Defecting from the Culture Wars
James Hampson
January 1, 1999
The best thing about the year 1992 was the arrival of Rush Limbaugh on the national scene. On the ailing AM side of the radio dial there suddenly appeared a crisp, clear voice articulating principles I not only agreed with, but felt passionately in my heart. There had never been a conservative voice like this before. Rush spoke out unabashedly for personal empowerment of individuals rather than the liberal alternative of the welfare nanny state; he advocated bringing moral teaching back into our public schools; and he threw a gigantic floodlight on the hypocrisy of the American left. He was a phenomenal orator—charismatic, witty, and entertaining, incisive and intelligent. He stuck to his principles and gave hope to conservatives across the nation that what we believed in—the America of our fathers—was right, good, and worth standing up for. It was a welcome surprise for me, a life-long conservative and a born-again Christian since age fifteen. In the 1980s, when I was in high school and college, I had wholeheartedly supported Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. In my college years I read Paul Johnson's Modern Times and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, two landmark intellectual forays into the decline of moral culture of America and the loss of absolute values in light of a new hedonistic philosophy masquerading as ethical relativism. After graduating from Sewanee with a British history major in 1989, I had moved to the progressive southern city of Atlanta, where the liberal media establishment was alive and well. They would make every effort to uncover an extreme example of the religious right and put it on the front page to demonstrate what they called "bigotry." At the same time, they kept the unsavory excesses ...
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