As we know, Rush Limbaugh died last week as a result of the cigars he held in his formerly nicotine-stained fingers. I leave it to you to decide what the “RIP” stands for.
The news of Rush’s death led to a LOT of negative comments on social media, which I shared in because of my current feelings about Limbaugh and the movement that he boosted. However my opinion isn’t that of a liberal who hated Limbaugh’s guts just because. I’m speaking as somebody who used to LIKE Limbaugh, and listened to his show (and to a lesser extent, Sean Hannity and Fox News) and while I may be more in agreement with liberals than I used to be, my antipathy toward Limbaugh is not because I always hated conservatism, but because I once agreed with it and hate what people like Rush turned it into. And even then, as with leftists saying “real socialism has never been tried” it’s a question of whether what I hate was a giant scam that I was persuaded had real merit or an agenda with real merit that was co-opted for a giant scam.
You have to understand, as much as some people think otherwise, politics is not eternal. I’ve already mentioned how liberals who find it hard to believe how Reagan destroyed their perfect world of regulations, upper tax brackets and unions don’t comprehend that at the time, a lot of people didn’t see that as a perfect world. I’ve heard it said, “if you remember the Seventies, you weren’t really there.” Well, I did remember that period, cause I was a kid, and unlike a lot of kids, I didn’t like drugs and didn’t like what they did to my peers. So I got to look at what was going on around me and I didn’t like it: Double digit inflation, double digit unemployment, an energy crisis, President Carter getting humiliated by the Iranians and even by a bunny rabbit. Reagan was my fuckin’ hero, frankly. If I’d been old enough, I would’ve voted for him. By the time I was old enough to vote, the Republican choice was George HW Bush. And as I said of him, he acted like Mr. Rogers when he should’ve acted like John Wayne, and he acted like John Wayne when he should have acted like Mr. Rogers.
So I was a conservative, or thought I was, and even in my conservatism I was still skeptical. I saw the whole political bag with a certain sense of humor that was lacking in most conservatives and certainly liberals. And of all the political observers, Rush Limbaugh was the least inclined to take the Beltway culture seriously. At the time, I considered that attitude a necessary corrective to politics as usual.
Rush was of course influential enough that when Newt Gingrich successfully won back Congress for the Republicans in 1994 – for the first time since 1954 – the Republicans invited Limbaugh to speak to the new Congressional delegates.
And among other things, he said, “You people in the press have got to understand something. This country is conservative, it has been for a long time. Get used to it. You tried to change it and you failed… (these reporters) were all trying to say in a roundabout way that I took a bunch of brainless people and converted them to mind-numbed robots. … there may be some talk show hosts who do that and I don’t think they’re the majority, I think the reason you’re sitting here tonight and liberals aren’t is that you understand the American people are intelligent. They are aware. They care.”
None of this is eternal. Even if both liberals and conservatives act like it is. Leftists assume that the government is built around the assertions of conservatives and reactionaries, when that was not always the case. The “conservatives” act as though the government is still built around the assertions of liberal Democrats and get-along-to-go-along Republicans, when that hasn’t been the case since at least Newt and Rush’s heyday. But both of those guys did perceive conservatism under attack, they did have a plan to get control of Washington, and they did execute it. That’s why there is still so much praise for Rush Limbaugh in conservative circles, because they remember when Rush was a serious influence on politics, hard as that may be to imagine today.
But then, it’s a bit hard to imagine today that Rudy Guiliani was once called “America’s Mayor” after 9/11. Which is for a similar reason.
