An Economy of Mystery

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

 

I hate most airlines, but ask me on any given day which one I absolutely hate the most, and I will always give you the same answer: The one I’m on today.

 

I feel the same way about FedEx vs. UPS: They are both unreliable at times and maddeningly opaque, but the one I dislike most intensely is the one that has disappointed me most recently.

 

(That’s you this week, UPS.)

 

That’s a variation of “present bias,” as the behavioral economists call it. Present bias is your preference for getting paid less today rather than getting paid more tomorrow — accepting a smaller reward in the here and now rather than holding out for a larger one in the future. It’s also what pushes us toward consumption over savings.

 

Present bias isn’t necessarily irrational: As the famous economist Rooster Cogburn put it, “I don’t believe in fairy tales, sermons, or stories about money.” Sometimes, tomorrow’s payday doesn’t come, or it takes a lot longer to get here than you expected.

 

(Especially if it’s being sent by UPS.)

 

Just as we tend to add a modest multiplier to benefits had in the present, freshly inflicted wounds are the most sensitive — scars can, eventually, become a good story. And what is true of deep wounds also is true of minor irritations.

 

To be clear, this is not going to be a column about parcel services, and I don’t much fault UPS for this week’s delays, although it could be a lot better about transparency and such. I can live with three days late — it’s indefinite delays that rankle, or three-day delays that become nine-day delays. My disposition is such that I’m willing to be pretty flexible about things like delivery dates and other details, but, once something has been agreed to, I expect people (and companies, and governments) to stick to the agreement. If Instacart needs an extra three hours to deliver my groceries and says so up front, then I’m the picture of equanimity until T-plus 2:59, at which point I start to turn into the Tasmanian Devil from the Bugs Bunny cartoons. I hate having my time wasted, not because I am so busy but because wasting someone’s time is an expression of contempt for them. And that is especially galling in relationships where my direction of cashflow is outward.

 

(Like most people, I am a lot easier to get along with if you are paying me than if I am paying you.)

 

While trying to figure out when UPS might return to its more or less usual predictable mediocrity after the winter storm in Texas (where UPS operates many facilities, including a regional air hub), I inevitably fell into the rabbit hole of customer horror stories, a genre that thrives on the Internet and one to which I have made too many enraged and petty contributions of my own. The complaints offer a snapshot of the U.S. economy in this waning winter of discontent: Blue-collar small-business owners complain about being sidelined, their businesses effectively suspended because critical parts and supplies have not been delivered to them on time, costing them thousands of dollars in lost business; at the other end of the market, customers of Louis Vuitton are reporting a high degree of frustration with delayed deliveries, and one poor fellow who had paid good money to get a pair of highly desirable new sneakers delivered to him pre-release won’t even have his kicks on release day, much less beforehand. One sympathizes.

 

This is a weird time for our economy. We’ve been through some truly terrible stuff, a long ugly chaotic run from the subprime meltdown and the Great Recession to dysfunctional health-care markets, a fruitless and destructive trade war with China that suplex-slammed many American farmers, the COVID-19 mess that saw U.S. GDP plunging at a rate of 32 percent while unemployment spiked to 15 percent, and goodness only knows what next.

 

And what came of all that? It was very hard on those who already were unemployed or marginally employed, who had little savings and little room for error, including something on the order of 12 million renting households who collectively owe back rent that may add up to more than $70 billion, by one estimate. Moody’s Analytics calculates that the typical distressed-renter household owes about $6,000 in back rent and fees, or between three and four months’ rent. There isn’t any good outcome likely there: Many of them will end up being evicted and put into even worse circumstances than they already are, and many small landlords, who often have only modest incomes, will be ruined by their renters’ defaults. There are good reasons not to intervene there, but, for perspective, consider that the Democrats’ proposal to forgive the student loans of nice young progressives who went to Haverford and Oberlin could pay off those poor Americans’ back rent 22 times over. If you’re into that sort of thing.

 

At the same time: The Dow closed at a record high last week, car dealers and art dealers both are enjoying record profits, commodities prices from oil to soybeans to copper are soaring, and, as though some rank symbolism were needed, the display cases of the nation’s Rolex boutiques are stripped as bare as a San Antonio supermarket after a polar vortex. It is difficult to think of another plague that has been accompanied by quite so much high-end conspicuous consumption.

 

Some of it is bewildering. I recently went car shopping, and, like any middle-aged Texan with reasonably good credit and a rich fantasy life based on immoderate boyhood viewings of Red Dawn, I took a look at some wonderful customized trucks, mostly from the Rocky Ridge gang. I had no real intention of buying any such thing (the roads are paved where I live — badly paved, nonetheless paved) but I was almost offended at the prices. Cool fender flares or no, there’s no way I’m paying a hundred grand (in the imaginary world in which I’m in the market for a $100,000 car) for a jacked-up Ram pickup. But they don’t need to sell one to me: They can’t keep them on the lot. High-end Jeeps, Toyota trucks, Range Rovers, Corvettes, the Mercedes S-Class, and other rolling emblems of mid-American ostentation are going as fast as they can unload them.

 

New-car prices are strong because of production interruptions that have taken the slack out of the inventory, but business is booming in everything from flower shops to bicycle builders to guitar luthiers. Some luxury-goods sellers have been hit by the lack of tourists visiting their boutiques on vacation, but even unwieldy global conglomerates such as LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton are holding up pretty well — the firm just announced that it has acquired a 50-percent stake in Jay-Z’s Armand de Brignac line of Champagne in a deal said to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The wine shops are doing an astonishing trade in $750 bottles of Chateau Margaux, and if you want to buy a new Rolls-Royce or Lamborghini, you’ll be lucky to take delivery sometime toward the end of 2022 — and they’ll act like they’re doing you a favor. Even for a fun-loving capitalist running dog such as myself, this looks like madness.

 

But even with all that bananas spending going on, the savings rate is soaring.

 

Aren’t we supposed to be in some kind of national crisis?

 

Some of the boom is being yanked out of the pockets of the hospitality industry, as COVID-19 shutdowns have Americans redirecting some of the money they would have spent at restaurants into other purchases. Some of it is stimulus checks hitting the bank accounts of people who don’t need the money. And some of it is — probably — inflation.

 

If you look around for inflation the way most people think of it, you won’t see a lot of it. “Core” consumer prices, as they are known, have been pretty flat, and what rise in prices that consumers have seen has mostly been in oil. But, in spite of the way the term is used, inflation really should not be treated as a synonym for a general rise in consumer prices. Inflation is an increase in the money supply not linked to an increase in economic production — rising prices are one possible consequence of inflation, but are not inflation itself.

 

For generations, the abuse of fiat currency — “printing money,” as the goldbugs say — was accompanied by steep and often disastrous spikes in the prices of everyday items such as bread and shoes. If that is what you mean by inflation, then there is little sign of it on the horizon, no matter what my fellow libertarians are forever promising. But if what you mean by inflation is a big increase in the money supply, then there is oodles of it: The M2 measure of the money supply has increased by 26 percent over the past year, as the Wall Street Journal reports.

