Rush Limbaugh: The "Jaunty Optimism" of a Commoner

I just checked my blog, and I mentioned the dearly departed Rush in 109 blog posts. The first one was on June 2, 2005, when John Kerry was complaining about the right wing noise machine that was drowning out the liberal message.

I know! If only!

But I think that the thing that defined Rush Limbaugh was his "jaunty optimism." I picked that line up from some liberal sneering at Rush, but now I can't find out who it was. Because when you search for Rush Limbaugh "jaunty optimism" the first thing that comes up is yours truly: "Glenn Beck's Girl Conservatism." In that piece I say:

I once read a critic of Rush Limbaugh who lightly sneered at his "jaunty optimism." That's it, I thought! That's exactly the secret of Rush Limbaugh: his day in, day out, irrepressible jaunty optimism. It's a profoundly male thing, of course. When men are under stress, whether they are an army platoon in a tough spot or working in a business that is teetering on the edge of failure, the response is to maintain a front of jaunty optimism, to say to your brothers that things are looking up, we'll get through to the end of this, and then we'll lift our arms with a brewski.

Also, I notice, that Ronald Reagan was noted for his "jaunty optimism."

But the other thing about Rush was that he was a Commoner. Actually, he was the son of a lawyer and his brother, David Limbaugh is also a lawyer. So, in a way, Rush was born Gentry and reinvented himself as a Commoner. Because what is more Commoner than starting out as a radio-station helper disk-jockey?

Anyway, that was how he presented himself on "The Rush Limbaugh Show." Nobody here but us regular guys and our common sense. And, from what I understand, Rush never put on airs. Rush told the story of the first time he got invited to see William F. Buckley Jr. at National Review headquarters in Manhattan. Kathryn Jean Lopez:

The first time he was to meet Bill, for an NR editorial dinner, he had his driver drive around the block a few times, because he was so nervous.

Common sense is the philosophy of the Commoner. The Commoner does not try to "make a difference," as the Gentry does. The Commoner lives within the received world of the culture and the world he was born into. And Commoner men make fun of things, because otherwise life would be too discouraging. Here's an example of who Rush was. His "Environmental Wacko Pick." 

In the early days of the program, I picked football games on Fridays, and a lot of people listening didn’t care. They didn’t like football, some women and some guys. “Come on, stick to the issues!” So I devised a way to combine politics with the football picks and came up with the environmentalist wacko method. What it does, basically, is take each contest, take the teams involved, and determine who should win.

So he would go down the NFL matchups for the weekend and predict the result using the environmentalist moral narrative. Dallas Cowboys vs. Cleveland Indians? Hoo boy. It would be only right for the poor Indians to win that one. But what about the Seattle Seahawks against the Philadelphia Eagles? Hmm, that would be a puzzler to Rush, and he would wrestle with the environmentalist wacko pick where both the animals were notorious predators.

The Environmentalist Wacko Pick was pure Rush. Making a political and cultural point while skewering the opposition with a satirical take on their moral narrative. Really, nobody could beat him at that game.

They never let Rush into the Holy of Holies, never gave him a show on network TV, never celebrated him in the corridors of power. Of course not. Rush was a Commoner, not quite out of the top drawer, old chap.

No doubt that's why Chief Nancy of the Kapitol Keystone Kops tore up the speech of President Trump when he awarded Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

"Mrs. Pelosi, Tear Down This Wall."

And liberals were trying to cancel Rush Limbaugh before there was a "cancel culture." They intimidated big corporate advertisers off his show. And they canceled his foray into NFL color commentary 20 years ago. You can see why. Rush said, of black quarterback Donovan McNabb:

I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team.

Sorry Rush. You are not allowed to say stuff like that. Not nohow.

What Rush Limbaugh did, with his Sacramento show and then his national show from New York City, starting in 1988, was to save the AM radio station business from oblivion. He and his backers figured that there was an opportunity in the middle of the day, after the end of the morning drive time shows, for a political show. And there was. And how.

That is the fundamental way that the market economy works. You notice something that nobody else has seen. And you decide to take a flyer.