Limbaugh is today less remembered for a constructive influence than a destructive one. For example, saying that Chelsea was the White House dog during the Clinton Administration. I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t care. I mean, the whole point of being transgressive is that you don’t care about other people’s peer pressure and political correctness. But a lot of us who did listen to Rush and fell out of that habit did listen because we thought conservatism was supposed to be promoting something positive. Capitalism, opportunity, the chance to make a success of yourself, and challenging government mainly when it got in the way of all that. Over the years, it became obvious that even if there was a core there, that’s not what was being advertised. Years later, I wrote that the problem with “conservative” philosophy was that there really ISN’T a conservative philosophy and that to be conservative means to be conservative relative to something. And that was the problem with trying to convey conservatism as a positive philosophy, and I think why the Republican Congress never really tried to do that even back when they aspired to ideas: “Conservatives don’t get anything done because they don’t know what they want. And they don’t know what they want because they don’t know what they ARE.”
Over the years I’d also noticed that Rush was starting to somehow… lose it, as a radio host. His voice seemed off, and he rambled. It wasn’t for some time that he announced he was going deaf, and that was only after he had to respond to investigations that he was using unprescribed painkillers. (Which wasn’t his only incident with unprescribed drugs. In 2006, he returned from the Dominican Republic and customs officials confiscated a supply of Viagra that was not in his name. After the incident, Rush told his audience, ‘I had a great time in the Dominican Republic. Wish I could tell you about it.’)
But I also mentioned in my piece that if one wants to find out what happened to conservatism, or why the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan turned into the Trump Fan Club, the mentality that led to Trump didn’t just come out of nowhere:
“Conor Friedersdorf had an excellent column in The Atlantic where he talked about how one of Rush Limbaugh’s own listeners (along with a columnist at RedState) called him on supporting Trump even when it was clear to many he would flip-flop on immigration, even when Rush said “I never took him seriously on this!”
“But that’s something I picked up on a while ago. Back when I was still conservative enough to listen to Limbaugh’s show, I remembered that right up to the last week of Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign against Rick Fazio, he was predicting that she would find some reason to back out. Or that she would end up losing. Of course, she didn’t. I distinctly remember the day after the 2006 midterm elections (when Democrats under President George W. Bush regained the House) when Limbaugh angrily confessed, “I feel liberated. … I no longer am gonna have to carry the water for people who I think don’t deserve having their water carried.” Heck, way back in 1992 (when Rush had a TV show) I remember a TV Guide cover with a blurb on an article, “Rush Limbaugh: I’m so-o-o happy Clinton won!”
In other words, whether he wanted to admit it or not, Rush was a political hack. I’d mentioned in another column that I was reminded of another incident where I deliberately tried to go over Fox News programming for a whole day to get my impressions of it, and it just so happened to be the day that Malik Hasan shot up Fort Hood, so I got to see that Fox News does have a real news operation, and the fact that there was real news to report put the midday events in contrast to the speculation of opinion pundits like Bill O’Reilly (now Tucker Carlson) in prime time, where Fox makes its real money and ratings. I said that that wasn’t the end of my watching Fox News, but I started watching it less and less, cause it felt like I’d seen the wires behind the magic trick. That’s pretty much how I felt about Rush saying that he was carrying the water for the Republican Party. Who was making the implication that he was? Wasn’t Rush the brave truth-teller against the RINO establishment? No. He was there to tell his audience to support the Party. Calling himself a water carrier was simply an admission of what should have been obvious by then.
I’ve been saying this many times, many ways, but in politics, you don’t succeed unless you give people something to fight FOR. And when Democrats didn’t figure that out, they lost to Republicans in 2004, and in 2016. Republicans won under Reagan and (sometimes) under the Bush family because they associated their party with positive traits that Americans wanted to be associated with. Apparently that’s just too hard now. Rush could have used his golden microphone to present constructive ideas for what Republicans could do, as opposed to just making fun of Democrat women and using “socialism” as a Devil word. I say this because I seem to recall in the old days that he would come up with ideas. But I guess that just wasn’t commercial. Rush Limbaugh, like Rudolph Giuliani and even Donald Trump, took his ‘tell-it-like-is’ reputation, and rather than use it to tell it like it is, became a cartoon character whose job was to amuse a limited demographic. And as with the demagogue who basically stole his act and took it to the White House, a lot of people took him as seriously as the Gospel (more seriously, in fact) when his ideas were becoming less and less serious.
