What Will Rogers could teach the age of Limbaugh.

A voice of selflessness and consensus might sound out of place today, but without one, nothing we need to do will get done

No money, no banks, no work, no nothing, but they know they got a man in there who is wise to Congress, wise to our big bankers, and wise to our so-called big men. The whole country is with him. Even if what he does is wrong, they are with him. Just so he does something. If he burned down the Capitol, we would cheer and say, ~Well, at least we got a fire started somehow.

--Will Rogers on FDR's inauguration, 1933

This no-nonsense but generous welcome to the House was exactly what Franklin Roosevelt needed. After all, things in the country could hardly have been worse. When a writer for the Saturday Evening Post asked John Maynard Keynes if there had ever been anything like the Depression before, he replied, "Yes. It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years."

Of all that was said at the opening of the Roosevelt administration, it's striking that the most sensible words came not from a Brain Truster but from Rogers--a former cowboy rope twirler, star of the Ziegfeld Follies, and movie actor. Striking, but not surprising: In the early thirties, Rogers was the nation's most influential popular political and cultural voice, reaching 40 million Americans with his columns and radio commentaries. With wit and common sense, Rogers emphasized pulling together and extending a generous hand to those down on their luck. "These people that you are asked to aid, they are not asking for charity, they are naturally asking for a job. But if you can't give them a job, why the next best thing you can do is see that they have food and the necessities of life," Rogers said in a 1931 appeal for the unemployed, who then numbered 25 percent of the population. "You know, not a one of us has anything that these people that are without now haven't contributed to what we've got. There is not an unemployed man in the country that hasn't contributed to the wealth of every millionaire in America."

Delivered without sentimentality, this kind of message moved a country deeply skeptical that familiar institutions could work--a world not unlike our own. Americans then were as bewildered by the failure of banks, farms, and the market as we are now by schools, health care, and government itself. What separates us from them is that they pulled themselves out of their ditch and we remain stuck in ours, routinely registering despair with die state of the union. Sixty percent of Americans regularly tell pollsters the country is "on the wrong track."

This is not because there were better ideas or better policies in the past. There are plenty of sound programs around now on health care, entitlements, and education. Yet none seems likely to come about in the current political climate because we are missing what made America work from the thirties to the sixties: a willingness to concede the other side's point and to give up special advantages in order to advance a common good. Without that, all the reforms in the world will come to nothing.

If Rogers' successor as the country's most influential pop political voice--Rush Limbaugh--is any indication, that is exactly the dismal situation Americans now face. Limbaugh's reach is similar to Rogers': a weekly radio audience of 20 million, a nightly television show available to 99.82 percent of the nation's viewing households, and 400,000 subscribers to his monthly newsletter. But Limbaugh's tone and message is a world away from Rogers'--and a world away from generosity of spirit. Limbaugh, for example, greeted the Clinton inauguration on his TV show with an "America Held Hostage" graphic: "We are all imprisoned to the liberal idealism of the hippyish sixties, ladies and gentlemen," Limbaugh warned. "And every night we're going to remind you of it on this show."

The distinction is more than partisan: Rogers stuck up for the little guy and so tended to identify with Democrats, but he hit FDR and his party when they deserved hitting. The signal difference between Rogers and Limbaugh--and between the thirties and the nineties--is one of spirit. Rogers' voice was generous--shrewd, funny, and encouraging. Limbaugh's is childishly ironic--shrewd and funny, to be sure, but uninterested in making anybody do anything except listen to Rush Limbaugh. One was about coming together, the other is about coming apart. Consider:

* A year before the 1932 election, Rogers, who had been hard on politically conservative bankers, speculators, and the Harding-Coolidge administrations, said this of Hoover: "I know that [unemployment] is very dear to Mr. Hoover's heart and know that he would rather see the problem of unemployment solved than all the other problems he's got before him combined. . . He's had a very tough, uphill fight, and this will make him feel good. He's a very human man."

* After Clinton opened his Inaugural Address with the phrase "My fellow citizens. . ." Limbaugh ranted: "Wait a minute. Wait a minute... ~My fellow citizens'? Whatever happened to ~My fellow Americans'? You think he didn't say Americans by accident? That was on purpose, folks. I guarantee you that's exactly what this administration is all about--their stupid symbolism. You know what the problem with ~Americans' is? Americans is not inclusive enough. No, no, it does not include everybody. It alienates people out there on the fringes whose pain we are all trying to feel. There are a lot of people who aren't proud to be Americans: Native Americans, the people who don't like you to call them Redskins and Braves and all that. This is purposeful... He can't just say, ~My fellow Americans.'"