 

John Greenwood and Steve Hanke write:

 

Speculative manias are in the air, as evidenced by the recent price surges for bitcoin, a digital asset with a fundamental value of zero, and GameStop, a declining retailer. Along with the other economic trends—a strong recovery, surging commodity prices and an uptick in inflation—those asset bubbles have a clear cause: the massive expansion of money and credit.

 

Yet America’s fiscal and monetary masters are turning a blind eye. They are focused solely on mending the labor market. With the fervor of messiahs, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen tell us the only way to save the labor market and reach full employment is to continue to pour fiscal and monetary fuel on the fire. But their prescriptions and prophecies, modeled on the playbook of the 2008 financial crisis, are not valid today.

 

Why the “speculative manias”? With interest rates having been at or near zero for a long time now, investors are desperately looking for higher yields wherever they can find them, from exotic assets to risky investments in China, where Ant Group investors just received a brutal reminder that political risk is both enormous and unpredictable in a one-party police state. And it isn’t swashbuckling Gordon Gekko types running after big returns on dodgy investments: The big movers and shakers here are the nation’s schoolteachers, police officers, firefighters, and sundry municipal bureaucrats whose pension funds comprise some of the biggest pools of investment capital on earth.

 

Inflation, meaning the artificial expansion of the money supply beyond what increase productivity demands, is supposed to devalue currencies. Has that happened? The dollar remains pretty strong vis-à-vis the items in the basket of goods that control CPI calculations, and it remains pretty stable vs. the euro and the yen, having declined only slightly against them in the past year, while it has gained just a little on the Swiss franc. So the value of the dollar is pretty solid if you are in the market for bread, gasoline, or foreign currencies. On the other hand, the value of the dollar has declined significantly against certain financial assets, commodities, certain luxury goods, etc. That is another way of looking at the rise in prices in these sectors: If a wristwatch is worth more dollars, then the value of the dollar has declined as measured by wristwatches. Not everybody is in the market for a fancy timepiece, but most Americans — the vast majority of them — live indoors, and the value of the dollar has declined quite a bit in terms of houses. In 2020, the collective market value of the total stock of housing in the United States increased by $2.5 trillion, driven not by new construction but by rising valuations of existing housing. The nation’s houses are a year older and have an additional year’s worth of wear and tear on them — why should they be worth $2.5 trillion more? The population isn’t growing fast enough to bump up demand such that prices would climb so dramatically.

 

This is the Now Economy. To be clear, I am not an economist and do not purport to explain this in technical terms. I am not even necessarily arguing for tighter monetary policy — some very smart people, including my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru, believe that we would be better off if inflation were given a little more leash. But the run-up in stocks and commodities, paralleled by the run-up in real estate, luxury goods, Bitcoin, etc., has the feel and smell to it of cheap money chasing a stagnant or declining pool of opportunities for investment and consumption. Perhaps the stock market and the commodities indices reflect some underlying economic prowess that is too subtle to be detected by the likes of me. Or maybe it is, at least in some part, a series of bubbles created by increasingly desperate efforts to stave off certain economic realities that must one day be dealt with, from public debt to unfunded pensions to entitlements to labor productivity.

 

Globalization and ruthlessly efficient markets may keep the prices of ordinary consumer goods from going all zany Zimbabwean on us, and the specter of the stunned burgher pushing a wheelbarrow full of rapidly depreciating paper currency down to the baker’s to exchange for a single loaf of bread may be one of the many powerful historical images that has outlived its practical usefulness.

 

But that doesn’t mean that all is well. It could mean that market distortions are simply happening in silos — the change is dramatic in each silo, and there are a lot of silos, but it does not have the look and feel of a general condition because a box of Kraft dinner still costs what it always costs. But when stocks are trading at price-to-earnings ratios that are unusual and, let us say, optimistic, and Ferraris are selling like Honda Civics, it is hard not to get an impression of frothiness. It’s not just GameStop and Bitcoin.

 

Maybe I am a pessimist or am temporarily possessed by the ghosts of my beloved New England Puritans, but this feels just a little like a game of musical chairs. Everything looks peachy right now, but I wonder how soon we’ll be saying, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

 

In Closing

 

The death of Rush Limbaugh provoked approximately the reaction I expected, i.e., one that made me ashamed to be a member of this awful species of ours. But one struck me as particularly egregious: that of Bishop Talbert Swan of the Church of God in Christ, who opined of Limbaugh: “Wishing him to rot in hell is being kind.” I think you can write and think that way and call yourself a barely literate columnist for the Arizona Republic or a histrionic peon on Twitter, but I do not think that you can maintain that attitude and call yourself a minister of Jesus Christ.

 

Bishop Swan would not be the first to let the purple go to his head: “He spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others. . . .”

Why We’re Taught to Not Speak Ill of the Dead

By Jim Geraghty

February 18, 2021 9:11 AM

 

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum

 

“Of the dead, say nothing but good”

 

We used to widely honor the instruction to not speak ill of the dead, at least in media and public communications. But in our modern era of social media, the instinct is largely the opposite. When a prominent political figure passes away, those who loathed the figure jump online and instantly proclaim how happy they are that the person has died, how terrible the figure was, how they hope that figure is burning in hell, etc.

 

You can find a lot of hackneyed columns disputing the old edict to not speak ill of the dead, particularly after the death of a prominent conservative, with all the columnists convinced they’ve discovered the amazing truth that indisputable villains of life die too, and no one would object to speaking ill of Adolf Hitler.

 

The aphorism dates back to Greece in 600 b.c., and the modern advocates for speaking ill of the dead seem oddly confident that the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare and everyone else before them could not possibly have grasped the moral nuances of this uniquely modern circumstance of a controversial figure dying.

 

Or they contend that holding one’s tongue about the recently departed represents a compromise of the truth or an instruction to lie. But the aphorism bars one action; it does not compel other actions. It is not an instruction or requirement to praise the dead and certainly not one to bear false witness in praising the departed. Nor does the instruction forbid silence in response to the passing of a life. The American version of the custom really only asks people to refrain from expressing their disdain for the departed in public for a short period of time after the death. No one really cares if you privately get grim satisfaction out of someone departing this earth, and there will be few complaints if you uncork your long-simmering denunciatory diatribe about the departed a month later.

 

And yet, for many figures obscure and better known, the edict is just too much to ask.

 

The first argument put forth in defense of holding one’s criticism of the recently departed is that the figure’s loved ones are in mourning. That’s true, but we have no way of knowing if our words will reach the ears or eyes of mourning family or friends, and that cannot be our sole or deciding concern. Osama bin Laden, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Qasem Soleimani, Timothy McVeigh, and Anthony Sowell had loved ones who mourned their deaths.