Now that is okay if you see your role in the culture as being a jester or wrestling heel, but it’s not okay when you’re trying to lead the free world. Even in this country, you normally win elections by getting the most votes, and the flukes where that has not been the case have convinced the Republican Party that they can survive on the political campaign equivalent of AM radio niche programming, and that’s why they are where they are now. The first thing that right-wingers (Republican or Libertarian) have to learn is that the Left is going to call them a bunch of heartless ogres and witches whether they earn the reputation or not. Which is what makes it imperative NOT to earn it. Because if the uncommitted middle of the country can compare what woke cancel culture is telling them about you with what you actually do, and they see you are not the racist, sexist, whatever they are painting you as, you can prevail. But if you go out of your damn way to be associated with racists and other knuckle-draggers, then that’s on you. That’s how Joe Biden won Arizona, and Georgia, and the Electoral College by 74 Electoral votes, because even if Trump got more votes than he did in 2016, he got that many more people pissed at him who might not have been otherwise.
When all you have is negative partisanship, and you’re an effective minority, you’re setting yourself up to fail against a majority whose negative partisanship is earned by your actions. Of course, Biden also had positive partisanship, in that he seemed to be a real human being and professional government official, not a celebrity who made Snidely Whiplash look like Albert Schweitzer.
As National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty put it, “Many conservatives who have loathed the Donald Trump era will look back on Limbaugh’s success with regret, realizing that the talk-radio revolution was the giant leap from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.” I accidentally observed the same thing about Rush’s connection to Trump years before Rush’s death, as Trump was starting to take over the Republican Party, and concluded, “This attitude has been going on for quite some time, at least by the start of the second Obama term. The Republican Party has been Trump’s party for years. They were just waiting for him to show up.” And that’s because there isn’t a whole lot of space between Trump and Rush Limbaugh, except that Rush at least was coming off an intellectual tradition of William Buckley, Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, and what he ended up doing was making something that didn’t even deserve to be called Zombie Reaganism. His fan club, who professed to disdain empty-headed celebrity millionaires, ended up becoming “mind-numbed robots” to a radio celebrity and a “reality” TV star, only one of whom could make a claim to being a self-made man.
Among the various other NeverTrump conservative autopsies of Limbaugh, on the 19th Andrew Sullivan said (on Substack): “As with Roger Ailes, it’s stupid to deny Limbaugh’s media genius. He created an entire world for his ditto heads to live and breathe in; he mastered an often hilarious gift for self-mockery disguised as self-flattery; and he had an unerring ability to expose and prick the self-righteous humbug of pious lefties. I will confess to laughing out loud many times at his blasphemy.
“And in the context of the once-smothering liberal monopoly of mass media of the 1980s, this insurrection was ballsy and overdue. But like the Gingrich phase of conservatism in the 1990s, which also broke a long-held liberal monopoly on the House of Representatives, it curdled over time. The tribal mockery was funny when allied with a coherent and counter-intuitive defense of conservative ideas and arguments. But as the years went by, and as conservatism remained calcified in a Reaganite zombie phase, the mockery began to replace the ideas completely, faute de mieux. What was originally an argument became merely an attitude, like the grin that slowly became all that was left of the Cheshire Cat. And with the emergence of a figure like Trump, who was a walking assault on conservative ideas and sensibility, the attitude became detached from any principle but tribalism, and based itself in exactly the kind of personal cultism Limbaugh innovated for himself.
“He was as personally kind and generous, we are told, as he was publicly shameless. And it’s important to see the man as a complicated whole. But what he did to conservatism was ultimately to facilitate its demise as a functional governing philosophy; and what he did to the country was intensify its cynicism and tribalism. Few did so much to popularize conservative values; and few did more, in the end, to discredit them.”
In fact, the real summary of Limbaugh’s spirit was already written over ten years before he died: