The Right likes to think that intellectuals and academics like Allan Bloom and Dinesh D'Souza spurred the explosive growth of movement conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was actually mostly Rush Limbaugh.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Limbaugh can rightly be said to be the greatest populist expositor of conservatism in America since Reagan, and the link between the Reagan generation and the so-called Rush Babies.
Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, and other conservative giants are the voices of the conservative movement's conscience. Every day, millions and millions of Americans - myself included - turn on their radios and televisions to listen to what they have to say, and we are inspired by their words and by their determination.
Since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not - and more often than liberals - about most of the important issues of the day.
The reason I take Rush Limbaugh seriously is not because he's offensive or right-wing, but because he is one of the few people addressing a large group of disaffected people in this country. And despite his frequent denials, Limbaugh does indeed have a somewhat cult-like effect on his ditto heads.
I'm sure I've devoted enough thought to Rush Limbaugh for one lifetime.
At times, conservatives become defined by their volume rather than by their ideas.
I was raised by parents who really admired the religious leaders of the left, as many 60s and 70s liberals did.
Over fifteen years of studying the American Right professionally - especially in their communications with each other, in their own memos and media since the 1950s - I have yet to find a truly novel development, a real innovation, in far-right 'thought.'
In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'
The progressive movement needs more crazy and amoral/immoral right-wing politicians and pundits like Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity.