It’s amazing what one day can do to throw you off schedule. Yesterday’s newsletter was overlooked in the rush to get back to normal after a long weekend and an extra day for snow and ice. I know that’s nothing compared to what Texans are dealing with, so all thoughts and prayers are with you folks.
The big news on Wednesday was the passing of Rush Limbaugh. I’ll have more to say in time - perhaps in a longer piece - but I think it’s hard to talk about Rush without mentioning the way in which he ultimately made our politics worse. Yes, he introduced many people - myself included - to a broad world of conservatism, but before there was Fox News or Ben Shapiro or before Tucker Carlson went crazy, Rush was the guy who convinced his listeners that he was the lone voice of reason - no one else could be trusted! Of course there were problems with what Rush dubbed the “mainstream media,” but most of those outlets were largely doing very good work and were (and remain!) reliable on most issues. Rush lured people away from those sources just as much as, and likely more than, those sources pushed media consumers away.
Worse, Rush propagated a tactic now common on the right, but one that is ultimately unhealthy - that is, the idea that Crazy Thing XYZ is emblematic of the Left and the Left is the Democrat Party, and therefore all Democrats want you and your children and your dear old grandmother to do Crazy Thing XYZ. You’ve seen this before. Somewhere in America, an academic or a celebrity or a school board or a mainline, liberal church says or does a thing and, truth be told, it is pretty outrageous. In other words, there’s a significant chunk of the country that would be uncomfortable with the thing in question or, if not the thing itself, then perhaps the context in which it was presented. Yet Rush would find a way to say this event was the calling card of American liberalism, thereby baiting liberal intellectuals and media members into perhaps defending it on some constitutional grounds and then inevitably a Democrat of note would get tied into the matter and voila! Rush could then present the entire Democrat apparatus as eager to teach second graders how to put a condom on a cucumber. This was bad for our politics, and even worse for our culture.
I know sometimes the Left made it easy for Rush and those like him - like the time the journalist Nina Burleigh supposedly quipped that she would be happy to stand in for Monica Lewinsky in thanks to Bill Clinton working to keep abortion legal - but that only reinforces the point that Rush was all too eager to get down in the gutter and play hardball, with the result being a culture and a politics that grew more coarse with each passing election.
I think much of the response to Limbaugh’s death was inappropriate - cheering when someone dies says about much about the one cheering as it does the one who has passed. But Limbaugh was a very public figure with a massive footprint on American politics and media. Whatever good he did has to be weighed against the bad, and in the end, there is no way I could say that the former outweighed the latter.
More next time, maybe tomorrow. Until then, hang in there.