Joan Walsh did a book back in 2012 during the Obama-Biden Administration called What's the Matter with White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America.
Reading the title today, you can almost hear the Trumpistas gasping, "Critical race theory! Critical race theory!"
Chill out, folks. I'm willing to guess that no public grade schools in the US is teaching this book.
She relates how the GOP reacted against Obama during his first term as President:
Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn, tried to defend the president in August 2011 with bizarre and condescending racial stereotyping. "His intent isn't to destroy," Coburn told a constituent at a Tulsa town hall meeting. "It's to create dependency because it worked so well for him. I don't say that critically .... As an African American male, coming through the progress of everything he experienced, he got tremendous benefit through a lot of these programs." The racism and the racial idiocy were dizzying.
It was also well organized. Hillary Clinton exaggerated a little when she talked about "a vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband in 1998. Yet ten years later, an intimidating nationwide apparatus of overt and covert right-wing character assassins, fearmongers, and race-baiters made the anti-Clinton Arkansas Project look like a friendly fund -raising group for his presidential library.
Rush Limbaugh had the loudest single voice within the anti-Obama media movement. He set the tone for the leaderless Republican Party when he announced on the eve of Obama's inauguration, "I hope he fails." Limbaugh went on, "We are being told that we ... have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president," a glimpse of right-wing psychosexual anxiety I'd rather not have seen.
The Republican Party has been on their current trajectory for a while. Less than a decade after the situation Joan described in her book the Grand Old Party was storming the Capitol on January 6.
Most cults have easily identifiable leadership figures who push members to the edifice of a belief system, but Q remains ethereal even while delivering messages to the faithful for four years. Trump’s outsized presence brought him a messianic-like following within the movement. Together, Q and Trump are an ample substitute for a clear cult-like figure. According to the most zealous of believers, if Trump or Q say something, it must be true — or eventually will be. [my emphasis]
As large a political movement as the Trump supporters in the Republicans composes is obviously much more complex than a cult focuses on more limited material goals. But this analysis suggests that QAnon provides a flexible but enticing emotional content and a narrative flexible enough to be highly adaptive to changing circumstances, while himself provides the authoritarian leadership figure to give focus to the movement.
Blazakis also talks about the trend that QAnon devotees describe in which they become pulled in deeper and deeper to this thought world by what really is "research," but a type of research structured in content and helped by social media algorithms that winds up providing "researchers" with a very narrow, self-contained range of information heavily embedded in conspiracy theories:
And if someone cannot see the so-called truth, they aren’t looking hard enough. A refrain among QAnon adherents I track online is “dig deeper.” The phrase is often uttered by seemingly hardcore believers and is directed at those who begin to question the conspiracy theory or say they cannot see it.
In 2020, amid a global pandemic and a contentious U.S. presidential race, the QAnon conspiracy theory took on even more sinister overtones. The language of QAnon began to parallel that of previous cult leaders who had encouraged followers to take another step forward toward full indoctrination — a step that could result in self-harm or staging an attack. [my emphasis]
And while it's important to recognize the specifics of trends like QAnon, the Republicans spent decades building a narrative and partisan identity that validates conspiracist thinking. As the passing of Rush Limbaugh reminds us. Digby Parton (From Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump: Rush Limbaugh's legacy is the modern GOPSalon 02/19/2021) gives us this accurate summary of his poisonous legacy:
[Limbaugh's] radio show almost single-handedly created the culture war narrative that has come to define conservative politics. It's not that Limbaugh came up with every element on his own. There were plenty of racists, xenophobes, sexists, religious hypocrites and violent extremists long before he came along. But he found a way to synthesize their point of view into one over-arching worldview: coastal elites, Black people, immigrants, gays, feminazis and environmentalists are your enemy and they want to destroy America.
Seeing its organizing potential back in the early 90s, backbench congressman Newt Gingrich turned Limbaugh's narrative into a partisan weapon, launching a program designed to teach fledgling, right-wing politicians how to talk about themselves as heroic warriors for the American way and portray their political opponents as depraved savages bent on destroying everything Real Americans hold dear. When the Republicans won the House majority for the first time in decades in 1994, Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the freshman class. The new House Speaker said he couldn't have done it without him.
Gingrich was right. And there would have been no Donald Trump without Limbaugh either because there would have been no Trump base without him. Gingrich may have turned partisan, electoral politics into a blood sport but it was Rush Limbaugh who brought in the fans. [my emphasis]
It seems like lately I've been citing Heather Cox Richardson every other day or so. And I'm going to continue, this time quoting her obituary notice for Rush Limbaough in her Facebook post for 02/17/2021:
The crisis in Texas continues, with almost 2 million people still without power in frigid temperatures. Pipes are bursting in homes, pulling down ceilings and flooding living spaces, while 7 million Texans are under a water boil advisory.
