observing the strange cyclical habit conservatives have when it comes to the people they embrace as their champions. At least since Reagan, when the GOP controls the White House most conservatives look to the President as the leader of the movement as well as of the party. Bush the Elder did not fit this role well at all, and it is not entirely coincidental that it was during his administration that Limbaugh gained his mass following, which the Clinton years then expanded. When the President is not a Republican or does not inspire loyalty among movement conservatives, as both Reagan and (rather more inexplicably) Bush did, it seems as if conservatives end up looking to their radio hosts and to Limbaugh in particular as their guide. It is not just that Limbaugh has a national audience and can communicate more effectively with many rank-and-file conservatives than can elected Republicans, but both they and he believe that this is how conservatives will re-emerge from the political wilderness.

Contra Frum, Limbaugh is not calculating that he will gain from continuing conservative failure, but mistakenly (and I think genuinely) believes that conservatives “have the blueprint” (as he is always saying) and that he, Limbaugh, will show them the way back. There is a widespread and quite wrong conservative interpretation of the present political moment as being very much like 1993, but where Clinton mistook a repudiation of Bush for an endorsement of an aggressive Democratic agenda it is the GOP that has misread what just happened last year. Most of the right seems to expect a replay of ’93-’94, and so are sticking to the same tactics that they used then (including the turn to Limbaugh and the return of Gingrich).

To use a pop culture analogy, Limbaugh and most conservatives believe he is something like the conservative movement’s Laura Roslin, but he is, in fact, their Baltar. As the plot of that story suggests, however, even if he were Roslin the destination to which he is leading conservatives may be a barren wasteland rather than the far green country they expect to find.

P.S. Conservatives seem to have spent the last year rapidly regressing from cheering on lame politicians who could at least intelligently recite their platitudes (Romney) to worshipping pseudo-populists who could not even do that (Palin) to elevating random guys who didn’t like taxes (the Plumber) to rallying around a radio host who makes Romney’s own brand of Reagan nostalgia and three-legs-of-the-stoolism seem deep and meaningful by comparison. Of course, there isn’t that much substantively different between Romney’s opportunistic recitations and Limbaugh’s boilerplate, but at least with Romney you knew that he was capable of saying something else and would have said it if he had thought it was to his advantage. The boilerplate is not only all Limbaugh knows how to say, but if you pressed him to elaborate on any of it he would just repeat himself.

Update: See Reihan’s Forbes column for a less combative critical response to Limbaugh.

Second Update: Reading this John Hawkins post, I was reminded of my point the other day that “reformists” are currently the only game in town when it comes to developing a domestic policy agenda. This is inevitably what will happen when the only people inclined to adapt to changing political realities are those who already tend to be more moderate or meliorist in their views. The irony is that movement conservatives guarantee that they will become less and less relevant to shaping Republican policies if they ignore the need to adapt, and the very meliorist alternatives that they find so objectionable will win by default. To the extent that reformists are lamenting Limbaugh’s takeover, it is because they understand that the fortunes of reform conservatism rise or fall with the reputation of mainstream conservatism, and no amount of “tweaking” policy will make any difference if Limbaugh effectively brands the movement as one that is instinctively hostile to renovation and adaptation. I was tempted to describe Limbaugh’s speech on Saturday as the moment when movement conservatives hit rock bottom, but psychologically they have not yet reached capitulation. I’m not sure what more it will take, but apparently a few more defeats will be required before movement conservatives will begin adapting.

Hewitt (via Ross):

Rush eschews “leadership.” He doesn’t tell people who to vote for or where to show up and march.

This is simply and obviously not true. In 1992 during the primaries, Limbaugh went so far as to endorse Buchanan against Bush (as did National Review), reflecting the deep dissatisfaction that many partisans had with Bush the Elder at the time. As the ’08 primaries wore on, he never explicitly endorsed anyone but made it very clear that he regarded both Huckabee and McCain (i.e., the people winning most of the primaries) as great dangers because they were supposedly trying to “reinvent” the party. If he didn’t tell people whom to vote for, he certainly told them which votes were wrong in his eyes. During the Democratic primaries last year, he explicitly urged his listeners to participate and vote to prolong the Democratic contest, which may have been a waste of time for all concerned, but it was clearly a case of Limbaugh attempting to lead his listeners in a certain direction to achieve a political result that he believed would help the GOP. To some limited extent, he was able to persuade people to follow his lead in some of these cases.

