Rush Limbaugh, the Right

Ross Douthat, on the place of Rush Limbaugh in US politics:

In the same way that every ambitious Democratic politician ought to be attuned to how Jon Stewart covers the news, so every right-of-center politico should keep an ear to the portion of the dial where Rush holds forth - because the Limbavian worldview, and the people he speaks for, represents an important (and valuable) slice of American conservatism, and indeed of America itself. But those same politicians should remember, as too many conservatives seem wont to forget, that Limbaugh is first and foremost an entertainer, and to mistake him for a strategist or policy wonk or political philosopher is to make a category error of epic proportions. Letting Rush define who is and is not a conservative, or what the national GOP can and cannot stand for, is the equivalent of the Democratic Party inviting the writers of the Daily Show to hammer out their party's platform - or the Roman Catholic Church turning the next edition of the Catechism over to Oprah.

My column from today's DMN in praise of Ross and Reihan's book is here. Here's how it starts:

In her 2001 memoir of seminary life, Episcopal priest Chloe Breyer expressed befuddlement that the Rikers Island inmates to whom she was ministering mocked her liberal approach to religion.

"They want answers, not questions," Ms. Breyer wrote in frustration. "The more contradictions I point out in the Bible, the more the inmates decide there is no point in wasting their time with a religion that lacks answers."

Can you blame them? The poor and working class tend to prefer non-squishy religion prescribing a stark moral code - even if they struggle to live up to its demands. It's not hard to see why. Unlike Ms. Breyer, whose father is a Supreme Court justice, and other social elites, folks living nearer the economic margins have far more to lose from individual and communal moral failure.

A Mexican immigrant housekeeper whose husband works on the road told me that her Pentecostal congregation in Dallas is the only thing she has to help her keep her teenage girls on a path to a stable future. Given the skyrocketing teen pregnancy rate among Latinas, you can see why a mother like this housekeeper gravitates toward Pentecostalism, not liberal Protestantism or laissez-faire Catholicism.

This innate cultural conservatism partly explains why the white working classes have voted Republican over the past generation (and why blacks, despite being reliably Democratic in their voting habits, are fairly conservative in their social views). Democrats see these Republican voters as closet racists at worst or, at best, dupes of Republican wedge politics.

This is condescending and mostly wrong. In fact, when you fear a loss of control over your future, identifying with culturally conservative candidates is a reasonable response.