 

I suspect the saying is driven by a sense of universal empathy. The public figures you love and adore will die. The public figures you hate and detest will die. In their final moments, the differences between them will become quite insignificant. Few of us are likely to feel “ready” to die when our time comes. Few of us will believe, in our final days, that we lived with no regrets. In our final moments, we are likely to feel vulnerable, frightened, and perhaps pained. Even the most powerful dictator looks frail and weak and sad on his deathbed. Death humbles us all, and death comes for us all.

 

We have a hard enough time grappling with our own mortality as is. It gets even tougher when a beloved or iconic figure who seemed likely to be around forever — say, Alex Trebek — shuffles off this mortal coil. Recognizing that the public figures we can’t stand are human beings means recognizing that they are mortal, and that they are as vulnerable to age and cancer or heart disease other health problems as anyone else. That is one more stark reminder that our days are numbered as well. The powerful and wealthy and famous may have the resources and good doctors to delay the grim reaper’s arrival for a bit, but not to deny him.

 

I liked the observation in this editorial of the U.K.’s Reform magazine, written after Margaret Thatcher passed away in 2013:

 

It seems to me, that if we rail against someone while they live and change our tone when they die, we show respect not for them, but for death.

 

This powerful and divisive figure, the enemy within, can’t be voted out or overthrown, and even medicine and technology can offer no lasting alternative to its regime. Despite the colossal changes to our moral landscape over the last 50 years, and the death of deference towards traditional authorities and mores, our profound and ancient deference towards death is as alive as ever — presumably because it has as much power over us as it ever did.

 

The sadness and grief of Rush Limbaugh’s loved ones today is indistinguishable from the sadness and grief of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s loved ones in September or John Lewis’s loved ones or Herman Cain’s loved ones in July. No matter how much we may think that we are different from those we vehemently oppose, they are as human and mortal as we are, and we are all going to end up in the same grave; ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

 

Finally, there is the fact that the dead cannot speak for themselves, and castigating the departed will often seem like an unfair attack — and not just immediately after their passing. You may recall that in The Last Dance, the documentary about the glory years of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, former Bulls general manager Jerry Krause was consistently portrayed as a bumbling, arrogant, fuming fool. The documentary featured recent interviews with Michael Jordan and almost all of his teammates and coaches . . . but Krause passed away in 2017.

 

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Mike Sielski pointed out that Krause did make a lot of good decisions in the draft and free agency, and observed, “Aside from a token compliment here or there from Kerr or Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf, no one is standing up for Krause in the documentary: no family member, no colleague, no one. There is something cheap, unseemly, and quite telling about the inclination to continue bullying a man who isn’t around to defend himself.”

 

Perhaps we say we should not speak ill of the dead because the finality of death should also mark the end of our disagreement with the departed. If you read this newsletter, there’s a good chance that you vehemently differed with Ginsburg or John Conyers or Ted Kennedy or John Paul Stevens, or any other figure on the left side of the political spectrum who passed away in recent years. But they’ve gone to meet their Creator now; our argument with them is finished. (There would be something absurd about continuing an argument with a dead man; one could envision a Monty Python or Saturday Night Live sketch where a candidate dies during a debate and his opponent absurdly insists that the debate continue, because he thinks he has a better chance of winning now.)

 

Our deceased political foes can do no more, and they can say no more, so we have no need to say any more, beyond rest in peace.

 

One last thought: The snarky philosophy students at the video series Wisecrack sometimes discuss Ernest Becker and his work The Denial of Death. Becker contended that just about everything that human beings do is consciously or subconsciously an effort to avoid death. Becker observes that hatred and violence can be a convenient way of suppressing or sublimating the fear of death: “Only scapegoats can relieve one of his own stark death fear: ‘I am threatened with death — let us kill plentifully.’” Being able to inflict death upon other people can give people a sense that they can control death; because they can decide who else lives and dies, they can “decide” that they themselves will never die. This never works, of course, but the easiest person to fool is yourself.

 

Thankfully, few people turn to homicide to cope with their fear of death. But perhaps a variation of that impulse can be found in the compulsion to feel and express glee in response to the death of an opposing political figure, to treat it as a personal “win.” The hideous and hateful little troll who jumps on social media to celebrate Rush Limbaugh’s passing as a victory is inadvertently revealing the lack of genuine victories and joy in his life. He controls nothing on the grand stage of American politics and can exercise no true influence over the course of events, so he must take the inevitable — the death of an elderly figure revered by the political opposition who was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer — as some sort of shocking and earned triumph, one that allows him to bask in shared glory.

 

As for Rush himself, you can read tributes from The Editors, Jack Fowler, Dan McLaughlin, Michael Brendan Dougherty, John Fund, Kathryn Jean Lopez, and yesterday on the Three Martini Lunch, podcast Greg and I scrapped our traditional format and just discussed Rush and how he shaped us, modern conservatism, and modern radio. National Review has also reposted James Bowman’s 1993 cover story on Rush, declaring him “The Leader of the Opposition.”

 

America has many powerful and famous celebrities with devoted fan bases, but it has very few who more or less single-handedly created the industry that made them famous. The AM-radio dial was utterly transformed, permanently, by Rush Limbaugh; an entire industry and format grew and thrived for decades and shaped our system of politics because of what he started on KFBK in Sacramento, Calif., in 1984. You can argue he is among the top ten or fewer of the most influential Americans of the post–Cold-War era.

 

I didn’t always agree with everything Rush Limbaugh said, but I didn’t have to. In 2004, Rush reached out and told me was a fan of the Kerry Spot, and I felt like I had walked on the moon. He offered a blurb for Voting to Kill — now available at fine remainder bins everywhere — and had me on his program in 2006 when I was promoting the book and he had absolutely no reason to help out. He was the biggest figure in the conservative movement, but never too big to demonstrate the smallest kindness. He will be sorely missed.

Rush Limbaugh, R.I.P.

National Review Online

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

 

Radio is a powerful medium, more personal somehow than TV, and few broadcasters exploited its power to greater effect than Rush Limbaugh.

 

The former DJ kicked around various gigs until finding the right outlet for his talent (“on loan from God,” of course) in political talk radio.

 

Limbaugh created a new industry, revitalized AM radio, and made friends with millions of people who never met him but were drawn to his voice and irresistible persona. His lashing critiques of the Left, comic riffs, and combative ebullience spawned many imitators, but none of them came close to being his equal.

 

To think that he had such an impact, sitting alone at a microphone, with few guests and not many callers, for three hours a day, is astonishing.

 

He had an outsize role in conservative politics for 30 years and could instantly elevate a cause or argument. He was especially influential when Republicans were out of power, at the beginning of the Clinton years (the new Republican House majority made him an honorary freshman in 1994) and in the Obama years.