Why is the same nation that idolized Rogers now idolizing Limbaugh? One reason is that we are not the same nation anymore. Rogers lived in a time when, because the middle and working classes were basically united, he was able to urge selflessness on people inclined to be generous. By the sixties, however, that sense of community had frayed. Increasing numbers of upper income parents pulled their children out of public schools, and the draft, which mixed millions of middle class and working class men, ended in 1973. Politically, we have separated as well: As Jonathan Rauch notes in his book Demosclerosis, Americans have subdivided into lobbies at an astounding pace since 1956. That year, there were 5,000 associations in Washington; by 1990, there were 20,000. Seventy percent of Americans belong to at least one association; 25 percent belong to four or more. (It's not merely coincidental that Washington, which boasted only three fancy restaurants in the fifties and sixties--Rive Gauche, La Salle du Bois, and the Jockey Club--had a rash of upscale openings in the seventies to meet the demand for lobbyist expense-account meals.) Limbaugh comes out of a selfish world and urges self-absorption on the self-absorbed. In short, FDR could appeal to a nation that had not yet organized itself into chain-link fence manufacturers and mohair farmers; Clinton cannot.

Yet Roosevelt and his successors up to Johnson were not operating in a pastoral world of public selflessness. They too faced a country as potentially susceptible to the politics of self-interest--the politics of Limbaugh--as we are now. But Americans generally overcame their worst tendencies through the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Eisenhower years, the New Frontier, and much of the Great Society. These were days of rapidly expanding government (from Social Security to Medicare to the Tennessee Valley Authority) with rapidly obvious results (Social Security and Medicare virtually ended poverty among the elderly; TVA brought power to a huge part of the country). The building of the interstate highways and higher top tax rates on the rich (Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, 91 percent; Johnson, 77 percent) were other signs of collective national action, made possible by a national willingness to contribute.

Real reform always means sacrifice--whether it's a well off Social Security recipient taking a means test or a farmer giving up his crop subsidy. Americans were once unselfish enough to make just those kinds of sacrifices. That's what FDR counted on, and he was rewarded with sweeping re-election in 1936. All of which shows that while our problem today--a politics of self-interest--is difficult to solve, it is soluble because we have tilted the margin toward fair play before in difficult times.

A Will to Help

First, a look back. In the mid-thirties, the New York Sun wrote, "Will Rogers... has a curious national quality. He gives the impression that the country is filled with such sages, wise with years, young in humor and love of life, shrewd yet gentle. He is what Americans think other Americans are like."

Born just 14 years after Appomattox, Rogers traveled by horseback in Oklahoma as a boy and would die in an airplane crash in Alaska in 1935. In the intervening years, American life was rapidly moving from agrarianism to manufacturing. Rogers moved with the times, mastering one medium after another: Wild West shows, vaudeville, radio, newspaper columns, and movies. In the early thirties, Rogers was the most widely read columnist and the number-one box office draw in the nation--a level of popularity in different arenas almost unimaginable today. So it's telling that the public responded so enthusiastically to a man whose public persona resembled that of another figure associated with common sense and the frontier: Huck Finn. Like Huck, Rogers appealed to the best things in the American character--fair play and a throwing off of old class divisions--with a cold eye for hypocrisy and human folly. And this message resonated with people, puzzled as they were by a changing economy and changing times, who took from Rogers the lesson that the decent thing to do was sympathize with those who most needed help.

"You can never have another war in this country unless Will Rogers is for it," an unnamed "Washington statesman" told the popular American Magazine in 1930. When newspapers and magazines began calling, only half-jokingly, for a Rogers presidential campaign in 1932, it worried Roosevelt enough that he wrote Rogers, "Don't forget you are a Democrat by birth, training, and tough experience, and I know you won't get mixed up in any fool movement to make the good old Donkey chase his own tail and give the Elephant a chance to win the race." While FDR was right that Rogers' sympathies were basically with the Democrats, his politics, as Ben Yagoda defines them in a landmark 1993 Rogers biography, were more complicated than that:

His main impulse was a broad, neo-Jeffersonian

populism tempered by an across-the-board

skepticism. He had a general and

instinctive distrust of bankers, big business,

and Wall Street.... Pro-income tax

and anti-tariff, he doggedly stuck up for

the farmers, whom he (correctly) saw as

getting the blunt end of Republican economic

policies of the 1920s. He felt that

consumer buying on credit and stock-market

speculation, both of which reached unprecedented

proportions by the end of the

decade, were something close to an evil,

and he (correctly) felt they would end in

disaster. But unlike many populists, Will

was no proselytizer.

Rogers wasn't radical in any way. He dismissed Prohibition ("Talking about Prohibition is like whittling used to be--it passes the time but don't get you nowhere") and put no stock in crusaders from William Jennings Bryan to Huey Long to Woodrow Wilson.

