So Rush Limbaugh is dead. Whatever I thought of him – whatever anyone thought of him – he deserves the dignity we afford to those who are dead and silent. Rush, rest in peace.
I first became aware of Limbaugh in the mid-1990s, some fifteen years after my mother and father had gotten divorced. My mother re-married a Kentucky horseman in the 1980s, and I lived with that side of the family.
They were conservatives, but not radicals. The favourite book of one of my mother’s in-laws was All the President’s Men. He would describe with relish Woodward and Bernstein discovering Richard Nixon’s schemes. ‘They would get closer and closer,’ he would say.
I stepped away from the mother’s side of my family during my undergraduate days at Yale. When they ended , I returned to find that their politics had changed, and strangely.
The relative who had enjoyed All the President’s Men now believed that Woodward and Bernstein had invented Deep Throat and helped to carry out an unconstitutional coup against Nixon.
They also believed that Joseph McCarthy was right about Communists infiltrating the US government, that climate warming was a hoax, that gays had taken over the Catholic Church, that the Nazis were actually Socialists (and therefore Hillary Clinton, a socialist, was a Nazi), and that Democratic politicians had group sex with unwilling waitresses from time to time.
They tended to present these beliefs as self-evident facts.
These certainties were not prone to correction. When Deep Throat showed up on television in 2005, their views about Watergate did not change.
The reason, more than any other single cause, was Rush Limbaugh.
Over the years, Limbaugh built and perfected an alternative American political history that, in turn, led seamlessly into an alternative American political reality for conservatives. This new reality had several characteristics.
First, it was (and remains) hermetically sealed, rarely offering alternative viewpoints except as targets for mockery.
Second, it was repeated very day, three hours a day on weekdays, on car radios where many rural Americans driving on old state roads still received their news.
Third, it tended to portray political battles not as honest disagreements between good-faith actors with different interests, but as part of a broader civilisational and cultural war between good and evil.
Fourth, because this reality insisted on a good-versus-evil paradigm, it tended to reduce politics to a blood sport. Any notion of calm dialogue geared towards resolving differences and building a better country went out the door. It was replaced by zingers and insults and sarcasm and mockery and a ceaseless search for hypocrisy and alleged double standards. Either that, or pregnant silences that were really just mutually agreed truces.
Limbaugh had a sense of humour, but the laughter was often bitter. Comedy works best as a way for the powerless and the downtrodden to punch upwards. But like his political embodiment Donald Trump, Limbaugh ranked with the powerful, and he never hesitated to punch down.
Fifth, just as Limbaugh demonised this opponents, he tended to idealise the conservative way of life. Ultimately, this idealisation became indistinguishable from self-worship: worship of your big house, your giant truck, your huge wealth, and yes, your whiteness and your maleness, even if not all his listeners were male and white.
Finally, although Limbaugh spoke endlessly of his great intellect, his world-view was based on revelation rather than reason. When confronted with a skilled debater or comic, he often flailed and cut off sceptical interlocutors rather than engage with them.
His appeal was visceral. He showered his listeners with his alleged genius, and they were grateful. Part of that appeal was his attitude and even his physicality. His vast deep voice – a truly great radio voice – sounded, to his admirers, like the voice of God. He was big and fat and egoistic, and he revelled in it all, as did his audience.
If this sounds like a religion, it was, of a sort, although it was the opposite of Christianity. Limbaugh’s alternative political reality was not a universal church. It was a sect. It was also not unlike the small religious sects, descendants of the Reformation, that have dominated American rural life for centuries.
Before the 1990s, those sects remained separate. Limbaugh helped to bring them together, and the internet multiplied their power.
These sects tended to find solace in a simple, good-versus-evil paradigm of human events, and Limbaugh was a Great Simplifier. He took the messiness of life and reduced it to a handful of aphorisms. His listeners demanded enemies, and he provided them.
But more than that, Limbaugh embodied an American archetype: a combination of showman, preacher, con artist, and circus ringleader who used the credulity of his believers to make himself ridiculously rich. He was ‘Professor’ Harold Hill from The Music Man, but set to a darker soundtrack of sarcastic laughter.
He never made anything concrete or useful, at least that I’ve seen. But the air from his lungs was worth $600 million, according to Fox News.
His legacy is silence, but not his own. His words will live on in the mouths of my relatives, who will parrot his language for years.
The real silence is the one that exists between myself and my family.
Every once in a while, usually during a holiday visit, I try to have a cordial discussion about politics. It always ends in disaster.
The last time, I asked something innocuous about Trump. The response was a verbal wall of words, each brick an unfair allegation or conspiracy theory. So many outlandish claims hit me at once that I didn’t know where to begin.
And that’s the point. You cannot argue with an alternative reality based on faith. To do so marks you as an outsider, and perhaps as an enemy. The result is a painful and awkward silence.
That’s the irony, you see. Limbaugh talked so much that his listeners forget how to listen to anyone with different views. On omnipresent digital screens, noise surrounds us and engulfs us. On TV, cable news sophists may shout or sneer. But those who listen never really talk. Fear smothers our words.
I respect Limbaugh’s passing, but I cannot mourn it. I can, however, mourn the terrible American silence that he left behind.