As Ross noted, Hewitt is on the right track when he identifies Limbaugh as filling an Oprah-like role on the right, but there is a crucial difference between them. Unlike Oprah, who ventured into partisan politics for the first time in the last election, Limbaugh’s entire act is now focused on serving as a conservative spokesman and unofficial strategist for the GOP. As often as he and his defenders keep crying, “Entertainer!” at the first sign of trouble, he constantly poses as something more important than an entertainer even while he is engaged in his performance.

In this, he is rather more like Bono, but even Bono cannot quite fuse his role as entertainer and his role as activist so completely. Bono has given benefit concerts in the past for various causes that would normally be identified with the political left, but to a large extent he has tried to keep his entertaining and his political activism in two distinct arenas. Limbaugh cannot do this, because his entertainment is political talk, but that necessarily means that he is never going to be merely an entertainer, just as Al Franken was never going to be merely a comedian once he went into talk radio. (Franken has since taken the next logical step and run for office.) Until and unless political activists and rank-and-file conservatives insist that Limbaugh be taken just as seriously as they are willing to take Bono or any other celebrity activist, they will be stuck with an entertainer for one of their main leaders who nonetheless does not lead responsibly because he can always declare when things get difficult, “Don’t look at me–I’m just providing entertainment!” As soon as the latest controversy dies down, he will then start spouting off on the issue of the day, as if to say, “Hey, look at me–I’ve got something important to say!”

P.S. The title of Hewitt’s post suggests that he doesn’t quite believe his own claim that Limbaugh is not a political leader, since “the Speech” invokes (who else?) Reagan, c. 1964.

Good ideas are meritorious. But being meritorious isn’t what wins elections. Most voters have only the faintest idea what policy ideas candidates advocate when running or implement when in office. External conditions (such as the economy, but war and scandal matter also) have much more influence over which party wins. ~Jonathan Chait

This is true, but it isn’t as if these “external conditions” have no relation to the policies that are actually pursued by the party in power. Were it not for some supremely bad policy ideas, some of them implemented by the executive branch and some by the President’s appointees at the Fed, for example, many of the “external conditions” that brought the GOP low in the last few years would not have existed or would have been less ruinous. It is true that minority parties do not win simply because they have well-crafted alternative policy ideas, but that is not an argument against developing them. Limbaugh is pretty clearly arguing that developing “better policy ideas” is directly harmful to GOP electoral fortunes, because he seems to see everyone interested in policy arguments as representing an attempt to abandon everything connected to Reagan and completely redefine conservatism. To say that having better ideas do not guarantee election victory is merely an observation about poorly-informed voters and the cynical and only partly true calculus that ideas, any ideas, are irrelevant to electoral outcomes. Could a Democratic nominee that did not oppose the war and had no objections against the torture regime have done as well as Obama did? Would a Republican nominee who broke with Bush over the bailout have done as poorly as McCain did? Surely at some point policy ideas, and differences over policy, have some significant effect on elections.

To listen to Limbaugh tell it, though, policy ideas are not all that important. That makes it all the more bizarre for Limbaugh, Jindal and the GOP leadership to interpret the last two elections as repudiations of the GOP’s “wasteful spending” ways and to adopt an accordingly austere fiscal policy position. If new policy ideas are irrelevant to a Republican comeback, as Limbaugh said and Chait grants, it seems that actual Republican policies cannot have had much of anything to do with their downfall. I doubt Chait would go so far as to grant this, and not even Limbaugh would agree with it, which is what makes his mockery of policy thinking even more foolish than it seems at first glance.

The entirety of movement conservative and Congressional GOP strategy, so called, that Limbaugh has been cheering on derives from the fanciful idea that the electorate turned against the GOP because of excessive spending. They believe that resisting Obama’s agenda will be rewarded by voters next year, which is why they are making a more or less suicidal bet that they will profit from simple rejectionism. This is an absurd misreading of the election results, of course, and it shows no evidence of learning from past defeats, but at the heart of everything the GOP is doing right now is an attempt to mount a comeback through what they regard as their “better policy ideas,” which in the limited imagination of most activists and partisans these days means more tax cuts and thwarting earmarks. While it may be possible to read Limbaugh’s statement as Chait does, Limbaugh made the statement in service to a specific set of positions on the stimulus and other issues to justify a stand-pat austerity agenda that no one outside core Republican voters supports in an era when fewer people identify as Republicans than at any time since the early ’80s.

One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat them is with better policy ideas right now. ~Rush Limbaugh

Not to worry–there seems to be no great danger of this “better policy idea” approach catching on anytime soon, but this is a practical suggestion that everyone who wants to heed Limbaugh’s words can follow. Yes, this is something you can do every day from the comfort of your own home. You can do this without getting up in the morning. Indeed, you can do this in your sleep, or perhaps even in a vegetative state. The latter would be the most appropriate condition in which to do this, as the higher brain functions will have already ceased, and you will never become aware of just how unsuccessful an approach Limbaugh’s recommended course of action really is.

