![]() ![]() Josh Hawley (R-MO) lauded him as someone who “lived the First Amendment and told hard truths that made the elite uncomfortable.” Former President George W. In 1994, first-term House Republicans - who had just won a majority - named him an honorary member of their class.Īfter his death on Wednesday, leading Republicans from both the party’s insurgent right and establishment wings lined up to praise him. The dittohead ranks grew rapidly in the late 1980s and early ’90s, and the institutional Republican Party welcomed it. His fans called themselves “Dittoheads” because callers would frequently “ditto” each other’s praise of whatever Limbaugh had just said. Limbaugh had a singular talent as a performer: an ability to capture the hearts and minds of his supporters with few parallels. ![]() Limbaugh proved that the particular combination of strident right-wing politics, outrageous commentary dressed up as “humor” or “just asking questions,” and incessant attacks on the “liberal media” could be commercially viable with an extremely large audience. Fox News arrived eight years after Rush online conservative outlets like Breitbart were quite literally inconceivable at the time. He was the first of the major talk radio hosts. Prior to Limbaugh’s emergence on the national scene in 1988, the conservative mass media as we know it today did not exist. Limbaugh’s startling influence over the Republican Party The rest of us have to live with his baleful legacy. “The things we now think of as particularly Trumpian features of conservatism - the insults, the conspiracies, the blend of entertainment and politics and anger - Limbaugh had been doing it for a quarter-century before Trump showed up to the party.” This, according to Hemmer, is very much not a good thing. 7CuHlE5Lpy- Sage Rosenfels February 5, 2020 That time Rush Limbaugh made fun of Michael J Fox and his Parkinson’s disease. He elevated conservative media into a coequal branch of party politics, and pioneered a style of rhetoric, argument, and entertainment that would come to define conservative politics,” writes Nicole Hemmer, a historian of talk radio at Columbia University. “Rush Limbaugh radically transformed the Republican Party. Limbaugh had more influence on the trajectory of the American right than the vast majority of political leaders it is not a stretch to say that Trump’s presidency may not have happened without him. In return, Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom - America’s highest civilian honor - during the 2020 State of the Union speech. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the 2016 presidential primary, he came around to Trump and Trumpism, becoming one of the former president’s most influential boosters in conservative media. “Limbaugh was the fountainhead for an entire generation of radical right-wing GOP politicians who owe their careers to the politics of resentment and white racial rage.”įoremost among these leaders, of course, is former President Donald Trump. “Rush built upon an already robust right-wing media and organizational infrastructure and married it to lowbrow entertainment culture, appealing to a deeply politicized audience of angry white men who did not consider themselves political,” writes David Astin Walsh, a historian of conservatism at the University of Virginia. Bigotry dressed up as “jokes” or “entertainment” were the stock in trade of Limbaugh’s show he built and maintained a massive audience across decades not in spite of this commentary, but because of it. He once did an impression of former Chinese President Hu Jintao that consisted mostly of saying “ching chong” over and over again he had a guest on to sing a song titled “ Barack the Magic Negro.” He repeatedly mocked the death of gay men from AIDS in the 1980s, suggested that the Clintons murdered their aide Vince Foster in the 1990s, called the NBA “the Thug Basketball Association” in 2004, and claimed that college student Sandra Fluke owed him a sex tape in return for taxpayer-subsidized birth control in 2012. Obituaries for talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, who died on Wednesday at the age of 70, have frequently described him as a “ conservative provocateur.” This is technically accurate but euphemistic, akin to calling Bashar al-Assad a “controversial leader.” Limbaugh’s stock in trade was bigotry and offense his career-long defining trait was a willingness to channel the conservative id in unusually blunt and crude terms. ![]()
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