In their classic post-World War II study Prophets of Deceit, sociologists Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Gutterman analyzed the kind of media demagoguery that has become popular in America again. The subtitle of their work was 'techniques of the American agitator,' and they studied anti-Semitic, fascist demagogues, like white supremacist and holocaust denier Gerald L.K. Smith, who used personal and political insults, vilification and often popular forms of humor to dehumanize and demonize minorities and political opponents. Lowenthal and Gutterman also pointed out that these demagogues were engaged in a kind of racket, gaining personal wealth by appealing to and enhancing the prejudices of those who bought their political message, attended their rallies, read their publications as against organizing a serious and far more dangerous political movement.
Rush Limbaugh has engaged in the kind of racket that Lowenthal and Gutterman analyzed in Prophets of Deceit for a long time. He has made millions in what is called in the US 'conservative' talk radio. (A friend who had lived in Vichy France during World War II told me in the 1990s that aside from the anti-Semitism, Limbaugh and his colleagues reminded him of the kind of people who dominated Vichy 'talk' radio, vilifying the Allies, the previous popular front government, and of course all enemies of the glorious France of Marshall Petain, Pierre Laval, and their heroic friend and ally, Adolf Hitler.)
Unlike Gerald L.K. Smith, et al, in the 1930s through the 1950s, Limbaugh's message and those of his radio colleagues has commercial sponsors and helps to run interference for the Republican Right, which feeds off it. Most recently, Rush Limbaugh attempted to promote division and hate among his audience by expressing his hope that Obama fails as president. In other words, that the economic crisis worsens, that terrorism strikes, and a myriad of global problems worsen, apparently.
To this wish for doom, President Obama answered Limbaugh's bullying nonsense by telling Republicans, who are gearing up to fight his stimulus package, 'you can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.'
The media response got the story backward. Most insisted that Obama had picked a fight with Limbaugh,even though Limbaugh has attacked him viciously for months. Obama 'risked' launching a 'new culture war,' they insisted, by fighting back against a radio demagogue. Like Joe McCarthy in the witch hunts of the 1950s, Limbaugh has the tacit support of the 'respectable' right-wing in his hysterical tirades. It is possible that Limbaugh, like McCarthy, will end up doing himself in by biting the Republican hands that feed him, although I doubt it.
Just as Bill Clinton was about to take power 16 years ago, Limbaugh launched vicious attacks on Lani Guinier, and Clinton withdrew her nomination for a top Justice Department position. Unlike Clinton, President Obama has refused to open his administration by appeasing his enemies. He is also moving ahead with a stimulus package that grows more necessary every day as the large corporations continue to lay off tens of thousands. Several major US-based corporations, for example, announced this week that they were laying off 62,000 workers in both the US and abroad as the depression danger deepens.
What Rush Limbaugh and Gerald L.K. Smith have most in common, other than their ultra-right politics, is that they play on 'social resentment' and promote 'culture wars' to build their audiences and provoke divisions and hate. Franklin D. Roosevelt buried one of the biggest the 'social resentment' issues of the 1920s by ending Prohibition. Roosevelt rejected the religious right-wing movement and, instead, built a class-based political coalition that united rural and urban Americans, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish Americans, and began a process of bringing African Americans and their oppression into national politics.
Obama, by his first decisions on a woman's right to choose, stem cell research, the closing of Guantanamo and the ban on torture, is moving quickly and bravely in the same direction. He is telling the 'social resentment' or 'culture war' right that he is not afraid of their rhetoric and will not appease them, just as he is telling those who elected him that we will move forward to overcome the economic crisis in their interest. In the process, he is sending the message that favoring the Rush Limbaugh and tabloid news television style of political discourse – insults and divisiveness and endless scandal mongering – instead of really addressing economic and social issues doesn't enable citizens to understand anything and to act as citizens to get anything done.