But here's the thing. The Rush Limbaugh Show was Rush and his monologue, Rush and the call-ins. No guests, no interviews. Just Rush. And Rush made it look simple.

Yeah. If you want to know how hard it is to be an opera singer, don't listen to Luciano Pavarotti. Listen to someone just starting out, and feel how hard they are trying. The genius of genius is to make it look simple.

The same applies to former President Trump. He made it look simple. He made everyone think he was an amateur, a fool that caught a lucky break.

Sorry chum. A guy that takes out the entire field of GOP presidential hopefuls and then beats the candidate that was supposed to be the First Woman President is not a fool.

And the guy that reinvented political commentary and created a whole new industry was not the hateful bigot that liberals wanted him to be.

Rush Limbaugh had a lot of zingers, designed to get under the skin of Gentry liberals. One of them was his self-description: "talent on loan from God." You can take it any way you want. I take it to mean that Rush Limbaugh understood that his particular talent was God-given. But it was up to him to make it work.

Rest in Peace, Rush Limbaugh.

Another Four Law. But What to Call It?

I've been pondering adding another law to my Four Laws. Did I mention what they are?

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). 

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). 

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). 

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

My fifth law has to do with our current Big Problem, that the lower part of the Ruling Class -- not the actual ruling clique but the whole educated Gentry -- overloads the political system with 1,001 different wizard wheezes for government programs. And the legal system. What we call "lawfare," where 1,001 activist groups are manipulating the legal system with attempts to mandate this or that use of government power to bend the arc of history towards justice.

One example of this problem is, of course, climate change. The whole educated class is down for the cause, and is pushing it in a hundred different programs and a thousand different legal cases. Meanwhile the media and activists and leading government scientists all turn the question into a moral crusade and stigmatize any opponent as a "climate denier."

The point is, once the educated gentry has got the bit in its teeth like this, what can the average person -- or the aggregate of average persons -- do against the flood tide of educated and expert opinion, except brace for the inevitable crash landing.

And, in the broader context, where is the justice in a system where the ruling class can bully the rest of the country into submitting to and paying for its 1,001 wizard wheezes, which are not really about making things better but flattering the activists in question into thinking that they are "making a difference?"

Because it is really hard to come up with a political program that really does make things better, rather than merely feed the conceit of the activist in question. Here's a potential maxim:

All activism comes from a place of privilege.

But that doesn't quite get where I want to go. I am thinking about the right of the average Commoner to live his life in peace without being jostled around by privileged Gentry on some conceited mission to save the world.

What I am really asking for is a political threshold that must be exceeded before an eager activist can lasso the whole of society into his moral crusade.

It goes back to the other Four Laws. Don't muck about with the economy and its prices, because 1000 to 1 you will only make things worse, Mr. Socialist. Don't think you can run the Districts from some bureaucracy in the Capitol, Mr. Credentialed Bureaucrat. Because you don't have the bandwidth to do so. Don't think you can regulate the malefactors of great wealth, Mr. Regulator, because all you'll do is get captured by the regulated. Don't start any new program, Mr. Activist, because you will cast some social/economic activity in stone and prevent its improvement.

I guess this goes back to my notion that "the Age of Politics is over." What I mean by that is that politics, the practice of civil war by other means, really should not go much beyond resolving and compromising conflicts that might lead to civil war. Anything else should be done outside of politics.

On the other hand, by meddling around in politics, our liberal friends are actually creating new instances of conflict where the people adversely affected by their noble activism may be prompted to form a head of rebellion to obtain redress against new injustices. I guess that is what I mean by suggesting that our lefty friends represent a Great Reaction. They are returning us to an age where people feel the only way to get their voices heard is by force.

RIP Rush Limbaugh.

How Not To Resist the Regime

Instead of getting on with his Gray Mirror book project Curtis Yarvin has been taking after Scott Alexander -- of Slate Star Codex and now Substack and others of the Silicon Valley "rationalist" school. Whatever that is. Scott Alexander has recently been drive-byed by The New York Times for something or other.

