Ellen Goodman in the Miami Herald this morning found that the absolute worst epithet that Liberals could find to use about the sickness of a drug user is that Rush Limbaugh is a “hypocrite”. Ms. Goodman calls Liberals, who do not fight for their principles against unprincipled conservative attacks, “wimps”. Neither “hypocrisy” nor “wimp” quite catches the nuances in the war of words and legislation going on between the two forces in America today.
A stable nation swings between contending philosophies in a two-party political system. England and the United States represent good examples of this. The pendulum takes about eight years here to correctly depict the differences between the parties and the political switch in power. In a Russian Revolution sense, there was a division between the revolutionaries and the Monarchists. Among the Revolutionaries on the Left, there were two parties, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks who can be described effectively as those who wish to make revolution slow and those who want it fast. In Russia, back in the first two decades of the twentieth Century, left-wingers warred against a conservatism that allowed a tiny monarchical elite to sit on top of a pyramidal base of workers and serfs (land slaves) who could not be distinguished from the peasants tied to the land by Constantine in the early years of the Christian Centuries.
Our two party system breaks down into parties of wealth (including the middle-class of middle managers and mom and pop business establishments) on the right and all others, topped by once formidable Liberal intellectual leaders on the left. Simplified, this line up could be described as leftist progressives pitted against conservative reactionaries on the right. It is hard not to use the kind of language that Rush Limbaugh and his clones have honed to a cutting edge in this situation.
Bill Clinton is celebrated in some quarters for seizing the middle between extremes and making it work for a few optimistic brief years. Along came a stolen election and the Ruthless Right used every mean trick in its catalogue to elevate the scion of a old money, oil rich family whose presence in national and world politics was reached in a pinnacle of the Gulf War that was against Saddam Hussein/Iraq.
Rush Limbaugh, missing from his daily pedestal, has been replaced by surrogates who cannot quite match his vitriol and vicious attacks on anything to his left. “Hypocrite” is not strong enough, but Ellen Goodman is on the mark when she calls Liberals “wimps”. Mr. Limbaugh deserves a stronger label for the terrible damage he has caused to the universe of discourse. “Liar” is too easy on him. We need a better all-inclusive term to describe the revulsion his monologue prompts.