If we want to take it seriously, there are two ways to take Limbaugh’s statement. He is either saying that conservatives cannot possibly come up with better policy ideas, so there’s no point in trying, or he is claiming that policy ideas are entirely irrelevant to all of conventional American politics*. If he meant it in the first way, there are two options for conservatives: surrender or wait until Democrats fail and try to pick up the pieces. If he meant it in the second way, this would seem to be an endorsement of an even more intensified use of gimmickry, phony populist rhetoric and symbolic biography politics.

* I am willing to grant that policy ideas and issues generally are not as important as many of us would like them to be in determining electoral outcomes, and for many swing and late-deciding voters they have little role at all in influencing voting behavior, but it seems crazy for any movement that is at all concerned with electoral politics to ridicule the work of developing policies as something detrimental to electoral success.

Update: In one of those priceless moments, Limbaugh said near the beginning of his endless speech that the Preamble to the Constitution says that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights,” revealing the sort of historical and constitutional illiteracy I have come to expect from his sort. Naturally, the geniuses at CPAC gave him their Defender of the Constitution Award. This is what you get from people who so cherish the Constitution and Declaration that they cannot remember what phrases belong to which document.

Second Update: Another truly bizarre element of Limbaugh’s remarks is the idea that liberals are somehow lacking in optimism. Optimism has been a constant theme in Limbaugh’s rambling for years, but in light of Jindal’s oddly-framed speech (“the American people can do anything!”) there seems to be this weird trend in trying to outdo the Hopemonger himself in optimism. Of course, optimism is the very last thing we need, and we have had far, far too much already.

So for politically correct reasons, we’re moving the focus of the war on terrorism to a very bad place for us. The Russians couldn’t win there. Peter the Great couldn’t win there [bold mine-DL]. Oh, but maybe the messiah can win there, ok. ~Ann Coulter

Yes, there is a comparison with Vietnam, too. Of course, Peter the Great was otherwise occupied with Swedes, and never had the opportunity to get anywhere near Afghanistan. The Central Asian khanates had not yet been acquired by the Russian empire, and the Great Game was almost two hundred years away, but don’t let that stop you. Not that it needed to be said, but Coulter doesn’t have a clue what she’s talking about. Yes, I know this is just oppositional posturing–increasing troop levels under Gen. Petraeus was Holy Writ two years ago and last year when it concerned Iraq, but this year in Afghanistan it is crazy, hopeless escalation and Vietnam redux. In itself, increasing troop levels in Afghanistan will not necessarily do very much, but if it is combined with some effort to buy off or negotiate with reconcilable Taliban units there is some chance that it could improve matters.

One wonders what there is in the history of Iraq, which has been a frequent battleground between different polities and resistant to every Western power that has ever set foot there, that makes it a preferable location. Depending on how ambitious our objectives are, the war in Afghanistan not only needs more soldiers in the near term, but it will almost definitely fail without them. It could be that there is not much more that we can realistically accomplish in Afghanistan without undermining Pakistan, but then defenders of the war in Iraq have never had much interest in questions of regional stability; stability has always been a curse word for them. Besides, Coulter is not actually saying that we should end the war in Afghanistan, but merely that any tactical change in that war is a mistake because Obama is the one making the decision.

Support for Taliban attacks on NATO forces is vastly higher in areas where air raids have been used to make up for lack of manpower, as these raids invariably cause civilian casualties, and these raids make it harder to reduce the numbers of so-called “accidental insurgents” (i.e., armed locals who sporadically join battles against our forces when their territory becomes a war zone). Obviously, there are some goals that are out of reach (e.g., eradication of the poppy trade) and should be scrapped right now, and some tactics that are positively harmful to the stability of neighboring Pakistan, and therefore directly advantageous to Pakitani Taliban forces, such as the drone strikes. The war in Iraq is still far from over, regardless of the withdrawal timelines announced this week, and we will still be bearing its costs for years to come while we maintain tens of thousands of “residual” forces there. It may be that the war in Afghanistan will become unsustainable, and Pakistan could very well collapse thanks in part to years of neglect and lack of support, but the longer we remain in Iraq and the more resources we continue to waste there the more likely both of those outcomes are. It may make sense to scale back our involvement in Afghanistan for many reasons, but there is no argument for doing so that also permits us to perpetuate the war in Iraq.