Conservatism’s Limbaugh Problem

Ross Douthat
NYR

Whether he’s right or wrong about the value of negative obituaries, David Frum is right about this, in a column on the comparison between Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” comments and the similar remarks that have befouled the careers of various left-wing entertainers:

[Rush] Limbaugh’s place in American public life is in no way comparable to that of David Letterman, Bill Maher or Ed Schultz.

Letterman is not a political figure at all; and while Maher and Schultz strongly identify as liberals, neither qualifies as anything like a powerbroker in the Democratic Party. I’m sure the Barack Obama re-election effort is happy to have Maher’s million-dollar gift, but I sincerely doubt there is a Democratic congressman who worries much whether Maher criticizes him … Among TV and radio talkers and entertainers, there is none who commands anything like the deference that Limbaugh commands from Republicans: not Rachel Maddow, not Jon Stewart, not Michael Moore, not Keith Olbermann at his zenith.

… That is why no one asks Democratic politicians to repudiate the latest strident statement from an Olbermann or a Moore. There’s no sport in it. It’s too easy for them to say, “Sure.” For Republicans, it’s tough.

In my Sunday column this week, on the respective careers of Andrew Breitbart and James Q. Wilson, I pushed back against the tendency to see the shift to a more partisan and sensationalistic media (which empowers figures like Breitbart, Maher, Olbermann, etc., and arguably diminishes the potential influence of genuine eminences like Wilson) as a straightforward story of cultural decline. But it’s also a mistake for conservatives to over-romanticize this shift, and the people responsible for it, just because the old media establishment leaned left and its decline coincided with political gains for the Republican Party. It’s this romanticization, above all, that explains Limbaugh’s totemic role in conservative discourse: Because his rise coincided with (and, yes, furthered) the Republican Party’s rise to majority status, and because he established the template for so many talkers after him, he has an aura around him no other right-wing entertainer enjoys — and speaking ill of him, for many on the right, feels like speaking ill of Ronald Reagan, or Republican voters generally, or the modern conservative movement itself.

(More here.)