Rush Limbaugh Hurt the Conservative Movement

Growing up I recall William F. Buckley, Jr., and other conservative intellectuals, if you will, and a Republican Party and conservatives that valued education, knowledge, and science.  Those days are long gone and now we see a Republican Party that embraces QAnon crazies, embraces ignorance, puts ideology above objective reality and competence - see this piece that looks at Texas' current state for where this can lead -  and basically has one agenda: pandering to white grievance.  This tragedy did not happen overnight but there were some key players who helped the decline and debasement of the Republican Party and the larger conservative movement which are shunned by younger voters as well as educated suburbanites less gullible than the GOP's prime demographic, non-college graduate working class whites.  One of these individuals was Rush Limbaugh (shown lauding anti-gay Chick-fil-A) who enriched himself peddling hatred and division - much like evangelical pastors and charlatans like Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress to name a few - and helped set the stage for the flight of the conservative intelligentsia from the GOP.  Conservatism has suffered as a consequence as laid out in a piece in The Atlantic.  Here are article highlights:

As a radio broadcaster, Rush Limbaugh, who died yesterday, was a great success: He pioneered his genre, attracted millions of listeners for several decades, and grew fantastically wealthy.

As a proponent of conservatism in America, Limbaugh was a failure who in his later years abandoned the project of advancing a positive agenda, culminating in his alignment with the vulgar style and populist anti-leftism of Donald Trump. Character no longer mattered. Budget deficits no longer mattered. Free trade no longer mattered. Nepotism no longer mattered. Lavishing praise on foreign dictators no longer mattered.

All that mattered was owning the libs in the culture war, in part to avenge a deeply felt sense of aggrievement. Limbaugh and Trump were alike in attaining great wealth and political influence while still talking and seeming to feel as though society was stacked against guys like them.

In obituaries and commemorations, many right-leaning commentators are crediting Limbaugh with advancing movement conservatism, as if he were the William F. Buckley Jr. of the Baby Boomer generation.

Yet he wasn’t for everyone with conservative instincts, and the proposition that Limbaugh helped conservatism thrive or grow is unsubstantiated. National Review and Barry Goldwater reinvigorated conservatism in postwar America. The high-water mark of American conservatism, Ronald Reagan’s presidency, was over before Limbaugh was a force in American politics.

Over the ensuing decades, as Limbaugh grew in fame and gained as much influence in the Republican Party as anyone, the conservative movement suffered from political and intellectual decline. “In place of the permanent things, we get Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar,” a writer at The American Conservative once complained. “Gone are the internal tensions, the thought-provoking paradoxes, the ideological uneasiness that marked the early Right.” The seesaw of partisan politics gave conservatives occasional victories, such as the 1994 Republican takeover of the House and the 2010 Tea Party wave, but once in office the GOP tended to squander those victories quickly and never accomplished much conservative change. The government kept getting bigger. The country kept getting more socially liberal. The right delighted in the fact that the left was never able to create its own Rush Limbaugh, despite various attempts. But perhaps that supposed failing has helped progressives make gains.

Since Limbaugh’s political radio career took off in the late 1980s, each successive Republican president has been less conservative than the last, and Trump was the least conservative GOP president since Richard Nixon. Looking at that trajectory and thinking that Limbaugh helped advance conservatism in America is as delusional as believing Jeb Bush’s claim that his brother kept Americans safe on 9/11.

Over time, as the talk-radio style of culture-war point scoring over a substantive agenda, and loyalty over intellectual honesty, became more common among GOP politicos as well as right-leaning entertainers, the coalition got less and less conservative, culminating in the GOP’s takeover by populists who openly championed tariffs and other barriers to the free trade of goods.

Limbaugh isn’t solely or mostly responsible for conservatism’s decline, but he is partly responsible. He spent several decades running interference for whoever was leading the Republican Party, only to complain later that those same Republicans were corrupt swamp creatures. Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Trump differed greatly in their worldviews and policy agendas, but Limbaugh, always more a partisan warrior than an intellectual leader with independent convictions, aligned with each just at the height of his or her power in the GOP, even in years when fiscal profligacy under Republican leadership meant ballooning budget deficits and debt. Nor is fiscal conservatism the only core belief Limbaugh jettisoned.

In the 1990s, no one spent more time than Limbaugh insisting on the importance of character in a president. “This, ultimately, is why the issue of character is so important,” he wrote in his 1992 best seller, The Way Things Ought to Be. “Liberals wig out when character becomes an issue, because many of their candidates are of dubious character.” In the aughts, no one spent more time deflecting Democratic attacks against President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. But when Trump, a former Democrat and serial adulterer who lied constantly, became a Republican and ran for president characterizing Bush’s foreign policy as an unmitigated disaster, Limbaugh got on board as people with deeper commitments to conservatism went Never Trump. While never a RINO, he became a conservative in name only.

In one particularly odious example of fueling divisive racial paranoia, Limbaugh told his audience, “It’s Obama’s America, is it not? Obama’s America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama’s America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,’ and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he’s white.”

Limbaugh, as much as any leftist, was a hypocritical force for identity politics. More than that, he personified bigotry. Bull Connor and Lee Atwater were gone, George W. Bush was reaching out to Latino voters, but Limbaugh could still be relied upon to question Obama’s place of birth or call Sandra Fluke a slut.

In the end, Limbaugh was aligned with a Republican standard-bearer who openly bashed Mexicans and Muslims to win the White House. Trump lost the popular vote twice and served one term, accomplishing the confirmation of many conservative judges but little else of lasting consequence for conservatives. By the end of Trump’s time in office, conservative self-identification was falling overall.

Many on the right will still feel like Limbaugh did a lot for conservatism, but facts don’t care about feelings. William F. Buckley Jr. advanced conservatism. Milton Friedman advanced conservatism. Limbaugh advanced the smug hatred of liberals and feminists, took pleasure in mocking the left, fueled the ugliest impulses of his audience more often than he sought to elevate national discourse, boosted Republican politicians (whatever their policy preferences) until the end, and died an identitarian populist who betrayed the philosophy he long extolled. He will likely be remembered more for the worst things he said than the best things he said, because unlike Buckley, who said his share of awful things, no Limbaugh quote stands out as especially witty or brilliant. Given his talents as a broadcaster, his shortcomings were a tragedy. At least he gave generously to charity.