Mark Bauerlein: Rush and Race: A Guest Post by Donald Lazere
In the current controversy over whether Rush Limbaugh is a racist, he and his supporters have based their denials on what they claim are inaccurate accounts of radio and TV broadcasts. A more verifiable source, however, is the text of his two mega-best-selling books published in the early 1990s.
The following passage from pages 117-18 of The Way Things Ought to Be (1992) reads sickeningly like a Ku Klux Klan tract.
The civil rights coalition in this country has had its way with the Democratic party since 1957. That was the last time the coalition, as a liberal constituency, was defeated. The coalition includes the ACLU and the leaders of such civil rights organizations as People for the American Way and the National Association for the Advancement of (Liberal) Colored People.
How have the leaders of these civil rights organizations become so empowered? They do not have normal jobs. Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP, for example, raises money and keeps a percentage of it for himself as head of the organization. The same is true for the head of People for the American Way. They do not have real jobs, yet they have power. They derive that power by utilizing the tools of class envy and hatred.
These people enjoy power for only one reason. Their sole source of strength is their monolithic constituency -- which determines the number of liberal votes they can deliver to Democrats on election day. This monolithic constituency delivers up to 90 percent of the minority vote to the Democratic candidate for president every presidential election year. The ability of all these civil rights groups to deliver the vote for Democrats has invested them with power. This vote, in turn, has invested the Democrats with power. It's a win-win situation. [On p. 41, Limbaugh also claimed, "The Democrats love giving money to the poor because it makes them dependent upon the Democrats and helps to ensure their reelection."] . . .
It is neither far-fetched nor unfair to draw an analogy between the civil rights leadership and the Soviet Communist leadership, insofar as exploitation of their people is concerned. The leaders of both enjoy the privileges of class at the expense of the masses, who do all the work and whom the leaders purport to serve. . . . Their efforts produce no goods or services to be contributed to the economy, but in fact have just the opposite effect.
These passages are classic demagogy, inciting the prejudices of the ignorant against "these people," with a barrage of unsubstantiated, sweepingly vague slanders. (Nowhere here or elsewhere did Limbaugh explain what specific abuses he was criticizing that warranted comparison with the massacres and imprisonment of millions in the Soviet Union.) Beginning with the first sentence, I defy anyone to explain what on earth Limbaugh could have been referring to in 1957. Prominent civil rights leaders at that time included Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers, head of the Mississippi NAACP, both of whom were to be murdered by white racists. Hundreds of other leaders were imprisoned, beaten, tortured, and attacked by police dogs and fire hoses for demonstrating peacefully for these rights in the decade following 1957. Given his timeline, we must infer that Limbaugh meant to include King, Evers, and the rest in his unqualified indictment of civil rights leaders who are only out for power (an unprovable, ad hominem charge in any case).
As for their "having their way" (a sexually suggestive phrase) with the Democratic party, 1957 was the year Republican President Eisenhower desegregated Little Rock High School, against armed resistance ordered by Democratic Arkansas governor Orval Faubus. The civil rights movement was waged in opposition to the Democratic segregationists who dominated the party and Southern governments then. The Democrats nationally and in the South only came around to supporting civil rights legislation between 1963 and 1965 -- immediately after which millions of white segregationists switched to become Republicans, forming the base of Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1968. Can we again infer that passage of those laws ending segregation is what Limbaugh meant by civil rights leaders "having their way" with the Democrats since 1957? His defenders will rationalize that he only was talking about more recent leaders, not the earlier ones. But if that's what he meant, why didn't he just say so, instead of coy wink-wink-nudge-nudge innuendos keyed to that damning date of 1957?
The rest of Limbaugh's passage contains so many logical fallacies in so few words that it would take volumes to unpack them. For a sampling, his insulting account of the nature of the jobs of civil rights leaders (raising money and keeping a portion of it as salary) could be applied with equal accuracy to officials of any nonprofit organization including churches, charities, and such favorite Republican lobbies as the National Rifle Association, anti-abortion groups, and the Christian Coalition.
Or consider the logic of the claim that "the Democrats love giving money to the poor because it makes them dependent upon the Democrats and helps to ensure their reelection" -- with the implication, in context, that most of the poor are minorities. Why would any political party choose to "pander" to poor people, since they have the lowest rate of voter turnout and campaign contributions, and since -- by Limbaugh's own account -- they amount to a small percentage of the American population, even if 90 percent of the number who actually vote do vote for the same party? Wouldn't it be more advantageous to pander to the rich and middle class (and whites) -- in precisely the manner of Limbaugh and the Republicans? When Limbaugh wrote this, before Clinton's election in 1992, Republicans had won seven out of the last ten presidential elections. Which was the "win-win situation"? (Even in 2008, Obama could not have won without a substantial number of white, middle-class voters.) Limbaugh's tirade, of course, fails to recognize the possibility that Democrats might support, and be supported by, minorities and the poor out of genuine moral values, including the teachings of Christ about caring for the poor, rather than the selfishness that this avowed Christian assumes to be his opponents' motive no less than his own.
Limbaugh's other book, See, I Told You So (1993) is equally loaded with factual errors and appeals to ignorance in racial, sexual, religious, and a wide range of other issues. (The editors at Pocket Books, which has made millions from Limbaugh's books, apparently couldn't afford to fact-check them.) My favorite howler is on page 81: "Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? Yes. Read the story of Joseph and Pharoah in Genesis 41. Following Joseph's suggestion (Gen 41:34), Pharoah reduced the tax on Egyptians to 20% during the ‘seven years of plenty' and the ‘Earth brought forth in heaps' (Gen 41:47)."
One at least has to admire Rush's gall in figuring that his legion of religious conservative followers were so gullible they'd swallow this lie about one of the best-known passages in the Bible. Joseph's advice, of course, had nothing to do with taxes, but with the government laying up 20 percent of crops during the years of plenty, to consume during lean years. Sounds like socialistic stifling of the free market to me! Ditto, Rush?