Tim Boyd, the mayor of Colorado City, Texas, put on Facebook: “The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!... If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy is direct result of your raising! [sic]…. This is sadly a product of a socialist government where they feed people to believe that the FEW will work and others will become dependent for handouts…. I’ll be damned if I’m going to provide for anyone that is capable of doing it themselves!... Bottom line quit crying and looking for a handout! Get off your ass and take care of your own family!” “Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish [sic],” he said.
After an outcry, Boyd resigned.
It was Limbaugh who popularized the idea that hardworking white men were under attack in America. According to him, minorities and feminists were too lazy to work, and instead expected a handout from the government, paid for by tax dollars levied from hardworking white men. This, he explained, was “socialism,” and it was destroying America.
Cox has more to say about him in that post. But she is a respectable historian, so she's more kind in her comments that I am.
My first encounter with the now-deceased Rush Limbaugh that I remember clearly was in 1993, when he started running a daily TV show that ran 1992-96 that I believe he at first distributed to outlets free. I watched maybe 10 episodes altogether starting in January when Bill Clinton inaugurated President. Limbaugh was presenting his radio and TV programs at the time mainly as entertainment. He used the slogan “Lighten Up!” for a while to advertise the broadcasts.
I knew he had become an influential conservative commentator, and that whatever “entertainment” value his “political humor” contained, his fans took his political commentary dead seriously. In one episode, he ran a clip of Bill Clinton hosting some kind of religious event with Jewish kids at the White House, with the boys wearing yarmulkas. He showed a moment when some glowing embers fell onto one of the girl’s hair, which Clinton immediate gently patted out, with the girl apparently not noticing her hair almost got burned. And I wondered, what’s the deal? I know Limbaugh hates Clinton, and this was actually a sweet moment where Clinton was doing something any normal person might do. I wondered, is he trying to imply that Clinton is Jewish? Or that there was something wrong about stopping a young girl’s hair from catching on fire?
A couple of episodes later, he mentioned that the famous New York photographer Annie Leibovitz had done a photo shoot with Hillary Clinton. Limbaugh deliberately stumbled on the name, “Leib-o-VITZ”, and repeated it a couple of time. And I wondered whether he was just trying to say that Hillary was hanging out with a hoity-toity New Yorker with a Jewish-sounding name. It was more weird than anything.
In another couple of days, before a break he teased the next segment, which showed an interview with Bill Clinton with some reporter. When he returned from the break, Limbaugh said something along this line, “And now it’s time to look at the Bill Clinton interjew – oh, excuse me! *Interview*, I don’t know what’s wrong with me today, I meant to say *interview*.” I guess this kind of fake faux pas was part of the “political humor” he used for his fans to “lighten up” with.
But it told me everything I needed to know about Rush Limbaugh. And nothing he did in the 18 years since improved my opinion of him. That’s an example where that saying applies, “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.”
This is an article that the late, salty-talking Texas columnist Molly Ivins from a couple years after that giving her view of Limbaugh’s act: Lyin’ BullyMother Jones May/June 1995.
Limbaugh told them that once they change the country, it might be a good idea to “leave some liberals alive.” The reason? “So you will never forget what these people were like . . . keep one Marxist and two liberals on the staff of every university so you can show your children . . . living fossils. Living fossils.” Ha, ha, political humor, lighten up, libs.
Trumpism didn’t start with Donald Trump’s Presidential candidacy in 2015. The only surprise is that it took them so many years to get to the point where they could send a lynch mob into the Capitol to kill people and prowl the halls of Congress chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and “Kill the infidels!”
Yeah, when someone tells you who they are, believe them.
Alex Shephard writes on Limbaugh in Rush Limbaugh Made America WorseNew Republican 02/17/2021: "Limbaugh was not merely bad for the United States, he was bad in uniquely terrible ways, and uniquely terrible right up until the end. He is near the top of any list of malign actors in the post-Vietnam period."
Also in the New Republic, Bruce Bartlett gives a bit of a confessional take to his obit, I Was a Rush Limbaugh Whisperer 02/18/2021. But you have to read down several paragraphs of whining about the Librul Media to get to actual criticisms of Limbaugh. This compliment itelf is pretty telling: "Limbaugh was also a blowhard, and his massive hubris was off-putting. But it was part of his schtick and one of the reasons he was popular." Bartlett says that this "blowhard" commentary in the late 1980s "was a breath of fresh air for conservatives—even those working in the White House—and an essential source of news." He even writes that Limbaugh " frequently had an intelligent spin on the news" (Gosh, I must have missed those!) He says it took him until 2006 to recognize that Limbaugh and FOX News had poor "news judgment." Bettter late than never, of course.
