Let’s briefly praise Rush Limbaugh—then bury him forever

Source: Politico | February 17, 2021 | John F. Harris

The radio host represented the aggrieved soul of the right for a generation.

For 25 of the past 30 years, no public figure more fully represented the aggrieved soul of the American Right than Rush Limbaugh.

These past five years, of course, Limbaugh was superseded in that claim by Donald Trump. Even then, it is impossible to conceive of Trump’s path to power if it had not been over ground tilled by Limbaugh.

The radio host, who died Wednesday of lung cancer, showed how to merge the raucous sensibility of a natural entertainer with keen intuition about the everyday political and cultural resentments nurtured by millions of Americans and spin it all into a lucrative mass movement.

Marc Antony came to bury Caesar, not to praise him, but in Limbaugh’s case it is fitting to do some of both.

Praise, of a sort: He was a brilliant performer, a self-invented character who, reading not very far through the lines of interviews over the years, had the interior life of a lonely misfit who came alive and found adoration mainly in front of the microphone. Here, in this florid exterior life, he used bombast, humor, insult, indignation, malice, superb timing and an astonishingly facile mind to make himself very famous, very rich and very influential. Limbaugh was wooed by presidents if they were Republicans, castigated by them if Democrats. In both cases they often seemed intimidated by him.

But the burial part is more important. At the age of 70 when he died, Limbaugh lived long enough to see where his brand of commercialized contempt — once it moved from the margins to the center of U.S political culture — would lead. It leads to a rancid, cheerless place, one quite different than anything Limbaugh himself talked about in earlier phases of his career when he rhapsodized about his notions of the ideal America.

There is no more pressing task, for either the conservative or progressive movements, than to endeavor that Limbaugh and the style of politics he represented will soon be seen as artifacts of a receding age, rather than forerunners of the next one.

……..

One last contradiction: Limbaugh in his own life hardly represented the kind of traditional values he extolled. He was married three times and arrested for misusing prescription painkillers, to which he acknowledged he was addicted. Nor in interviews did he present a picture of someone who regarded himself as one of life’s natural winners. His father was austere and strict, and wanted him to be an academic standout, but instead he dropped out of college after a year. After his syndicated radio show became a hit, he expected to be embraced in elite New York media circles by the likes of Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather. “Look, I admired these people,” he told the Times, “I thought they would welcome me as one of them. I was wrong.”

Much of Limbaugh’s performance was entertaining bluster, and, if one happened to catch it in the right mood, it was made more enjoyable by the impression that he was enjoying it as much as anyone. But the core of resentment was real — as corrosive for Limbaugh personally as it is for the political culture over which he loomed so large for so long.

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