But Yarvin has a word for you would-be opponents of the regime. They are the Three Don'ts.

Don't Collaborate. You'll humiliate yourself. And that's the whole point of getting confessions from the dissidents.

Since the entire principle of dissidence is denial of the regime’s mandate of heaven, any voluntary collaboration with power, for any reason, humiliates the dissident.

Don't forget, Yarvin says, "As a dissident, you are nothing, you mean nothing and you are worth nothing." Yes, but what does that mean? How to do this? Yarvin says that "you can never again trust anyone who has cooperated with power"; they are rats.

The way to deal with rats around the house is the same: don’t have nothing they can eat, and you won’t have no rats.

Easy for you to say, Mencius!

Don't Repeat Big Brother's Lies. You'll humiliate yourself. And don't believe in the lies either. For instance you don't ever want to say that women are "less intelligent or any worse at math than men." But what do you say? Hey, women just aren't that interested in math? What is the truth? I don't know, but there are a lot more male nerds that female nerds. I wonder why? And women seem to be a lot more interested in relationships than men. I wonder why?

To refuse the frame is to never mouth power’s lies. Never accept its assumptions; never respect its authority; and above all, never speak in its accursed soixante-huitard jargon.

Hmm. I tend to do that all the time, to satirize ruling-class lies. 

Don't Confront the Ruling Class. You'll humiliate yourself. Why would you want to confront people that are more powerful than you are? In fact, you are doing them a favor, as the viking chief did in Congress on January 6.

Why does confrontation not work? Because you are confronting enemies who are far stronger than you...  

Confrontation feeds their energy because it convinces them of their favorite fantasy: that, on behalf of the weak and helpless, they are fighting an uphill battle against the evil and strong.

 Yes, well, but where does that leave us? Merely here:

You actually cannot replace a regime. You can only convince it to replace itself.

Like the Soviet Union in 1989. Yes, why did the Soviet Union decide to cancel itself? I can't remember, but cancel itself it surely did. Now, mind you, today's Russia is still ruled by the KGB; Putin was once an officer in the KGB or whatever it last called itself.

But you can at least say that the Reign of Terror aspect of the ruling class in Russia is over. Because Reigns of Terror and witch hunts and purges and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolutions just don't last. 

Obviously the Cancel Culture of the present era is not over. And I suppose that what Yarvin is saying is that you still want to be around after the end of today's ruling class hysteria.

So don't collaborate with the regime; don't believe or repeat its lies, and don't confront it.

Hmm. I just called Seattle City Councilman Dan Strauss about a truck-jacking right here in River City, in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood. Should I have done that? Or will Dan make a special point of making my life a hell when he gets the chance.

Not Civil War, Not Revolution, But "Social War"

The Zman just put out about the best thing I have ever read on our current situation. He calls it "Social War in the Synopticon."

He says that our current online social media world is not like Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" where the state can watch the peasants. Or like Orwell's 1984.

It may be closer to Huxley’s Brave New World, but our managerial class is nothing like the World State, in terms of intelligence and purpose. There is no Mustafa Mond in our ruling class.

In other words, I assume, there is nobody at the top that knows what they are doing, Joe Biden. No, our world is different from both Orwell and Huxley.

While Orwell could imagine a world where everyone is watched by the state, he could not imagine a world where everyone is watched by everyone. Huxley could imagine a highly ordered society controlled by a few; he could not imagine artificial intelligence.

It really is a Brave New World.

America is now a synopticon. This is a term coined by Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen to describe a society in which the few are watched by many. 

Everything we do is watched, not just by the state and its secret police, as in the movie White Nights, but by everyone. The cancel culture works by a nobody accusing a somebody of a moral crime, like the prep school kids that got NYT reporter Donald G. McNeil fired. See, Good LIttle Girl Sophie Shepherd was talking to McNeil about education and:

He responded, she recalled, that “it’s frustrating, because Black Americans keep blaming the system, but racism is over, there’s nothing against them anymore — they can get out of the ghetto if they want to.” 