 

His three-hour program, listened to by 20 million people at its height, represented a crack in the dominance of the liberal mass media and foreshadowed the rise of a broader alternative conservative media.

 

He loved Bill Buckley — the feeling was mutual — and was friends with many people at this institution. A humble man in person, who performed countless acts of personal generosity that no one will ever hear about, he fought his lung cancer at the end with the heart of a lion. R.I.P.

Rush’s Place

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

 

For millions of decent people, Rush Limbaugh was their political lifeline. He was the only thing keeping them sane during the Clinton years. The Fairness Doctrine had disappeared in 1987, and Limbaugh stepped in to the new market that could now emerge in talk radio. Very quickly, he became a one-man opposition to the rest of the press: Time, Newsweek, NBC, ABC, CBS, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. They all burnished the Clinton legend. But standing athwart them all was Rush Limbaugh. You no longer had to wait for Pat Buchanan or Tony Blankley to interrupt Eleanor Clift for a sentence or two in a McLaughlin Group segment once every Sunday. With Rush, you got three hours of media counter-programming every weekday. The psychological effect on the right was sharp and sudden. If Nixonism had been the politics of the silent majority, Rush Limbaugh was the politics of a voluble insurgency. Rush’s program, beamed into cars sitting in traffic across the nation, was a beacon telling millions of people, “You are not alone.”

 

Many conservatives who have loathed the Donald Trump era will look back on Limbaugh’s success with regret, realizing that the talk-radio revolution was the giant leap from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.

 

For millions of other people, Rush Limbaugh was the largest impediment to embracing conservatism. I count myself in this group. I’m not Rush Limbaugh’s target audience and never was. At 14 years old, I bought and enjoyed Al Franken’s book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations. I don’t think I would enjoy it now because I simply don’t care about mass-media figures the way I did then. I vividly remembered the controversy when Rush Limbaugh called Chelsea Clinton a dog. She was about my age. And I was a child! How evil could a guy be?

 

I had to overcome Rush Limbaugh to become a conservative. Or at least overcome that image of Rush Limbaugh, which was always exaggerated. Years later, I would tune in and Limbaugh was a more relaxed, more light-hearted, nimble-minded, and obviously happier person than the rabble-rouser he was accused of being. Still, I haven’t met anyone who didn’t say dumber or meaner things than normal when filling up the demanding content maw of broadcast media for hours a week.

 

I would find my conservatism in books and magazines, not on talk radio. My English teacher gave me George Orwell to read. Public-spirited liberal family members bought me subscriptions to The New Yorker and Harper’s. A book of the best political writing from the 1990s introduced me to people such as Andrew Ferguson, Christopher Caldwell, and Tucker Carlson in The Weekly Standard, and Thomas Fleming or Bill Kauffman at Chronicles. The first “contemporary” political book that really lit me up was Roger Scruton’s mostly neglected The Meaning of Conservatism. It was a supple text defending a primordial Tory veneration of a mixed civilizational inheritance. It amounted to an unsubtle conservative critique of Margaret Thatcher. Scruton saw markets replacing institutions as the object of right-wing veneration and he resisted it. He began that book with his terms: “Conservatism is a stance that may be defined without identifying it with the policies of any party. Indeed, it may be a stance that appeals to a person for whom the whole idea of party is distasteful.”

 

Well Amen. Irish-American, I hated Roger’s Tories more than he did. The Republican Party? I agreed with the anti-abortion stuff and I didn’t see anything worthwhile in socialism, but I’d have been happy seeing Newt Gingrich and the Bushes tossed in a burlap bag with the Clintons and a dozen cats then dropped into the Missouri River.

 

For millions of Limbaugh listeners, someone like Scruton or one of his lesser disciples would be too deferential, too polite, and not up to the fight. Too boring. Just as with my exaggerated-for-effect image of Limbaugh, this tweedy and ruffled image would not capture the whole reality of the man or what he was about. It would miss Scruton’s moral and physical courage leading seminars in the Eastern Bloc. It would miss his sometimes-acid humor. Scruton once wrote about the moral philosopher Peter Singer: “It has been said of him, as he indelicately reminds us in the preface, that he is ‘the most influential living philosopher,’ and this is perhaps true. But the influence has been purchased at the cost of the philosophy. After all, there was a sense in which Mao was the most influential living poet, and Hitler the most influential living painter.”

 

I’m not sure Limbaugh ever achieved an insult so insulting as that.

 

It is obvious that voting blocs of 70 or 80 million Americans cannot be adequately represented by one face or one type of character. They can’t be represented by one class type. To the extent that the populists like Limbaugh and Donald Trump have become the face of conservative politics, they have driven away people who are otherwise conservative but cannot imagine trucking along with people who say “Feminazis.” But similarly, too much dramatized retching and sniffing at populism among the bow-tie wearing, Edmund Burke-quoting intellectual weirdos that make up conservative intellectuals will drive the dittoheads into rebellion or into political non-participation. This relationship between these factions will never, ever be comfortable, and only rarely will it be fun. And yet it is necessary.

 

If anything, considering the place of Rush Limbaugh in his nation’s political life is to realize that conservatism has been late to develop a voice that cuts in somewhere between its aloof intellectuals and aggro broadcasters. Conservatism is still searching for a middlebrow voice. Perhaps it is starting to emerge on the podcasts like those hosted by Ricochet and National Review. The effort to conserve, Limbaugh well knew, was an effort to build something new.

Don’t Shrug at Obama’s Michael Flynn Scandal

By Kyle Smith

Tuesday, May 13, 2020

How would President Obama be reacting to the collapse of the case against Michael Flynn if Flynn were a black teen?

Picture a racist white FBI agent who hates a black student and became enraged when that teen publicly insulted one of the agent’s close friends. Say the FBI sends two guys over to the teen’s house, claiming it suspects him of being involved in drug trafficking, and starts asking the kid questions in hopes that the kid will lie.

Suppose the FBI does not read the kid his rights before questioning him. Suppose the FBI discourages the kid from hiring a lawyer and tells the kid its investigation is friendly, not an effort to incriminate him. Suppose further that the FBI, after grilling the kid, still doesn’t think he lied (but merely that he forgot details of things he’d been asked about). Suppose the FBI then dragged out the case so long that the kid rang up $5 million in legal bills, then threatened to arrest the kid’s mother. Suppose the FBI withheld exculpatory evidence from the kid’s lawyers and agreed to leave the kid’s mother alone if he pleaded guilty — but didn’t tell the judge about this side deal.

If the teen finally pleaded guilty to a single count of making false statements, would Obama then say, “Aha! Justice is served! The kid admits being guilty!”? If the prosecutors, years later, finally dropped the case against the kid, would Obama say, “You begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk” because he thought the kid deserved everything that had happened to him?

