Woops! I thought I posted this two days ago, but it turns out I saved it to general drafts instead of publishing it. As part of my response to Neiwert, I promised the other day that I’d post some stuff from the book about Father Coughlin being a man of the left.  Anyway, here’s a bit of it:

This is as good a place as any to tackle the enduring myth that
Long and Coughlin were conservatives. It is a bedrock dogma of all
enlightened liberals that Father Charles Coughlin was an execrable
right-winger (Long is a more complicated case, but whenever his
legacy is portrayed negatively, he is characterized as right-wing;
whenever he is a friend of the people, he’s a left-winger). Again and
again, Coughlin is referred to as “the right-wing Radio Priest” whom
supposedly insightful essayists describe as the ideological grandfather
of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and other putative
extremists.  But Coughlin was in no meaningful way a
conservative or even a right-winger. He was a man of the left in
nearly all significant respects. ….[page 137]

…In October 1931, in a fiery speech against laissez-faire economics,
Coughlin declared that America’s problems couldn’t be
solved “by waiting for things to adjust themselves and by eating the
airy platitudes of those hundreds of so-called leaders who have been
busy assuring us that the bottom has been reached and that prosperity
and justice and charity are waiting ‘just around the corner.’” His favorite villains were “international bankers” and similar ilk. Donations and letters poured in.

In November, denouncing Hoover’s belief that economic relief
was a local matter, Coughlin made an impassioned case for government
activism at the national level. He railed against a federal government
that could help the starving of Belgium and even pigs in
Arkansas but wouldn’t feed Americans because of its antagonism to
welfare. As the presidential election loomed, Coughlin threw all his
weight behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The left-wing theocrat
swore that the New Deal was “Christ’s Deal” and that the choice
Americans faced was “Roosevelt or Ruin.” Meanwhile, he wrote the
Democratic candidate, Roosevelt, grotesquely sycophantic letters
explaining that he would change his own positions if that’s what the
campaign needed. 

FDR didn’t like Coughlin much, but, true to form, he was glad to
let the priest think he did. When FDR won, thanks in part to a successful
strategy of going after urban Catholic voters, Coughlin concluded
that he had been instrumental in getting him elected. When
FDR invited the Radio Priest to attend the inauguration, Coughlin
assumed that the president-elect saw things the same way. Over time,
he became increasingly convinced that he was an official White
House spokesman, often creating serious headaches for the White
House even as he celebrated this “Protestant President who has more
courage than 90 percent of the Catholic priests in the country.”
“Capitalism is doomed and is not worth trying to save,” Coughlin
pronounced. At other times he advocated “state capitalism”—a
phrase rich in both fascist and Marxist associations….

And from page 140:

Coughlin himself was a darling among Capitol Hill Democrats,
particularly the Progressive bloc—the liberals to the left of FDR who
pushed him for ever more aggressive reforms. In 1933 the administration
was under considerable pressure to include Coughlin in the
U.S. delegation to a major economic conference in London. Ten senators
and seventy-five congressmen sent a petition declaring that
Coughlin had “the confidence of millions of Americans.” The vast
majority of the signatories were Democrats. There was even a
groundswell among Progressives for FDR to appoint Coughlin treasury
secretary.

This was no joke. Indeed, Coughlin was perhaps the foremost
American advocate of what had become an international push
toward economic nationalism. An heir to the free silver movement,
he was a classic left-wing populist. The more “dignified” forces of
liberalism embraced him in much the same way today’s Democratic
Party embraces Michael Moore. Raymond Moley ran an article on
inflation by Coughlin in the journal he edited. Secretary of
Agriculture Henry Wallace collaborated with Coughlin in an effort
to sway the administration’s monetary policy further to the left.
Recall that Wallace (who was Alger Hiss’s boss at Agriculture) went
on to become Roosevelt’s penultimate vice president, the leading
Soviet “useful idiot” in the United States, the editor of the New
Republic, and the Progressive Party’s 1948 presidential nominee. In
1933 the League for Independent Political Action, a far-left group of
intellectuals chaired by John Dewey, invited Coughlin to participate
in its summer institute. When William Aberhart, the “radical premiere”
of Alberta, Canada, visited Coughlin in Detroit in 1935 to
discuss his own left-wing economic program, Aberhart explained he
wanted to get “the most expert advice on the continent.”

In short, when Neiwert puts Rush Limbaugh’s picture alongside Father Coughlin he’s lighting a signal flare, alerting the world to his own ignorance.