Can you imagine how unsafe a Good Little Girl from a private school would feel if anyone said that within her hearing or the hearing of her friends and the friends of her friends?

The point is that the synopticon allows everyone to get in on the action.

Another key concept to this new world is the social war. In agrarian and industrial societies, civil unrest leads to civil war or possibly revolution. A civil war is when factions within the elite draft the population into their dispute. A revolution is when a new elite rises up outside the old elite and attempts to overthrow them. A social war is one in which all participant groups can be at war with one another, but also in league with one another, for reasons they do not necessarily understand. [my bold]

Obviously, the ruling class, sitting at the top of the synopticon or at least with the power to turn off peoples' ability to broadcast to the synopticon, has significant advantages. But this is nothing new; the ruling class is always in the cat-bird seat.

But in the current situation, everyone thinks "they are losing control of the social code that shapes behavior." So maybe wokism is a flailing attempt by the liberal elite and its bribed apologists to regain control of the social code.

A civil war is about control of the state. A revolution is about the same thing, with the added aspect of ideological conflict. A social war is about control of the social code, the invisible set of rules that govern human behavior.

And, I would say, nobody really knows how to fight this kind of war.

Modern society is looking like a boiling pot. The more it boils, the tighter the lid is drawn down. Inside, the increasingly aggressive and antagonistic conflict is causing the pot to boil more violently. 

Wow. This is a truly remarkable analysis of our current situation. And, I emphasize, nobody, from the glorious leaders to the deplorables down to the meanest gangbanger, has a clue how to play this game to win. If, indeed, the purpose is to win, if it is even advantageous to win. 

I gotta think about this. When you butt into a new idea you have to release it to your unconscious and let it process it, and dream about it, and spit out something back into the conscious mind. At 3:00 am.

The Kids Are Not All Right?

Because I have a strong animus against gubmint schools -- for many years I have called them "government child-custodial facilities" -- I am rather taken aback by the current conventional wisdom that kids are depressed and suicidal because they can't go to school.

Wat?

But here is Salena Zito writing about the travails of the daughter of a "hospitalist," Dr. Paul Carson, of Pittsburgh, who has gone from an A student to a D student, because "I have nothing to look forward to."

Wat?

So, Doctor Paul, whatabout a spot of homeschooling? Whatabout a micro-school with your Doctoral pals? Whatabout a "learning pod," whatever that is? A month or two ago, on my regular evening walk, I came upon a couple of families -- with kids roaring around before my eyes completely out of control: yay! -- who were sending their kids to a "micro school." And these were doubtless completely conventional gentry liberals of North Seattle.

Here's the problem for me. In my reading about homeschooling, I get the impression that kids that are homeschooled are streets ahead of gubmint-schooled kids when it comes to social skills and learning skills. They are self-motivated. Because, I assume, they have not been kept in gubmint child-custodial barracks during their impressionable youth where all they had to do was follow orders.

But if kids that normally go to gubmint schools go all to pieces if they can't go to their gubmint schools... Well to me it says that the problem is bigger than I thought. I mean: to me, schools with their ranks of desks and their teachers up front and their tests and their grades -- well, in my dotage, where I am always trying to think Bad Thoughts, I am coming to think that schools are military basic training for... For what? Life as a cubicle worker?

As a kid born to Brits in India, I am sensitive to what generally used to happen to Brit kids in India. They were sent home to Britland, maybe to board with a relative, and sent to boarding school.

Then there is the case of Rudyard Kipling and his sister that were sent home from India and spent years boarding at the "house of desolation." Boy, can you spell child neglect?

On the other hand, my mother, born and raised in Japan, always regretted that her parents did not send her back to Britland to go to boarding school.

Now, my parents moved from India back to Britland when I was two, and I went to private schools, going to boarding school from the age of 10, I think. It all seemed perfectly natural to me.

My only regret in my youth was that I feel that I would have preferred to be around adults more instead of around kids my own age. When you go to boarding school you are around kids your own age 24-7. See, I tended to think that kids my own age were idiots, and I might have learned a lot from being around older people. By the way, there was almost no bullying, as I would understand it.