All of the above is pretty much exactly what happened to Michael Flynn. Except the team that went after Michael Flynn didn’t hate him because of racial difference; they hated him because of political difference. The personal insult Flynn delivered was when he publicly went after Hillary Clinton, leading the cries to “Lock her up” at the Republican National Convention. The FBI did indeed fail to advise Flynn that they were targeting him rather than seeking information about phone calls with the Russian ambassador that they had already listened to. They discouraged him from having a lawyer present and didn’t read him anything like the Miranda warning. They did indeed pour so much trouble on Flynn that he amassed some $5 million in legal bills (and had to put his house up for sale). They didn’t initially think that he had lied, but merely had a faulty memory. Instead of threatening his mother, the FBI threatened to indict his son, and someone leaked this to the media so that Flynn’s son’s reputation would be damaged in any event. And the FBI did indeed withhold exculpatory evidence from Flynn’s lawyers.

The effort to nail Flynn fell under the heading of counterintelligence rather than a criminal case, but either way the state must have a legitimate suspicion of underlying wrongdoing before it can start harassing someone. The Obama administration did not have a legitimate basis for going after Flynn, and it’s obvious they didn’t because of two words that are the political equivalent of “That’s what she said” — an old punchline called the Logan Act.

No one has ever been convicted under the Logan Act because the Logan Act is pure bushwa. Everyone in politics knows this. Everyone who merely follows politics from the outside knows this. I know this, and I never spent a day in law school. Do you seriously think lawyer and former FBI director James Comey didn’t know this, or former constitutional law lecturer and president Barack Obama didn’t know this? The discussion between the two of them in the White House on January 5, 2017, about going after Flynn under the Logan Act because he talked to the Russian ambassador does not pass the laugh test. When someone says, “Let’s indict someone under the Logan Act,” he might as well be saying, “Let’s indict someone under the Abracadabra Act.” If the Logan Act were a functioning law, someone would have been convicted under it at some point in the 200 years since it was passed. And Jane Fonda, Dennis Rodman, Jimmy Carter, and John Kerry all would have been busted under it. Moreover, all of these people, unlike Michael Flynn, were not the incoming national-security adviser whose job it is to do things like talk to the Russian ambassador. Constitutional-law professor Jonathan Turley notes, “The use of the Logan Act against the incoming national security adviser would have been not only patently unconstitutional but positively ludicrous.”

A country that respects “the rule of law” has to respect the rule of having a good reason to go after somebody. If there’s no legitimate cause to suspect the target of anything, the state could come after anybody for any reason — because an investigator is racist, sexist, hates Latinos, hates gays, or just has a personal vendetta. The “rule of law” is meaningless if the state sets about nailing somebody on a phony pretext, hoping that the process of investigation will cause some crime such as perjury or obstruction to occur. It’s a terrible affront to “the rule of law” when the law is misused to target an innocent black teenager. But the affront is much worse when it’s a high-ranking public official who gets targeted. The attack on Flynn was an attempt to delegitimize and undercut the lawfully elected Trump administration to aid the prospects of the Democratic Party. This attempt was extremely successful; the Democrats’ media arm, otherwise known as the media, spent nearly three years promoting the bogus theory that the administration and/or Trump himself had carried out illegal acts of collusion with the Russians.

Our political press is remarkably incurious about tracing the chain of motives when it comes to questionable doings by Democrats, but suspecting Obama of being behind the persecution of Michael Flynn is pretty easy when you remember the backstory of these two men’s relationship. Flynn, a registered Democrat, had worked for President Obama as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency for two years, Obama fired him, then Flynn publicly shamed Obama by blasting his ISIS strategy and saying his Iran Deal was terrible. Recall that Obama ran the tightest ship of any president in modern history, demanding and receiving the utmost level of loyalty: Essentially no major leakers damaged his presidency. No one close to him ever published a tell-all memoir undermining him. Then Flynn came along. Obama must have been incensed to see his former official tearing him apart on Fox News, then going full MAGA with his histrionics at the Republican convention, where Flynn was the only major Obama-administration turncoat to speak on Trump’s behalf, and gave perhaps the nastiest speech of the entire affair.

It irked Obama that Flynn might wind up on top, with a plum position in the Trump administration. But Obama couldn’t undermine Flynn by starting a PR campaign against him, because the position of national-security adviser doesn’t require cabinet confirmation. So Obama tried to talk Trump out of hiring Flynn. It must have been painful for Obama to beg for a favor from his worst enemy in order to sabotage another enemy, so he couched the request as friendly advice, as though Obama had any friendly feelings toward Trump. When this failed, Obama’s mind perhaps turned to finding a backdoor means of taking out Flynn.

Did Obama break any laws? Maybe not. Was he part of an unconscionable effort to weaponize the police powers of the state against a political enemy? It sure looks that way. How else do you explain that Comey and Obama just casually discussed using the obviously phony pretext of the Logan Act for going after Flynn in the January 5, 2017, meeting while Sally Yates, the deputy attorney general, sat there in amazement that her own supposed underling, Comey, would cook up something so obviously bogus and politically explosive as this case without telling her?

Put it this way: Knowing of Obama’s interest in these matters, is it plausible that the FBI acted as it did without his approval? If the media were one-tenth as interested in Obama scandals as they are in those relating to Trump, it would be shouting from the rooftops that the real Russia-collusion scandal was the effort to gin up a fake scandal to either damage Trump politically or take him out. As it is, most of the media’s response to the Flynn-Obama debacle has been boredom, shrugging and whataboutism: As Brian Stelter groused on CNN, right-wingers are “treating the Michael Flynn story like it’s a bigger deal than the deaths of 2,000 Americans a day.” You’d think someone who works at a 24/7 media company would understand that more than one story can be hugely important.

Limbaugh: A Genius at Radio

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Genius is often defined in myriad ways. One trusted criterion is the ability to do something extraordinary in a field where others could not — and doing something that perhaps will never be done again by anyone else.

By that measure, Rush Limbaugh certainly is the genius of talk radio, a genre in which he not merely excelled but that he also singlehandedly reinvented as something entirely different — and entirely more powerful and instrumental in American life — from what was imaginable pre-Limbaugh.

Even stranger still, his ascendance coincided with the presumed nadir of radio itself. It was supposedly a has-been, one-dimensional medium, long overshadowed by television. Even in the late 1980s, radio was about to be sentenced as obsolete in the ascendant cyber age of what would become Internet blogs, podcasts, streaming, and smartphone television.

Stranger still, Limbaugh has prospered through two generations and picked up millions of listeners who were not born when he first went national and who had no idea of why or how he had become a national presence.