Free of partisan baggage, Rogers conceded good points all around: As occasion demanded, he would praise Calvin Coolidge or Al Smith, Hoover or Robert LaFollette. "Suddenly, appearing to be a good sport, a regular guy, had become an important political consideration," writes Yagoda. Rogers' sympathy for right and left pressed the political debate forward and engaged established interests--from Wall Street speculators to New Deal bureaucrats--not just vaguely defined liberal or conservative ones.

Rogers, for example, ebulliently opened the Roosevelt era (remember, after kindly addressing Hoover, who was sometimes threatened with rioters during the '32 campaign), writing in the First Hundred Days, "[Roosevelt] swallowed our depression. He has inhaled fear and exhaled confidence." Two years later, however, Rogers hit both his friend in the White House and big business over the misadministration of FDR's National Recovery Administration (the arm of the New Deal intended to shorten the work week, establish a minimum wage, and let workers organize). Different industries were successfully lobbying for exemptions from the law. "The NRA looked like a good bet at the time, but part of it, in fact maybe over half of it, has proven to be nonpractical. It had all the right ideas but we are still just too selfish to see that exactly the right thing is done for the good of everybody." If we are really all in this together, Rogers said, then we ought to act like it:

Some industry can't come in and say, 'Ours is

a special and unique business. You can't judge

it by the others.' Well no committee come into

Jerusalem looking for Moses and saying

~Ours is a special business.' Moses just went

up on the mountain with a letter of credit and

some instructions from the Lord, and He just

wrote 'em out, and they applied to the steel

men, the oil men, the bankers, the farmers,

and even the United States Chamber of Commerce.

And he said, ~Here they are, Brothers,

you can take 'em and five by 'em, or else.'

Instead, Rogers pointed out, industries went to Washington and came back with "24 truckloads" worth of special interest exemptions. The overarching message? Not mindless government-bashing. Rogers never questions the need for action. He was criticizing an institution in a tone--friendly but sharp--that strongly implied the problem ought to be fixed, not just jawed about. Because Rogers talked like this, expressing and reinforcing the basic spirit of the times, it did have an effect. Middle and working class people whose inclination might otherwise have been to turn cynical about Roosevelt gave the president a break in those rocky early days--eventually sending FDR back to the White House in 1936 carrying every state except Maine and Vermont.

The Bum's Rush

Every day at noon, Eastern Time, on 638 radio stations and again late at night on television, a slightly overweight man in flowered ties intones:

Greetings, listeners across the fruited plain,

this is Rush Limbaugh, the most dangerous

man in America, serving humanity simply

by opening my mouth, destined for my own

wing in the Museum of Broadcasting, executing

everything I do flawlessly with zero

mistakes, doing this show with half my

brain tied behind my back just to make it

fair because I have talent on loan from...

God. Rush Limbaugh. A man. A legend. A

way of life.

Well. The contrast in tone from Rogers--whose signature opening was the self-effacing "All I know is what I read in the papers"--couldn't be greater. Limbaugh's self-promotion, consciously purveyed and heavy with irony, is a prelude to a message of selfishness, the worst element of an otherwise engaging conservatism.

For Limbaugh, on points of policy, is not entirely as antediluvian as his critics make him out to be. Leaving aside its uncritical adoration of Ronald Reagan, Limbaugh's creed (laid out in two books modestly titled The Way Things Ought To Be and See, I Told You So) can, at times, get at quite sensible points. For instance:

* His critique of government is hardly Know-Nothing: "Sure, I use the public streets and the post office, and if I get a disease someday I may benefit from the government's medical research. . . But the streets cost twice as much as they should and always seem to have potholes. The mail service is twice as slow as it should be. With some diseases the Food and Drug Administration keeps as many lifesaving drugs off the market as it approves."

* On the Washington press corps: "The media have covered up Congress' sins for a long time. Many journalists are lazy and they live off snacks of information passed out by congressional staffers. They love prepackaged stories they don't have to work at uncovering themselves. In return, reporters only rarely bite the congressional hand that feeds them."

It goes on: Basically clear-headed assessments of how homelessness is more the result of mental illness, drinking, and drug abuse than of a lack of affordable housing; of how criminals belong in jail; of how kids should be allowed a moment of silence in public schools.

What separates Limbaugh from others who also understand what's wrong with liberalism is that he refuses to acknowledge that polarized debate isn't very useful for the country. In fact, he epitomizes a terrible fact about American life today: Extremism, ego, and irony sell. "Remember this above all else," Limbaugh says, "my success is not determined by who wins elections, my success is determined by how many listeners I have." In other words, as long as he gets his, that's fine--the same view taken, not entirely coincidentally, by other major contemporary political forces like the American Association of Retired Persons or the National Education Association. Limbaugh is the apotheosis of the politics of ego--he is a one man special interest. He thrives on attention, and the less conciliatory he is, the more attention he gets. It's a reversal of the cycle Rogers was part of: Where Rogers was produced by a culture of selflessness and encouraged it, Limbaugh is produced by a culture of selfishness and makes it worse.

