Limbaugh: Our link to
Reagan conservatism

Saturday July 26, 2008

By Ellis Washington

Editor's note: This column is one in a series of WND tributes this week to Rush Limbaugh by our columnists in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of his national radio program Aug. 1.

Rush Limbaugh

[T]here's no reason to be afraid of these people [the liberal establishment]. There's no reason to cower. Whenever somebody is coming at you with lies and a false premise, you don't accept the lie, you don't accept the false premise. You just laugh at them, and you fight back, and you ram it back down their throats.

~ Rush Limbaugh, Oct. 19, 2007, interview on FoxNews' "Hannity and Colmes"

Harvard University, circa 1988

My first memory of Rush Limbaugh was 20 years ago. I was an idealistic young man of 26 walking around the campus of what many consider liberal Mecca – Harvard University. I expected to have a drama-free, wonderful life backed by the stamp of approval of a big-name school. However, like with most pessimistic people, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak. I didn't have to wait long.

The narrative below was in part cited in an earlier autobiographical column, In that piece, I cited the critical event that lead me to shift my intellectual allegiance from liberalism to conservatism during a fateful conversation I had with several Harvard graduate students at a party, when I had the unmitigated temerity to question the underlying suppositions of the modern feminist movement (here, think Michelle Obama before her makeover). The excerpt reads:

These three erudite, classy, intelligent black Harvard graduate students surrounded me and suddenly transformed themselves into Lady Macbeth, Nurse Ratchet and Hillary Rodham Clinton as they in unison went nuclear on me. They read me the riot act and essentially characterized me as a crazy, uninformed idiot.

From another room, my buddy Leon heard all of the commotion and rushed in to my aid, but his altruism and intervention was all to no avail. I and I alone had committed the unpardonable sin of liberalism – Thou shalt not have an independent thought (apart from liberal dogma).

After the party, I knew that my political and intellectual life would never be the same again. Like Caesar, who with his Roman Legions boldly marched onto Rome in 49 B.C., I had now crossed the Rubicon and had forsaken liberalism forever.

This night I became a conservative.

From that point forward, I determined to set my own intellectual milieu at Harvard as I began the arduous task of self-educating and learning about the principles of conservatism. I wrote:

The year 1988 was a time of great angst for the largely liberal faculty and student body at Harvard because (in their view) America had greatly suffered for eight years under a Ronald Reagan administration. Many of my own people to this day consider Reagan the Antichrist. Why? Because the number of letters in his name, Ronald Wilson Reagan, amount to the number of the Antichrist of the book of Revelation – 666.

Like any new convert, I set upon the task of educating myself regarding the tenets of classical conservatism. I got a subscription to the National Review and the Conservative Chronicle and read every book I could find in the used bookstores by Bill Buckley, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork and others. I also studied the political speeches of President Reagan.

One of the influences helping me grow in conservative philosophy that I neglected to mention in that piece was the path-breaking, conservative intellectual, Rush Limbaugh, whom I started listening to around November 1988 just three months after he started his national show. Rush's influence on my own intellectual development came in myriad forms, but primarily through the way he articulated his conservatism with such clarity, force, confidence and humor – characteristics he maintains to this day.

Lately, particularly during this presidential election and the many debates between the candidates, Rush has literally been on a one-man crusade in his yeoman's efforts to educate the public in the basic principles of Debate 101 – Never accept the premise of your opponent [liberals].

For example, during an interview last year on Fox News' "Hannity and Colmes," Rush made the following prescient remarks on the proper and improper way to debate liberal Democrats:

[T]here's no reason to be afraid of these people [the liberal establishment]. There's no reason to cower. Whenever somebody is coming at you with lies and a false premise, you don't accept the lie, you don't accept the false premise. You just laugh at them, and you fight back, and you ram it back down their throats.

This quote alone contains all of the genius that is vintage Rush – rational, trenchant, unapologetic conservative ideas stated in his patented jovial manner with a modicum of satire. Satire to Rush is the sword he wields so skillfully to bring his intellectual and political enemies to their knees.

If the Republican Party and the conservative movement can avoid shriveling up and dying on the vine, so to speak, they must accept Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and other radio talk-show hosts' open invitations to appear regularly on their shows.

If the GOP wants to win the presidential election, McCain and the Republican Party must stop their quisling behavior and return to unapologetic Ronald Reagan conservatism. Paraphrasing the ideas of Rush: Stop accepting liberal premises on policy differences by throwing the conservative base of your party under the bus to curry favor from the liberal media. In the end, they still hate your politics and will not vote Republican.

The American public is not stupid. They would rather vote for an authentic FDR-liberal like a Hillary Clinton or a certified socialist like Barack Obama any day before they vote for a Neville Chamberlain-like opportunist that is John McCain. In other words, people prefer an authentic original rather than a moribund copy.

That's how Ronald Reagan won 44 states in 1980 and 49 states in 1984. The American people plainly understood that Reagan was an authentic American that loved God, his country and her people above all else. Like Reagan, Rush is also an authentic American that loves her people and her unique traditions of liberty.

Rush was recently rewarded with the second largest radio contract in history. Real businessmen know that truth and authenticity sells, and that's why they clamor to advertise their products on the 600-plus stations that carry Rush's prescient radio show.

Twenty years ago, Rush, through the vehicle of the virtually dead AM radio signal, together with his singular, unshakable belief in the transcendent ideas of Ronald Reagan conservatism, free-market capitalism and rugged American individualism, continued a revolution that Reagan eloquently spoke of at the 1964 and 1976 Republican conventions, that William F. Buckley gave an intellectual voice to when be began National Review magazine in 1955 and that tens of millions of Americans have supported and championed in living their daily lives, by aspiring to the transcendent ideas and ideals of Jefferson – "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Thank you, Rush, for mentoring me 20 years ago when you first began your radio show and when I was a new convert to the dynamic conservative movement; a young graduate student roaming precariously in the liberal wilderness, yet daily I heard your clarion call to Veritas (truth). We need your leadership now more than ever as you help give vision and direction to the conservative movement 20 years into the future.

Exceeding gratitude to you, Rush, for teaching the legions of conservatives here in America and all over the world, who daily wage battle in the arena of ideas, to never, ever accept the tyrannical, sophistic premises of leviathan government liberalism – for if one does so, the argument is lost before it begins.

Ellis Washington, former editor at The Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including "The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law" (2002), "Beyond the Veil: Essays in the Dialectical Style of Socrates" and He has just completed the manuscript to his latest book, "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust" (2007).

Washington's latest book, "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust," can be pre-ordered by calling 800-462-6420, promotion code "UPREPUB."

NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted material herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For further information please refer to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

Back to Top

Back to Ellis Washington Articles