He certainly did not capture new listeners by adjusting to the times. While tastes changed and the issues often metamorphosed, he did not. He remained conservative, commonsensical, and skeptical of Washington and those in it, as if he knew all the predictable thousand faces of the timeless progressive project, whose various manifestations reappear to mask a single ancient and predictable essence: the desire of a self-appointed group of elites to expand government in order to regiment the lives of ordinary people, allegedly to achieve greater mandated equality and social justice but more often to satisfy their own narcissistic will to power. It was Limbaugh who most prominently warned that lax immigration enforcement would soon lead to open calls for open borders, that worry about “global warming” would transform into calls to ban the internal combustion engine, and that the logical end of federal takeover of health care would be Medicare for All.

The Left — and many too who would later become the Never Trump Right — thought that Limbaugh’s worst moment finally came after Obama’s 2008 victory, during the post-election euphoria and just days before the January 2009 inauguration. It was a heady time, when the media would go on to declare soon-to-be Nobel laureate President Obama as, variously, a living “god” and “the smartest guy” ever to assume the presidency. His supporters often compared him to iconic wartime presidents such as FDR and Lincoln. Americans had been lectured on Obama’s divinity even as a candidate, and the evidence had ranged from the mundane of Platonically perfect creases in his trousers, to the telepathic ability to prompt spontaneous electrical impulses in the legs of cable television anchors.

In answer to Obama’s promise to fundamentally “transform America,” Limbaugh flat-out said he hoped that the new president would not succeed: “I hope Obama fails.” Outrage followed. Was Limbaugh rooting for the failure of America itself? In fact, he was worrying about how America might survive the first unabashedly progressive president in over 60 years, now empowered by an obsequious media, a House majority, a veto-proof Senate, and Supreme Court picks on the near horizon.

Limbaugh was the first voice to warn that what would soon follow the election was not the agenda that Obama sometimes disingenuously voiced on the campaign trail — Obama’s ruse of occasionally sounding concerned about illegal immigration, gay marriage, the spiraling debt, a rapid pullout from Iraq, and identity politics — but rather a move to the progressive hard-left.

What would ensue instead lined up with Obama’s senatorial voting record, his prior associations with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and Father Pfleger, and his occasional slips on the campaign trail: “I want you to argue with them and get in their face,” “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a knife,” and (in the pre-Netflix, pre–Martha Vineyard estate days), “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Once elected, Obama was unbound. He lectured the nation about the wages of the West’s sin: the Crusades, America’s prior role in the world, and its own domestic woes. He instructed Americans on when it was the time to profit and when it was not, the point at which people should concede they had made enough money. And he listed the various reasons that he could not, as some anti-constitutional “king,” grant unconstitutional amnesties by fiat — before he went on to do just that.

Prior to Limbaugh’s national prominence, radio talk-show hosts were not shapers of national culture or politics. Even the few local and regional celebrity radio hosts had little power to influence issues of the day. While local talk radio was more conservative than liberal, it was hardly seen as traditional conservatives’ answer to the liberal biases of the major national newspapers, network evening news, and public radio and TV, much less the aristocratic pretensions of the Republican Beltway hierarchy.

So, what was inconceivable in 1988 was not just that any one person could leap from local prominence to national dominance, but that he could empower (rather than replace) his legions of radio subordinates. Far from making them irrelevant, Limbaugh energized talk-radio hosts. Once he became a national force, hundreds of others became far more effective conservative local and regional voices, partly through the art of emulation, partly through scheduling to lead in to or follow Limbaugh’s daily three-hour show, partly in the general renewed public interest in talk radio itself.

Call that coattails, or force multiplication, but in essence, Limbaugh redefined the genre as something more entertaining, more political, and yet more serious — an “army of one” antidote to the New York and Washington media corridor. How strange that after progressives achieved a monopoly in network news, public television and radio, the Internet conglomerates, Hollywood, and network prime-time programing, they sought to emulate Limbaugh by creating their own leftist version of national talk radio, Air America. Millions of dollars, dozens of talk-radio hosts, and Chapter 11 later, the venture collapsed in abject failure.

I wager that more Democrats listened to Limbaugh than to Air America, in the fashion of my late Democratic father, who used to sneak into my office on the farm and listen with me to Rush during the 1991 Gulf War.

How did Limbaugh do it?

No one really knows because few have been able to duplicate his success, despite a number of gifted hosts who have tried. For all the criticism that Limbaugh was crass, over some 25,000 hours of the syndicated Limbaugh show, there were few embarrassments. And in cases where Limbaugh said something he regretted, he later apologized. He certainly could grow animated but seldom shouted and yelled. He talked about having talent “on loan from God” but could turn self-deprecatory and compliment callers for insights that he found original and noteworthy, saying, “I hadn’t thought of that.” He mocked identity politics but at work and in life often surrounded himself with talented people who were not white, and he seemed oblivious to any significance of that fact other than that he’d found friends and employees who were competent and whom he liked. He was a self-made multimillionaire many times over and proud of it, and yet felt and acted more comfortable with those of the Midwestern middle classes with whom he’d grown up.

Perhaps the best clue is that Limbaugh was never just a talk-show host at all. Or rather, he redefined the talk-radio three-hour format into something far more expansive than the critical arts of editorializing and answering impromptu listeners’ calls. In his prime role as unyielding conservative explicator of the daily news without the filters of the Washington and New York commentariat, he combined the jobs of entertainer, stand-up comedian, psychologist, impressionist, satirist, provocateur, therapist, and listener to the nation.

Yet ultimately his audience listened because he differentiated between two worlds. On one hand, he saw, with a skeptic’s eye, the cosmos of progressive and liberal translators who selectively edit the day’s events and massage their supposed importance to Americans, to present the news in line with liberals’ preconceived agendas — under the guise that such reporting was beyond reproach as professional, disinterested, and entirely based in facts. Limbaugh exploded all those pretenses.

But he also saw the other world that was never reported. He did not claim to be a traditional journalist or even an opinion journalist. Instead, he proudly assumed the mantle and collective voice of a conservative Everyman. Or maybe, more dramatically, his listeners saw him as an atoll of traditional sanity in a turbulent sea of postmodern madness. His forte was explaining why nominal conservatives were infected with a fatal virus of wanting to be liked by the “mainstream media” and the cultural elite — and thus often “grew” in office, moving leftward, as if they had become smarter and more sophisticated than those who had voted for them.

People tuned in because they knew in advance that Rush would not weaken or deviate, much less “transcend” them. There would be no faddish Limbaugh who renounced his prior personas and positions. So his listeners were reassured each day that they were not themselves crazy to express doubt about what the nation was told or instructed.

The New York Times story picked up by their local paper, the NPR segment they heard in the car, and the commentary of the ABC, CBS, or NBC evening news anchors were rarely if at all the whole truth and anything but the truth. Limbaugh reminded them that what was purportedly the news was increasingly the output of a rather narrow slice of cocooned America between Washington, D.C., and New York City, offered up by affluent progressives (the “drive-bys”) who had come to believe that the media’s role was not to report events per se, but to do so in a way that would not only educate the otherwise blinkered American masses but would also improve them morally and make them redeemable spiritually.