See, I tend to think that, given how we treat kids -- following the latest religious or political fad -- it's a bloody miracle that kids grow up to have a decent adult life at all.

And then there is the curious phenomenon that IQs in the western world are going down. Whereas, earlier in the 20th century, according to the Flynn effect, IQs were going up. Until they started down.

You think that there is a problem? If so, I wonder what it is.

But Tear Gas and But Hate

I had my jolly little phone chat with Seattle City Councilman Dan Strauss yesterday, and here are my takeaways.

When it comes to policing, Year Zero for Strauss is the occasion of the mostly peaceful protests in Seattle in 1999 against the WTO. You can see what the ruling-class conventional wisdom is, from La Wik's "1999 Seattle WTO protests" with a picture of Seattle Police doing a spot of pepper spraying.

That's interesting to me, because Dan Strauss, born in April 1986 according to La Wik, would have been 13 at the time of the riots. Was he on the street back then? Or his social-worker parents? Why exactly would a 13-year-old be exercised by the WTO protests? Was he pepper-sprayed? Or one of his parents?

So Dan Strauss is interested in reducing the Seattle Police Department use of violence and tear gas and pepper spray. At least, that is what I understood from his comments.

Later on I introduced the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" moral narrative -- Allyism -- and proposed that it was problematic to describe the world with a moral narrative before you have described the world with a descriptive narrative. 

I advanced my reductive Three Peoples theory as an example of a descriptive theory, that tries to understand the world before judging it. Mind you, the idea of a descriptive narrative rather than a moral narrative is incredibly modern and progressive. If we are dealing with ancient religion, the whole of creation is subject to the wrath of the gods, and, as Mircea Eliade argues in his Myth of the Eternal Return:

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

See, I'm so sophisticated that I hesitate to blame my neighbor's malevolence for all the sins of the world.

And the narratives that arose later in the Axial Age are all moral narratives, too.

I went on to mention to Dan the virtue-signaling yard-signs so common in the gentry liberal neighborhoods of North Seattle that Dan represents: the Black Lives Matter, the #WeBelieve, the Hate has no Home Here signs.

In response Dan Strauss muttered about Hate. At least that is what I understood him to say.

Unfortunately I did not get in my Hegel zinger, that Hegel says that the thing is the same as its opposite, as in the north pole and the south pole of a magnet: the same, only opposite. On this notion, when you are exercised about racism as an noble anti-racist you are really putting yourself on the racist's level: obsessed with race. And if you are fighting Hate, you are probably a hater, because after all, you hate the Haters. Right?

The joke, to me, is that our liberal friends have become precisely the people they have criticized all these years. They used to rail against McCarthyite witch-hunts -- although back in the day Hollywood actually took fairly good care of the Commies in their midst. Now they get people fired for their political beliefs. They used to rail against censorship: now they applaud it. They used to sneer at enthusiastic Christianity and its obsession with sinners. Now they are obsessed with sinful racist-sexist-homophobe Haters.

Like they say: be careful who you choose as your enemies, because you will become them. 

Well, well, well. It's Nietzsche who said that:

Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that's who you become most like.

Or Marcus Aurelius arguing the opposite:

The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.

Or Sun Tzu:

To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy. 

Golly Geewillikins. Who knew?

But it does raise the question of how we deal with our liberal friends. Really, we don't want to wipe them and their hatey-hate Hate from the face of the Earth. We know that if we were to wipe out all liberals they would just be reborn as something just as foolish and knavish. Correction: as something more foolish and knavish.

Hey liberals! Ever thought that if you utterly cancel all the bitter clingers and deplorables they will return as something far worse?

And, of course, it is my conceit that I understand liberals and the left, that they are reactionaries lurching back to the past, that their activism culture is a kind of neo-Quixotic movement, pretending to be revolutionaries way after the end of the Age of Revolution.

And it is my belief that liberals, devoted to the idea of the creative life, of making a difference in the world, have totally misunderstood how the creative life works. It is not a triumphant bending of the arc of history, but a harrowing journey into the unconscious that, if successful, may well end in the death of the Sacrificial Hero rather than the applause of a grateful world. As I rehearse in my Good Life concept.

