February 17, 2024

A third year has passed since the death of Rush Limbaugh. The day of the sad news, millions of people were sensible of a loss. Something they depended on for reassurance, reinforcement, confidence, strength, amusement, and interest was now gone and never would come again.

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Limbaugh was an optimist, and optimists are like bonfires. The shivering gathered about him for warmth — those fearing an awful and incomprehensible transformation in their country, those to whom the triumph of Marxism looked to be inevitable. His listeners had this consolation — that at the appointed hour the ebullient voice would issue from the radio, and for a time they would be in the company of a friend, who saw what they saw but had it all figured out and was himself unafraid.

Naturally, the leftist bullies hated him for ridiculing their piffle, but above all because he was dauntless. And he made others so, as did Donald Trump.

Intellectuals who fancy themselves conservatives, but of such refinement and probity as to join occasionally with the liberals also shunned him. They could scarcely play the role they coveted while acknowledging such a man as Rush Limbaugh to be a leader of the conservative movement, a man who spoke to and in the voice of the Republican base. It was the respect of educated liberals and not the hooting of the rabble that was to be garnered, thought those who would evolve into the “never-Trumpers.”

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But doing justice to Limbaugh’s nominally conservative antagonists, their enmity also sprang from matters more interesting than snobbery. They thought themselves possessed of a certain moderation — they sometimes called themselves “moderates,” at any rate. They displayed this moderation in reaching out to the other side (“across the aisle”), and typically in joining the liberals on what came to be called the “social issues.”

Republican politicians of this stripe often were informed by the “consultant class,” as Limbaugh dubbed them. Professional political advisers typically would tell their charges not to offend moderate voters by showing anger at Democrats, no matter what the latter said or did, or by taking strong positions in opposition to abortion, for traditional marriage, or for the inclusion of religion in the public square. Wealthy donors would say the same thing to Republican politicians.

And so, Limbaugh challenged such politicians and derided their timidity before the Left. “How many books have been written about great moderates in American history?” he asked, more than once. And, of course, the answer was, none, so long as moderation was understood to be the quality of those said to possess it in our time. Moderation, for centuries numbered among the cardinal virtues, now turned out to be doing anything rather than take a stand on issues that excite enmity.

Against the so-called moderates, Republican consultants, major donors, and NeverTrumpers Limbaugh advanced his own brand of populism. “Populism,” as such, intellectuals associate with demagoguery — playing upon the basest instincts of ordinary people and sanctifying their ignorance. That accusation was directed at President Trump often enough.

The presupposition underlying the accusation is that there is a virtuous class of legislators — educated, high-minded, and thus immune to the prejudices of the vulgar. The demagogic politician raises the common folk against them, persuading them to surrender to him their liberty. A popular orator like Rush Limbaugh facilitated the demagogue Trump in doing so and threatened that exemplary group of people who constituted the leadership of both political parties in Washington.

But the legislators in Washington, with exceptions, and the army of unelected administrators and congressional staff have not been precisely a class of high-minded and enlightened public servants, these several decades. They sacrificed the nation’s commerce to a sinister foreign despotism, which then absorbed nearly all its manufacturing. They opened American borders to an untrammeled influx of destitute foreigners, without regard to the prosperity or security of the people they were elected to represent.