New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait acknowledges that unlike most conservatives, who view “the civil rights movement as having wiped out the racial debt owed to black America,” Rush Limbaugh often discusses “slavery and its legacy.”
That may sound like praise for Rush, but it isn’t. In a Monday blog post, Chait claimed that Limbaugh is “obsessed” with the idea that whites don’t get enough credit for abolishing slavery and has “an almost violent revulsion against white guilt” regarding the South’s now-defunct peculiar institution.
By the way, the link to this post in Chait’s New York archive is accompanied by the following mockery (for which Chait himself may not be responsible) of Limbaugh: “He’s like Ta-Nehisi Coates, except right wing instead of left wing, and really dumb instead of really smart.” (Coates’s Atlantic cover story “The Case For Reparations” was widely debated a few months back.)
From Chait’s post (emphasis added):
Limbaugh…mused [on his October 6 show] that the Obama administration lacks the requisite fervor to fight the Ebola virus because of slavery…
…[T]he unusual thing about Limbaugh is that a great many things remind him of slavery.
Limbaugh believes Barack Obama’s economic plan was a form of reparations, and believes the same about health-care reform…Limbaugh has likewise argued that 12 Years a Slave won the Academy Award for Best Picture because it was about slavery…
The quality that sets Limbaugh’s racialism apart from that of most conservatives is its historical sweep. The typical conservative treatment of race ignores the past. Conservatives start the racial clock at 1964. This is one of the most important distinctions between liberal and conservative American thinking on race: The former regards slavery and Jim Crow as essential and still-relevant precursors to contemporary race relations. Conservatives treat the civil rights movement as having wiped out the racial debt owed to black America. The past is too distant for them.
But Limbaugh is obsessed…He does not want to forget about slavery and its legacy — he cannot stop talking about them. Limbaugh believes that, rather than a blight on white America, it should be seen, in a world-historical context, as a point in its favor:
…The white race has probably had fewer slaves and for a briefer period of time than any other in the history of the world…
But despite all that, no other race has ever fought a war for the purpose of ending slavery, which we did…And yet white guilt is still one of the dominating factors in American politics. It's exploited, it's played upon, it is promoted, used, and it's unnecessary.
…[T]hat white Americans are blamed for slavery when they should be credited for their relative lack of slavery, galls Limbaugh continuously…[E]xtended consideration of slavery and its connection with modern politics normally pushes one toward the political left. Limbaugh’s reaction is just the opposite. He cannot stop thinking about white America's plunder and mistreatment of African-Americans, and his reaction to this sentiment is an almost violent revulsion against white guilt.
