You know of course that Rush Limbaugh is gone. You also know that many people are dancing on his grave singing hallelujah. You might be one yourself.
I am not hear to dance upon his grave, as I’m generally not into grave-dancing. Actually I normally wouldn’t post anything at all, but as a political junkie who worked in radio (to include news/talk radio around the time that Limbaugh and conservative talk radio in general was ascending*), I feel compelled to say something.
And that’s only really because of this piece by Conor Friedersdorf dunking on conservatives who have been giving Limbaugh credit for advancing conservatism in America throughout his career. Friedersdorf argues this isn’t true. Many liberals have responded along the lines of “oh yes he jolly well did”.
It’s possible many of the latter group didn’t read past the standfirst. Friedersdorf is specifically referring to “conservatism” as the political and economic ideology championed by the likes of William F Buckley and Milton Friedman – the general ideology of small govt, free trade, balanced budgets and personal responsibility. Friedersdorf argues that conservatism as defined above has been on the decline since Reagan left office, and while Limbaugh kicked off his career pushing a Reaganesque conservative agenda, he eventually abandoned it (as did the GOP in general) in favor of the current GOP ideology of culture wars, manufactured outrage, lib-pwning and the defense of Straight White Christian America at all costs.
Therefore, Friedersdorf says, Limbaugh was never the champion of conservatism that modern conservatives make him out to be.
And ... well ... okay.
But ...
The question, I suppose, is whether conservatism can be fairly and accurately defined strictly as an economy-based political ideology.
I don't think it can.
For one thing, you have social conservatism, which has been around in the US for a long time but became a serious political force in the 1960s and went mainstream during Reagan’s term, thanks in no small part to the rise of the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition. From that point on, the GOP spent as much time talking about traditional “family values” (and the alleged left-wing agenda to destroy them in favor of turning American children into gay Commie Satanic baby-killing multicultural dope fiends) as they did about free trade and tax cuts. By the mid-90s, social conservatism was inseparable from economic conservatism as far as GOP ideology was concerned.
While Limbaugh was never a conservative Christian in any meaningful sense, he was definitely onboard with social conservatives in terms of their basic political stances, even if he mainly used them as a way to bash liberals over the head. (Fact: Limbaugh was triggering libs before triggering libs was cool.)
Meanwhile, by the time Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution brought their Contract With America™ to Congress in 1994, the GOP had adopted a noticeably and increasingly more aggressive tone in its rhetoric – they weren’t just opposed to liberal policies, they were ANGRY about them. Anger and indignant outrage increasingly became the default setting for the GOP as the party tapped into (and encouraged) the anger, fear and frustration of their mostly white base that lived in fear of liberals turning the US into Cuba, or whatever they thought the Radical Liberal Agenda™ was. The other side of the aisle was no longer mere opposition – it was the Enemy of America. The GOP became less interested in bipartisanship and more interested in demonization, polarization and obstruction.
By perhaps no coincidence, conservative talk radio was expanding fast by exploiting that particular fear, and Limbaugh was leading that charge. Things took off from there, and now here we are in an era where the GOP is now the Trump Party that lives in a universe of alternative facts where libs are demonic anarchists who stole the election and are out to cancel white culture etc and so on.
So basically I’m not convinced by the argument that Limbaugh didn’t advance “conservatism” in the Buckley/Friedman sense, because that’s too narrow (and slightly dishonest) a definition of what “conservatism” has become. Friedersdorf kinda touches on this, and acknowledges that the GOP is no longer the party of Reagan in an economic-policy sense. But the party of Reagan was also the party of social conservatism, which Limbaugh and the GOP exploited to varying degrees of intensity for the last 30+ years to the point that the resulting culture war is now the dominant ideology. The economic side of GOP conservatism is now limited to ensuring that rich people live as tax-free as possible and this will somehow benefit the rest of us. (Spoiler: it won’t.)
Ironically, of course, many people who call themselves conservatives in the modern 21st Century sense still tend to fancy themselves as liberty-loving tax-cutting small-govt Reaganites. But at least some of those are from the conservative intellectual crowd who lost their usefulness around the time that Sarah Palin became a household name. They’re also being disingenuous – the GOP hasn’t embraced any meaningful form of economic conservatism or fiscal responsibility for decades. Even Reagan raised taxes, and he also more than doubled both the deficit and the national debt. In my lifetime, the deficit had only even gone down during Demo admins, not Republican ones. (There are complicated reasons for this – I'm just saying.)
Limbaugh himself occasionally complained about this and went after who he considered to be RINOs. But he ultimately went along with it, I think, because the Loud Angry White Populist schtick of the GOP suited his radio style. He was always a demagogue and an outrage merchant, and he delighted in stoking white fear of a black planet under Obama. Trump was the first President to successfully trade in the kind of xenophobic white-identity insult comedy that Limbaugh had pioneered.
Rush is often credited with countering the alleged liberal narrative of the Mainstream Media™, but it’s more accurate to say he helped create a new conservative narrative for an alternate universe that only ever made sense if you never questioned it. Which of course was part of Limbaugh’s whole brand – his loyal “dittohead” audience openly bragged about believing every word he said without question, if only to make the libs scream in frustration.
Limbaugh didn’t do that on his own, of course – he had help from fellow radio hosts, Fox News, right-wing bloggers and the GOP in general. But his dittohead army was arguably the rock upon which the Trump Party built its alt-realty church.
So in my opinion, Limbaugh didn't just help advance conservatism in America – he played a role in transforming it to the ugly hateful beast it is today.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk, etc.
*FULL DISCLOSURE: I worked at a news/talk radio station from 1994 to 1996 in Southern Illinois, but we didn’t carry Limbaugh’s show. Our mainstay was Chuck Harder, who at that time tended towards centrist populism of the kind you typically heard from Ross Perot, Pat Choate and Ralph Nader. He also entertained Clinton conspiracy theories.
Radio silence,
This is dF
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