Limbaugh set the tone for the internet age of politics, calling women’s rights activists “feminazis”, referring to HIV/Aids as “Rock Hudson’s disease” and claiming “environmentalist wackos” were “a bunch of scientists organised around a political position”. His broadcasts, featuring attacks on opponents as purveyors of “fake news”, became the template for TV’s Fox News, and at its peak this approach played a big part in Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” of 1994, which recaptured the House of Representatives from Bill Clinton’s Democrats. Much of that is due to social media that gives everyone a megaphone but not necessarily the wisdom to use it judiciously, some surely to the Limbaugh legacy where hardly any asininity is considered beyond the pale.Rush Limbaugh, who has died aged 70 after suffering from cancer, virtually created the style of political “shock jock” radio that made him so influential. As much as the term “cancel culture” seems overwrought, we can’t deny a rise in cultural ostracism in reaction to the public expression of unpopular beliefs. And we have to wonder how many average households suffer divisions far nastier and disrespectful than what previous generations might have dealt with. Cable television is much more sneering and divisive than it used to be. Talk radio has no truly moderate, let alone inquisitive voices. There are left-wing commentators who trade in name-calling as well, though they seem less commonplace and prosperous than their right equivalents. Make no mistake, the trend has long since transcended Republican politics. Social media simply exaggerated the worst effects helping create an echo chamber, a bubble where opposing views were never even broached let alone fairly examined. Limbaugh’s angry disdain for those who did not share his conservative beliefs, his disinterest in facts (rarely did he bother to engage with policy experts on his program), and his devotion to white male grievances and you have successfully poisoned the public square. It is in the creation of “ditto heads,” precursors of the “Trump deplorables,” who treated his comedic shtick as gospel. No, it is to address his broader legacy in coarsening the political debate so profoundly. Limbaugh, there would surely not have been a Trump presidency.īut our purpose is not to retell that unfortunate past or condemn his manifest racism, sexism or even his recent role in deliberately misleading his audience into believing the last election was stolen, an especially repugnant bit of demagoguery that culminated in the attack on the U.S. Not just in the politics but in the personality. Limbaugh’s rise to Donald Trump’s political ascendancy. What MAGA media gets right is that there is a line to be traced from Mr. He was an entertainer and, in the modern vernacular of social media, a social influencer with a checkered broadcasting past who stumbled into the Zeitgeist of disaffected working class white males. No, this was not an intellectual, not a pioneer in the conservative movement. with a straight face - a little fact-checking is clearly in order. He wasn’t looking for insight he was more interested in scorn, outrage and ridicule that helped him build a vast audience who found it all so entertaining.Īnd so, when Fox talking heads compare him with William F. Limbaugh treated serious matters of public policy in the same way that certain teen comedies of the 1990s addressed the awkwardness of puberty. Limbaugh’s career must concede that “wicked” is hardly an exaggeration. As noted in the Talmud, “God does not rejoice with the fall of the wicked.” And even a generous appraisal of Mr. And while we are left bewildered by these tributes, we do not find joy in his passing.
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