Limbaugh did all that, day in and day out, without any sense of monotony or boredom, but with almost adolescent energy and excitement about just talking to America each day. He never dialed it in. And his audience knew it.

Limbaugh himself knew his listeners, not just by class or locale, but through a shared skepticism about the values of coastal America and its inability to show any correlation between proven excellence and an array of letters after one’s name or name-dropping on a résumé. Does anyone think that a professor of journalism, a Washington pundit, a network anchor, a Senate elder, a president, or even a late-night TV host could host 30 hours of the Limbaugh show without losing most of the audience?

He was the Midwestern college drop-out who had bounced around among jobs before he found his natural place. Through that experience, he posed an ancient Euripidean question, “What is wisdom?” The answer was found in many of his targets: academics, editorialists, celebrities, journalists, government functionaries, and politicos whose bromides Limbaugh made ridiculous, and he instructed millions on how and why their ideas made no sense in a real world beyond their enclaves. Rush was hated by the Left supposedly for his politically incorrect -isms and -ologies; in truth, it was because he so often made them look ridiculous.

Limbaugh sounded sane when giddy Stanford grad and Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow enthused about Robert Mueller’s daily walls-are-closing-in bombshells — much as farmer and Cal Poly graduate Devin Nunes wrote the truth in his House Intelligence Committee majority report while Harvard Law graduate Adam Schiff’s nose grew in his minority-report reply, and in the way that supposedly idiotic wheeler-dealer Donald Trump energized the economy after Ivy League sophisticate Barack Obama said it would require a magic wand.

In response to Rush Limbaugh’s announcement that he has advanced lung cancer, millions voiced sympathy, support — and shock. Last week, millions asked, “What are Rush’s chances?” The correct answer might be, “Not good — if it was anyone but Rush.”

Yet one who can create national talk radio ex nihilo can similarly beat toxic malignancy. His listeners seemed worried not just over Rush’s health but about their own equally ominous future of the day’s events without him.

May that day be far off.

How Rush Limbaugh Made Millennials Like Me Conservative

By Nicole Russell

Thursday, February 06, 2020

I grew up in Minnesota, the heart of the Midwest: a blue state of really nice, hard-working people who love winter, lefse, and Al Franken. Starting at about 13 years old until college, I worked for my dad, a successful remodeling contractor, over school breaks.

I hated the work. Often the only female on a construction site or a hotel in the midst of remodeling, I felt awkward. I got dirty. I wasn’t good at painting or wallpapering. The hours were longer than anything I’d ever experienced, and we rarely ate out during the day. (Somehow cold granola bars just added to the laboriousness.)

I know, I sound like a wimp. I was. I gained great respect for hard-working men and blue-collar workers during that period. The only glimmer of happiness in the job was that I got quality time with my dad and this other guy: Rush Limbaugh, who recently announced he has been diagnosed with “advanced lung cancer.”

At every job site, the routine was the same: I’d dress in painters’ clothes, drive to the site with my dad, and along with all the tools we set up, we plugged in the radio set to AM 1500 KSTP. If memory serves, Limbaugh didn’t come on until 11 a.m. The next three hours were a respite of opinion, intellectual stimulation, and philosophical and political concepts I’d barely thought of yet.

As other workers labored nearby, I forgot the sounds of construction and my self-pity faded. Over time I started looking forward to this part of the day more than anything else. Along with the one-on-one time I had with my dad, three hours of Rush Limbaugh’s ideas, observations, wit, and humor provided everything I needed for a foundation in conservative thought.

Limbaugh’s quirks grew on me until they became inside jokes with my dad. The golden microphone. The dramatic paper shuffling. The cigar smoking. I wondered: When Limbaugh did that sneezing-squeal, was he laughing, crying, or just old?

Talking from the “Southern Command,” Limbaugh seemed untouchable, yet so in touch with politics, culture, and what the Everyman needed to know. His arrogance, sardonic jokes, and disdain for the media coupled with his cigar smoking had a jerkboy-fraternity-meets-William F. Buckley appeal.

I couldn’t get enough of how he stripped bare the ideas Buckley wrote about so that even a young teenager could understand. Between commercial breaks or callers, I would ask my dad what Limbaugh meant about the topics he was covering that day: welfare, the media, and liberal ideology.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I learned about core conservative principles through my dad’s interpretations of Limbaugh’s monologues and observations of critical news of the day. Later, I developed these ideas into a more cohesive political philosophy through the influence of other teachers and reading iconic authors. In college, I minored in political science—an homage to the “Rush baby” inside.

Limbaugh Created Comraderie Among Those He Influenced

I began an “adult” life: graduated from college, worked in politics, started a family, and moved to Northern Virginia, where I met some of the most influential members of the media and politics working today. I wrote for The Atlantic, Politico, The New York Times, National Review Online. I observed something incredible: Limbaugh was right.

He was right about the MSM (“the mainstream media”) he loathed, elitists, and liberals. While living nearly ten years outside DC, I observed how mainstream media skewed to the left and that Limbaugh’s observations were spot-on. One only needs to spend a little time in D.C. or New York City to see how pervasive leftist rot has become.

Limbaugh’s talking points became my talking points, and I discovered I could talk to painters or attorneys equally about conservative ideas. Even if I ended up talking with lawyers who tried cases at the Supreme Court, I could sort of keep up. Countless hours of Limbaugh’s history lessons, sharp media analysis, and relentless commitment to conservative ideals—free market, individualism, religious liberty, small government—were embedded in my mind.

Whether I met media icons, politicians, lobbyists, lawyers, or Supreme Court justices, and whether I met them at fancy galas, fundraisers, the Federalist Society, or Fox News, Limbaugh’s Buckley meets the common man conservatism proved true over and over. My dad wasn’t the only one. I wasn’t the only one. There were throngs of us with various skill sets, different values, and changing priorities, but we all had the same purpose: we were lovers of liberty.

A Steady Influence for Decades

A cursory glance at Limbaugh’s career shows how he touched someone like me as a teenager, along with the likes of Ben Shapiro and countless others. In 2018, Limbaugh was America’s most-listened-to radio host and reached a monthly audience of 25 million on more than 650 stations. That year he was the world’s second highest-paid radio host, reportedly earning $84.5 million, just behind Howard Stern.

A 2008 Pew Research survey found that Limbaugh drew a significantly conservative audience, including National Rifle Association supporters and what was known then as “Tea Partiers” and “Christian conservatives.” About 37 percent surveyed said they tune in for opinion, but another 28 percent say they enjoy the blend of news, opinion, and entertainment. According to a 2009 survey, only 28 percent of Limbaugh’s audience is female. Even so, I got a kick out of the male-oriented humor. How not?

Even as Rush spoke to more than 25 million people, it felt like he was just talking to me. Were it not for his daily show, and filtering ideas I heard with my dad, I would not have become a political conservative, a writer, a lover of liberty, and as we say at The Federalist, anxious for the fray—a sentiment I know Limbaugh would appreciate.

