Listen to Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham rail against John McCain. Listen, and enjoy. It is the sound of the conservative crack-up. The great, long ,pro-market, anti-government, pro-military conservative run begun by Ronald Reagan has been bankrupted by George W. Bush, and these commentators are slowly realizing that they’ll very soon be part of the going out of business sale.
The pendulum is always swinging in American history, and just as Reagan replaced the exhausted Carter and sent the country moving from left to right, something will move from right to left to replace Bush—the moderately conservative McCain, or the liberalism of Obama or Clinton. Either way, the far right’s time has past (for a while) and its cheerleaders are in a panic. No one is listening to them, most obviously not the voters (note that 70% of voters who identify themselves as conservative say they’re fine with McCain). At the CPAC convention last week, McCain was magnanimous to these people, but he didn’t have to be—the far right activists offer him very little that he doesn’t or can’t possess. Coulter and Limbaugh phumpher about supporting Clinton, but this merely shows the depth of their vanity and self-delusion. And shocking impracticality. If these commentators think they can carve out a comfortable living bashing a new democratic president like they did during the sunny nineties, they are kidding themselves. Voices will of course rise in opposition to whoever wins, but they will be new voices that are not invested in the past. The repudiation of Bush and his failed exhausted policies is also a repudiation of the blustering Limbaugh and the shrill Coulter and the condescending Ingraham. Soon they will join in has-beenhood Oingo Boingo and Wang Chung and the Flock of Seaguls, other eighties acts they were fortunate to have outlasted.