But hey, if the gentry liberals of North Seattle want a councilman concerned about police brutality and Hate, why, they got exactly what they want in Dan Strauss. Bless their hearts.

What Do You Say to a Progressive Seattle Politician?

I'm scheduled to have a phone conversation this afternoon with my progressive Seattle Councilman Dan Strauss, who was elected in 2019 over a slightly less progressive Heidi Wills. Heidi showed up at my yoga class, where I used to like to zing the teacher Jim, who would always have the conventional wisdom line from The New York Times or The Atlantic.

What should I say to Dan?

I think that I will ask him about Defund the Police.

First, I will ask him which activist groups are pushing it. Is it just Black Lives Matter, or is it a whole phalanx of activist groups?

Then I will ask him what he thinks is the problem? Police brutality? Gang warfare? Systemic racism?

Then I will tell him about my understanding of the problem, from liberal journalist Jill Leovy, author of the 2015 book Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America. I'll tell him that I wrote about the book back in 2015 "The Real Problem 'Ghettoside.'" See this is how Leovy reports it.

1. Blacks in the inner city are mad as hell because murderers never get caught.
2. Blacks in the inner city are mad as hell because the police are always harassing young men on the street.

There is a very good reason why murderers don't get caught. It's because of "snitches get stiches." The gangs intimidate witnesses so they won't testify at trial, although "everybody knows who done it." BUt everyone is still mad that the perps don't get perped.

The police react to this situation in a sensible way. Since they "know who done it," they harass the guys "who done it" for minor street crimes. And everyone is mad about that.

What to do? Well there is something. I read once from a policeman that the dirty little secret of successful policing is informers. If you have informers you can bust up the gangs. And the murdering is all about gangs defending their turf and conducting border warfare. Also, of course, since a lot of economic activity in the inner city operates outside the law, the folks in the inner city can't call on the police for help when illegal activity is involved.

And that includes simple off-the-books employees.

Yeah, that's a problem. The gangs exist because of the marginal economy in the inner city that operates on the edge of legality, because uneducated people and unacculturated people often can't get well-paying jobs above the minimum wage, or union jobs because they don't have the connections.

Gotta be careful not to get too far into the reeds.

But maybe I'll tell him the story of Lady Marjorie's fencing contractor. See, Marjorie had some fencework done and was not happy with the work so she stopped the check she had just written to the contractor. A short while later, a check-cashing facility called! The contractor was getting cash on the check with which to pay his off-the-books Mexican workers. So I wrote about this at American Thinker and pretty soon got an email from an auto mechanic in Florida. He said that it was almost impossible to get and on-the-books job, and that was a problem because he needed a credit record to get a home mortgage, and for that you need an on-the-books job.

Oh well, it's an imperfect world, and it's tough trying to bend the arc of history towards justice.

Then, I think I'll ask him about Allyism, about the three layer social analysis of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors."

Where does he fit in there? As an Ally? Or as a "white oppressor?" And what about tech billionaires and CEOs? Are they white oppressors or are they allies because they donate to BLM and censor "far right" insurrectionists?

Then, maybe, I should ask him about Defunding the Police now that we know from January 6 that the real problem in  America is "far right" insurrectionists, which are so big a problem that the usual practice of freeing people accused of crimes without bail has been suspended. And we need 30,000 National Guardsmen in Washington DC, while we didn't need them in Seattle and Portland last summer.

Don't you think, I'll ask him, that the post January 6 events are something of a "tell" from the ruling class? Are they not saying that BLM and AntiFa are nothing to worry about, because they are the street thug of the ruling class. whereas Trump insurrectionists are an existential threat that needs immediate action and overwhelming force.

Maybe I'll even have time to offer my reductive Three Peoples theory that experiences America not as a moral drama but as just three kinds of people trying to live their lives: Creative people that want to make a difference; Responsible commoner that want to follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law; and Subordinate clients that want their lives protected by political power

I wonder how it will actually go down.