Limbaugh: Evil

As you know, I like to go slumming in the drooling craposphere of right-wing nonsense from time to time. (Actually, I like to do the same sort of thing to the left, but the real crackpot lefties are a smaller, less vocal, and less influential group, largely confined to academia; so that's a different kind of thing.) Anyway, to be brutally honest about it, I am convinced that I do this in part because it makes me feel smart. So, if I'm feeling a bit down, I can just go hunt up some conservatards (at, say, the Corner), and, voila, I'm feeling a whole lot better about myself. Whatever my intellectual failings, at least I turn out to be a fairly smart guy in comparative terms. So there! Ahhhhhh. All better...

So you'd think I'd like to listen to Limbaugh, who should be able to make just about anybody feel fairly smart.

But, weirdly, it ain't so.Limbaugh's vile rhetoric is so poisonous that even I can't enjoy listening to it. Actually, years ago I made many attempts to listen to him seriously just because that's the kind of wimpy liberal I am. If I don't even listen to him, how can I know he's wrong? I thought. Wow. That's one seriously f*cked-up guy right there, friends.

Limbaugh is, of course, largely just pathetic. He's pathetic, first, because he so desperately needs approval from his audience. He's pathetic, secondly, because his audience is pathetic as well, apparently being composed largely of morons and obsessives just this side of hard-core conspiracy theorists. And desperately needing the approval of the pathetic is doubly pathetic at the very least. He's pathetic, thirdly, because he seems to actually believe that he's unusually intelligent, and that, consequently, that he's actually making some kind of contribution to American civilization.

But Limbaugh is so genuinely contemptable that it's not even possible--nor would it be sensible--to feel sorry for him, pathetic though he is. When I happen across him on the radio, I usually can't take more than a few minutes of his bombastic bullshit because it feels like someone is pouring poison directly into my brain. The poisonous combination of sophistry and hatred actually makes me feel rather sick. Now, I'd love it if there were more serious political discussions on the radio, and I'd love to hear a serious conservative making a serious case for conservatism. I'm not only not against such a thing, I'm way for it. But that, of course, is not what Limbaugh is about.

Now, despite what some liberals think, Limbaugh isn't actually an unusually stupid fellow--not in the most straightforward sense of 'stupid', at any rate. He seems to me to be of more-or-less average intelligence. It's not that he doesn't have the intellectual horsepower to do better--it's not as if he's too stupid. At some level, he seems to realize that he's full of shit.

Limbaugh's real problems are intellectual dishonesty and epistemic incontinence. He is, in Harry Frankfurt's sense, a bullshitter: he doesn't care about the truth. He's not an inquirer--he doesn't work to have true beliefs; he doesn't aim to accurately represent the facts. He's not trying to be objective. Whereas the inquirer knows what his methods will be, but doesn't know which conclusion he'll end up with, Limbaugh always knows what his conclusion will be--it will be some version of "liberals suck." What he doesn't know is how he'll get to that conclusion. But make no mistake about it--he'll get there, by hook or by crook, in some minimal sense of "get there."

Limbaugh's M.O. is, basically, free association. He wanders around in rhetorical loops and digressions, almost aimlessly, but, as it were, always turning to the right at every opportunity. The cloud of words that he spews out always aim ultimately at his preferred and pre-ordained conclusion, but it apparently won't do to just assert "liberals suck" over and over again. What Limbaugh aims at--and what his listeners crave--is the illusion of reason and reasoning. And that is what Limbaugh provides for them. Limbaugh's musings have a kind of minimal logicality--in a minimalist sense of 'logic.' That is, there are links of a kind between many of his sentences; there's a kind of way in which one of them leads to another. He always strives to make it sound as if he's making sense. He strives to make it appear that he's reasoning, as if his conclusions follow from the minimal gestures at evidence that he provides. He makes just enough sense that people who really, really, really want to believe his conclusions can tell themselves that sense is being made, that sound arguments are being given, that "liberals suck" is being proven rather than merely asserted.

Almost none of his arguments could ever withstand logical scrutiny--but they never have to. Limbaugh is, indeed, an entertainer, mouthing words that his listeners long to hear, and providing them with a kind of rational facade for beliefs that they can't justify. His job is to make them feel good about their politics. That's what he gets paid to do. No intelligent person would ever believe Limbaugh if she weren't desperate to do so--it's passion that drives his listeners, not reason. And, unfortunately, the passions in play are usually anger and hatred. Add irrationality and the illusion of infallibility to the mix and you've got something very toxic indeed.

Some liberals have tried to produce their own Limbaugh and have lamented the fact that it hasn't worked. But that it hasn't is actually a mark in favor of liberalism--angry, irrationalist, hyper-partisan hate-fests don't play as well with liberals as they apparently do with with a fairly significant slice of conservatives. Whatever can be said against liberalism, this can be said for it: it neither craves nor tolerates it's own version of Limbaugh. Too bad we can't say as much for American conservatism.