The mystifying aspect of the conservative war over Rush Limbaugh is its either-or aspect. My dear friend David Frum has taken to the cover of Newsweek to announce to liberals that the Right should cut off Limbaugh on the grounds that he is unpopular with people who are not on the Right, and because Limbaugh supposedly vulgarizes the Right. In response, my friend Andy McCarthy takes out after David Frum with a hatchet this morning on National Review, effectively writing David out of the Right for going on Chris Matthews’s show and failing to defend Limbaugh on the subject of race.

There is, in all this, a profound sense that the Right has been reduced to fighting over a few crumbs on the ground, having been judged wanting in two successive elections.

That has suggested to David and others a trend line in which more educated Americans and young people are being given no reason whatever to align themselves with the Right, and that the loss of such people represents a profound problem. This is true and it is false. It is true because that is what the data tell us about the 2006 and 2008 elections. It is false because such data are not static. They respond to events, and there is no telling what impact the events of 2009 and 2010 are going to have on these and other voters.

Andy McCarthy’s anger is a different sort of crumb-on-the-ground feeling — a sense of embattlement, of being surrounded on all sides, with one-time shipmates jumping port and leaving the remnant outnumbered, undefended, and under siege. This too is true and false. It’s true because the voices of cultural suasion in the United States — in the mainstream media, the education system, and the popular culture– have never before been quite as aligned in this sort of lockstep with the prevailing liberal power in Washington. It’s false because the Right is also more capable of reaching more people and rallying its forces more effectively than at any time in the past.

The sense of scarcity is what leads to arguments like this. But where both men are wrong is that all ideological tendencies need multiple points of entry into the common discussion —  from Rush Limbaugh to National Review Online to David Frum’s writings to COMMENTARY.  Arguments are valuable. The desire to write people or ideas out of a movement is an understandable human craving — it’s the train of thought that says, “I can’t stand listening to that, and I shouldn’t have to in my own house.” But it’s — what’s that word so beloved of the new White House? –a “distraction.”