I usually try and restrain myself when someone I loath dies, but I'm going to go ahead and revel in the death of Rush Limbaugh. While I haven't thought of that ambulatory tumor for years, except to roll my eyes in disgust when Trump debased the Presidential Medal of Freedom by giving it to him, as I reflect on him at his death, I can be convinced that no single person is more a personification and cause of the maladies infesting our body politic than Rush Limbaugh.
There's a certain argument to made for Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell, as cynical inside operators who exploited norms to destroy the idea of bipartisan legislating. In terms of elected officials, they are the two most responsible for the dysfunction of the Congress, and I will piss on their graves when the day comes.
What Limbaugh represents is the living, breathing manifestation of Cleek's Law: Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily.
That is modern "conservatism," effectively. When the GOP made their 2020 party platform an empty expression of fealty to Donald Trump, that did more than signal the intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican Party. Trump was and is hated by anyone to the left of Ben Sasse. That hatred of Trump is precisely at the root of his appeal and hold over the GOP base. The more we hate Trump, the more the base loves him.
It was Limbaugh who first tapped into this and made it his schtick. Anything liberals or even moderates wanted or supported, Limbaugh mocked and attacked. He was a racist, at least in part because liberal America thought racism was bad. He mocked the disabled, because liberals felt that they should be valued members of society. He was Trump before Trump, and helped drag the right into it's reflexive hatred of tolerance, kindness and inclusion.
Without Limbaugh, I don't think there is a Trump, but then perhaps Trump was inevitable.
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