I’ve wanted to write this essay for at least a decade, to tell people—or maybe just to tell him— how just one person can so powerfully influence another. Mr. Limbaugh, we the millennial Rush babies thank you. We wish you healing, grace, mega dittos, and many more cigars. You changed everything for us.

The Era of Limbaugh

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, February 08, 2020

Florida governor Ron DeSantis spoke to Rush Limbaugh last fall at a gala dinner for the National Review Institute. The radio host was there to receive the William F. Buckley Jr. award. “He actually gave me one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever had,” Limbaugh told his audience the next day. “He listed five great conservatives and put me in the list.” DeSantis’s pantheon: William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Limbaugh.

Good list. No media figure since Buckley has had a more lasting influence on American conservatism than Limbaugh, whose cumulative weekly audience is more than 20 million people. Since national syndication in 1988, Limbaugh has been the voice of conservatism, his three-hour program blending news, politics, and entertainment in a powerful and polarizing cocktail. His shocking announcement this week that he has advanced lung cancer, and his appearance at the State of the Union, where President Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, are occasions to reflect on his impact.

It’s one thing to excel in your field. It’s another to create the field in which you excel. Conservative talk radio was local and niche before Limbaugh. He was the first to capitalize on regulatory and technological changes that allowed for national scale. The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 freed affiliates to air controversial political opinions without inviting government scrutiny. As music programming migrated to the FM spectrum, AM bandwidth welcomed talk. Listener participation was also critical. “It was not until 1982,” writes Nicole Hemmer in Messengers of the Right, “that AT&T introduced the modern direct-dial toll-free calling system that national call-in shows use.”

Limbaugh made the most of these opportunities. And he contributed stylistic innovations of his own. He treated politics not only as a competition of ideas but also as a contest between liberal elites and the American public. He also added the irreverent and sometimes scandalous humor and cultural commentary of the great DJs. He introduced catchphrases still in circulation: “dittohead,” “Drive-By media,” “feminazi,” “talent on loan from God.”

The template he created has been so successful that the list of his imitators on both the left and right is endless. Even Al Franken wanted in on the act. Dostoyevsky is attributed with the saying that the great Russian writers “all came out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’” Political talk show hosts came out of Limbaugh’s microphone.

Limbaugh’s success prefigured more than the rise of conservative radio. His two bestsellers, The Way Things Ought to Be (1992) and See, I Told You So (1993), were the leading edge of the conservative publishing boom. And his television program, The Rush Limbaugh Show, produced in collaboration with Roger Ailes, was a forerunner of the opinion programming on Fox News Channel. “I had to learn how to take being hated as a measure of success,” he told a Boy Scouts awards dinner in 2009. “Nobody’s raised for that. And the person that taught me to deal with this and to remain psychologically healthy was Roger Ailes.”

Limbaugh is not fringe. His views fit in the conservative mainstream. He idolizes Buckley. “He was a fundamental individual in helping me to be able to explain what I believed instinctively, helping me to explain it to others,” Limbaugh said last year. The ideas are the same but the salesman is different. Limbaugh is Buckley without the accent, without the Yale credentials, without the sailboat and harpsichord. Limbaugh is a college dropout from Cape Girardeau, Mo., who spends Sundays watching the NFL and speaks in plain language. His background connects him to the audience — and to the increasingly working-class Republican voter.

Limbaugh entered stage right just as Ronald Reagan was making his exit. He took from Reagan the sense that America’s future is bright, that America isn’t broken, just its liberal political, media, and cultural elites. “He rejected Washington elitism and connected directly with the American people who adored him,” Limbaugh said after Reagan’s death. “He didn’t need the press. He didn’t need the press to spin what he was or what he said. He had the ability to connect individually with each American who saw him.” The two men never met.

Limbaugh assumed Reagan’s position as leader of the conservative movement. In a letter sent to Limbaugh after the 1992 election, Reagan wrote, “Now that I’ve retired from active politics, I don’t mind that you have become the Number One voice for conservatism in our Country. I know the liberals call you the most dangerous man in America, but don’t worry about it, they used to say the same thing about me. Keep up the good work. America needs to hear ‘the way things ought to be.’”

In a long and evenhanded cover story in 1993 by James Bowman, National Review pronounced Limbaugh “the leader of the opposition.” Bowman quoted R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor of The American Spectator. “We need to have people who can dramatize ideas,” Tyrrell said. “You need that literary spark. Luigi Barzini had it; Buckley has it. And, though he’s a great talker rather than a great writer, Rush has it too.”

More than a decade later, after the Republican defeat in 2008, Limbaugh once again stepped into the breach. The media likened Barack Obama to FDR. Republicans wavered. Should they cooperate with President Obama in building a “New Foundation” for America? Limbaugh gave his answer on January 16, 2009. “I’ve been listening to Barack Obama for a year and a half,” he said. “I know what his politics are. I know what his plans are, as he has stated them. I don’t want them to succeed.” Limbaugh said he hoped Obama failed. “Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what’s gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here. Why do I want more of it?” The monologue, and the speech he delivered to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., a month later, became a sensation. They set the tone for the Tea Party and Republican victories in 2010 and 2014.

Limbaugh did not mock Trump when the businessman announced his presidential campaign in June 2015. “This is going to resonate with a lot of people, I guarantee you, and the Drive-Bys are going to pooh-pooh it,” he said. He spent the primary reminding listeners of the importance of defeating Hillary Clinton. Trump was not an ideological candidate, he said. Trump was a missile aimed at the establishment. If ideology matters, then you should vote for Ted Cruz. “If conservatism is your bag, if conservatism is the dominating factor in how you vote,” Limbaugh said in February 2016, “there is no other choice for you in this campaign than Ted Cruz, because you are exactly right: This is the closest in our lifetimes we have ever been to Ronald Reagan.” But, Limbaugh added, the feeling in the country might be so anti-establishment that Trump’s unusual coalition could win the presidency. It did.

To say that Limbaugh supports the president would be an understatement. Last December he introduced the president at a Turning Point USA summit. He mentioned a recent encounter on a golf course. Someone told him it is hard to defend President Trump. “I said, ‘What? Hard to defend the president? It’s one of the easiest things in the world to do.’ President Trump does not need to be defended.” The crowd cheered. A few seconds later Limbaugh said, “How do you defend Donald Trump? You attack the people who are attempting to destroy him. They’re trying to destroy you. They’re trying to transform this country into something that it was not founded to be.”

Bold, brash, divisive, funny, and amped up, President Trump’s style is similar to a shock jockey’s. His presidency is another reminder of Limbaugh’s staying power. The American right has been molded in his anti-elitist, grassroots, demotic, irreverent, patriotic, hard-charging image. Rush Limbaugh is not just a talk show host. He defines an era.