By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I have been a big fan of Rush Limbaugh’s program since it first hit the airwaves in New York City in 1988. I listen to at least a half-hour, almost every day. Do I agree with everything Rush says? Of course not. Nonetheless, my first impulse, when a substitute host takes his place, is to turn off the radio and go about my business, even when the guest host is informed and articulate. No one matches Rush’s ability to both inform and entertain.
What is unique about Rush is that he gives the impression that he knows something of consequence about conservative writers such as Edmund Burke, Ludwig von Mises, Russell Kirk, and James Burnham; that he has wrestled with the difference between the traditionalist and libertarian wings of the conservative movement, unlike many of the blustering and repetitive conservative talk-show hosts of today.
There is one thing, however, about Rush that I have learned to take with a grain of salt: his broad and simplistic generalizations. I accept them as Rush’s way of being entertaining and provocative. As he says quite often, his first job is to hold and maintain his audience for the sake of ratings and “obscene profits.”
Do I have an example? Yes. I would say Rush’s insistence that Democrats want to “keep people in poverty to expand their voter base.” That’s a stretch. There may be some party operatives who think that, but the run-of-the-mill Democrat is genuinely looking for a way to help the poor. They may be wrong about the big government programs they favor to achieve that end, but they do not want to “keep people poor.”
There is another example I would have given — until recently. It is Rush’s contention that “the modern environmentalist movement has become the new home of Communism.” Rush’s point is that Marxists see the environmental cause as a way to promote government control over industries as the only way to achieve the low levels of carbon emissions that environmentalists favor.
The problem for me is that I have never heard Rush come up with specific statements from anyone on the left to support this contention, other than comments from fringe groups that few observers take seriously. Hillary Clinton would laugh off Rush’s proposition as just another example of “a preposterous right-wing conspiracy theory.” It doesn’t matter whether Hillary is sincere. It is a line that she can sell.
Until now. Rush has been vindicated: Theorists who would be considered respectable in mainstream academic circles are now making the specific case that Rush has alleged is part of the environmentalists’ agenda. In the September 25 issue of Commonweal, Eugene McCarraher, associate professor of humanities at Villanova University, reviewed two books — Capitalism in the Web of Life by Jason W. Moore and After Nature by Jedediah Purdy — that argue capitalism must be ended to save the planet.
McCarraher points out the common denominator between these two books: the insistence that things like “eco-friendly cars and installing more efficient light bulbs” are not enough to solve climate change. The problem, the authors argue, is that “Americans want change without changing too much; the preservation of the American Way of Life remains paramount.” Beyond that, large numbers of Americans continue to “deny the scientific evidence” of climate change. This is why, in McCarraher’s words, Purdy “worries that democracies will be inadequate to the task of averting ecological disaster.”
This is where Marxism comes in. Capitalism, writes Moore, relies on “organizing nature” for productivity and profit, the availability of “low cost energy and materials,” on “cheap Nature.” According to McCarraher, Moore sees capitalism as “an insatiable ecological predator, always on the lookout not only for new forms of human life to commodify, but also for new untapped ‘frontiers’ of unpaid work/energy.” Moore argues we are on the verge of an insurmountable ecological crisis, as the “infinite character of capital’s demands” inevitably confront “the finite character of the biosphere.” In Moore’s eyes, writes McCarraher, “Socialism would therefore constitute an ecological revolution in which nature itself was the proletariat.”
Moore relies on the socialist contention that socialist governments will run the economy not for profit, but to serve the interests of the community, that socialist governments will produce the goods and services we need without despoiling the environment. Capitalists, in contrast, because they put profit above all else, will continue to pollute, just as they exploit workers and consumers. They must be removed from power to save the planet.
Your guess is as good as mine as to how Moore explains the ecological horrors — the pollution of the soil, air, and water — that the governments in China and the former Soviet Union were responsible for in their attempt to industrialize. They were Marxian socialist systems when the pollution occurred. They both were dictatorships that had no need to convince their people of the realities of global warming. They polluted anyway.
Jedediah Purdy’s analysis is slightly different. He makes his case by focusing on an idea that he contends has been held by Americans since colonial days: the belief that God intended mankind to “master nature” to satisfy its needs. Purdy argues this belief is rooted in an interpretation of the passage in Genesis about humans being given power over “the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth.”
This is why Purdy frets that “democracies will be inadequate to the task of averting ecological disaster.” Democracies, Purdy contends, have been “failures” when it comes to imposing “self-restraint.” He is right about that, of course. It is not only tycoons and plutocrats who have polluted the environment. Blue-collar miners, ranchers, and lumberjacks have been just as responsible. To end this behavior, Purdy urges us to see nature not as “natural capital,” but rather as “a Sister, Brother, or even Comrade.”
McCarraher understands how these words may make “Purdy sound like some Franciscan-cum-Marxist” to readers. He seeks to calm their fears by assuring them that what Purdy is proposing is a “moral attitude and mode of experience” rather than a call for violent upheaval.
Fair enough. Even so, McCarraher concedes that Moore’s and Purdy’s theses center on the dangers of a “commitment to unlimited economic growth, as common on the left as on the right,” and on how this commitment “makes a democratic resolution to our ecological turmoil appear so improbable. The hope that the American Way of Life can be green-washed is as pervasive as it is futile.” This is what Rush has been arguing for decades is the hidden agenda at the heart of the environmental movement.
What does Rush always say? That he is “97.8 percent correct”? His percentage has just gone up.
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