Limbaugh, for example, preaches a small-government message to an audience that zealously protects its slices of the federal pie--Social Security, Medicare, home mortgage interest deductions, veterans' benefits, civil service pensions, what have you--that add up to big government. Nevertheless, Limbaugh raves against government without really acknowledging that the people he's talking to are the same people he's talking about: Limbaugh's beloved middle class, who are "just plain tired and worn out. They get blamed for everything in this country. They are taxed more than ever. . ." Middle America, put upon by unnamed liberals, is always being asked to pay while the undeserving poor are making off like bandits. "Our inner cities are now collapsing, crime is running rampant, and yet all the money we've poured into those problems hasn't helped." And so on.

Even when Clinton does things Limbaugh agrees with, such as calling on black ministers to stop inner-city violence, Limbaugh fails to give the president credit and instead claims credit for the ideas himself. In November, Limbaugh ran a clip of Clinton's impassioned speech to ministers in Memphis in which the president said, "And then there's some changes we're going to have to make from the inside out, or the others won't matter." Limbaugh then cut to himself (of course, on his TV show, he has to cut to himself; there's one camera, trained on Limbaugh, with rows of his books arrayed behind him), exclaiming, "That's what we've been saying all along. . . And it's the government that's led to the problems that we have. And now he, all of a sudden, is coming to the store, and realizing the problem, and he's being praised for it. I just wanted you to see this, because you know they're Johnny-come-latelies on this, my friends. Got to claim victory. You just have to run around and not let them get away with stealing this issue." There is no building of sentiment for actually doing anything. Great for ratings, bad for the country.

That the ratings are so high proves that a lot of us are buying what Limbaugh is selling. By pressing people to worry only about themselves and their own problems--Clinton's stealing our ideas; he's after our money--Limbaugh reinforces the increasingly self-absorbed world that has made him a star. "I am now enjoying success in my life," Limbaugh says. "That doesn't mean I don't remember what it was like to struggle... But it would serve no constructive purpose for me to sit around and wring my hands every day over the disadvantaged, the poor, the homeless, the middle class, and others. That would be the liberal thing to do." When you think about what Rogers used to say to a similarly large audience about the same subjects, you can see how far we have traveled from better days.

What would a Rogers say today? That nobody has a monopoly on virtue or the truth, right or left, and that it's folly to act as if the country's health care, its schools, or its daily life will improve without the willingness to confront uncomfortable truths and to stand aside when it's your stake that stands in the way. That it's a disgrace for 37 million Americans to be without health insurance, for millions more to fear losing coverage, and for reform to be bottled up by those--insurers, hospitals, doctors, and irresponsible patients--who wrecked the system in the first place. That it's a disgrace for public schools to spend so much and fail to educate children, paying more for bureaucrats than for books and teachers. That people who complain about big government and the deficit ought to give up their breaks first. That the poor deserve a hand up--and even public works jobs cost the taxpayer something.

Rereading Rogers, you get the sense that there is a similar twang out there today, not from Oklahoma but further south and a little east: from Texarkana's Ross Perot. At first glance, Perot seems to be Rogers' heir in homespun wit: We are cleaning up the barn; Washington is full of alligators in alligator shoes; etc., etc. Rogers was famously generous to drought and Depression victims; Perot did his most humane work in dramatizing the plight of American prisoners of war in Southeast Asia. But Perot built his business processing government contracts by computer, and he was a master at winning special tax breaks from Congress in his business lobbying days.

The great disappointment of Perot's politics in 1992 was that while he talked honestly at first about common sacrifice and offered a tough but fair entitlement-control plan, he quickly shut up about it for fear of alienating voters. He grew content to toss more one-liners around than appeals for national action. And, once Clinton was elected, the Perot egomania that lurked just beneath the surface during the campaign broke out all over and he fell into the Limbaugh trap of criticizing the president without trying to move the country toward a working consensus. Why? Because as polarization increases, so does the audience for polarizers.

What is odd about 1994 is that while most Americans agree things are in a bad way, they register no faith in government--or in themselves--to fix them. But the country did work together once, and it did so against obstacles of selfishness--the rich's hatred of Roosevelt, the sense of lay-that-burden-down immediately after 1945--that we face again today. The country worked when we recognized that while Arcadia was no attainable, the margin could be tilted toward order and fair play-toward a Will Rogers, away from a Rush Limbaugh and a Ross Perot. And that has little to do with policy minutiae and everything to do with how we see ourselves.