For some reason, when I heard of the passing of the 70-year-old Rush Limbaugh from lung cancer, oddly enough, a scene from the TV series Mad Men came to mind. Don Draper, the mysterious and dapper ad man, explains to enthralled Kodak executives that the most important idea in advertising is new. “It creates an itch,” he explains. “You simply put your product in there as a sort of calamine lotion.” I think such a concept is at the heart of why “El Rushbo” as he was affectionately known by his loyal legions of over 20 million daily listeners, (and “Satan” by the Left in whose boot he was a burr for 37 years) was so successful. He was the first of what would be a media counter-revolution. A conservative backlash to what many across “fly-over country” saw as an ever steeper and more pervasive leftward tilt to the media and news sources they’d once trusted.
In 1984, when Limbaugh truly launched his career as the country’s premier political talk radio host at Sacramento-based KFBK, the media landscape was a barren place wherein alternative viewpoints had few if any outlets. In my hometown of Chicago, for example, if you wanted news you had a very limited, and ideologically monolithic, choice of media outlets. Your national news was confined to ABC (Peter Jennings), NBC (Tom Brokaw), CBS (Dan Rather), a few local stations like WGN and WTTW, PBS, some obscure UHF outlets, and in Chicago, two newspapers. The internet didn’t really exist. FM radio was mostly music, AM very hard to even tune into. And that was it.
Yet, those tens of millions of Americans who leaned right of center had no voice. No place to go where their views could be championed. There was nobody on the air of any import they could listen to and nod while mumbling “damned right.” Rush Limbaugh changed all that. He sensed there was an itch for alternative viewpoints beyond the liberal dogma seeping its way into our schools, universities, pop culture, politics, and ultimately supposedly “straight news” organizations. And he was unafraid to speak them aloud. After all, he reasoned, he was only repeating on an open forum what millions of Americans unsettled by the shift of their country into self-loathing, lawlessness, political opportunism, social permissiveness and corrosive morality, and general leftism among the institutions of power, were saying every night at the kitchen table.
Once he moved to New York with its vast audience, and especially after the FCC repealed its Fairness Doctrine in 1987, Limbaugh’s career skyrocketed and he soon stood at the top of a growing pile of conservative talk-show hosts — Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck, Howie Carr, Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, et. al. — who rightfully look to him as the godfather of their uber-successful genre of infotainment.
At the ABC Radio Network he honed his style until be became the most recognized voice of the right in the nation. And he never wavered in his core message which could basically be summed up in a belief that the United States is a force for good, warts and all, and that the Left are out to destroy it. Every day, then, his radio broadcast was a three-hour long gladiator-like battle with the forces of evil, also known to his ocean of daily listeners as, well, “Democrats”.
But such a binary view of the issues and the players that shaped politics on the good and the bad side of the divide was fine with his legion of self-proclaimed “ditto-heads”. After years of being ridiculed, maligned, looked down upon, forgotten, and dismissed as knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing rubes, either through being labeled “clingers” or “deplorables” (let alone racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobe Nazis from Hell…or Missouri, like Limbaugh himself) by the elites in the media with the right credentials and right viewpoints, they were happy to follow a man who gave as good as he got. And the simple fact is the more the Left tried to demonize and marginalize Limbaugh, sifting through decades of transcripts for that one “gotcha!” career-ending gaffe, the stronger and more influential he became. They may as well have tried to put out a fire with kerosene. And it drove them mad.
One can already imagine the tsunami of vitriol and grave-dancing overwhelming the Twittersphere at this moment. But somehow I think Limbaugh would be happy to have their vile celebrations as his epitaph. After all, as a man in his line of work understood better than most, often it is more revealing to judge a man by his enemies than his friends
The numbers Limbaugh put up are testament to that void in broadcasting that The Rush Limbaugh Show targeted and filled. In 2008, he inked a contract extension with syndicator Premiere Radio Networks worth $400 million. His model of being a conservative yin to the liberal yang upset the balance of media power in this nation — meaning it moved to restore balance by offering an alternative narrative to those proffered by a once-unopposed media class — and his impact, almost three decades later, has been profound. Because of Limbaugh more than any other media personality, conservatives dominate the airwaves, despite Leftist attempts to emulate his model, but with an opposite message. His ascendancy went hand-in-hand with the rise of the Fox Broadcasting Company (1986) which Rupert Murdoch founded to directly compete with the big three networks where they lived…on Television. No doubt the success of The Rush Limbaugh Show had a profound influence on the astute Murdoch, as Limbaugh paved the way and exposed the multi-billion dollar market just waiting to be cultivated.
I could give a blow-by-blow account of Limbaugh’s extraordinary life from his 1951 birth in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, his many awards, wealth, marriages, books and the rest right up to his crowning moment when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 2020, while already battling cancer, but there is plenty of that out there.
What matters most about Limbaugh, one must think, is how different the country he leaves behind is as compared to the one in which he launched his broadcast revolution in 1984. Today we are more polarized as a nation than at any time since 1860…in many ways even more so. The question is, how much did Limbaugh contribute to it, and how much did he merely expose? That depends on who you ask. The left-wing Huffington Post, for example, reports his death this way: “Rush Limbaugh, Bigoted King Of Talk Radio, Dies At 70.” I think right there is the answer. Only in a nation already infected with such strains of hatred and vindictiveness could a Limbaugh have thrived. As with the president who awarded him his medal, Limbaugh was not a divider. Rather he exposed the divide that already existed. One cannot be so successful at selling calamine lotion for the soul to those not furiously itching for an alternative viewpoint, their viewpoint, to have a voice, a champion.
And as much as the Left hates Limbaugh, as much they will no doubt rejoice at his passing (in the name of “tolerance”, of course) they made him. He was their Frankenstein. And now they get to live with his legacy…which gives “El Rushbo” fans the last laugh, even as they mourn his passing. “Talent on loan from God” as he would mischievously say, has been returned to its rightful owner. But his impact cannot be refunded. Love him or hate him, we are living in a new hyper-political age that Rush Limbaugh, and those who symbiotically loved to loathe him, has created.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets. He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of Another Time And Place
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.