When did Ronald Reagan’s tenure as president of the United States end? Officially, on January 20, 1989, but Washington Monthly blogger D. R. Tucker posits that in a sense Reagan stayed in office well after that. In a Saturday post, Tucker asserted that in 1988, some right-wing “ideologues” sought to “artificially extend the Reagan administration past its constitutionally limited time by propping up a man who would defend and attack the same ideas and politicians Reagan defended.” That man-prop was Rush Limbaugh.
“Reaganism shifted wealth upwards…and the folks behind the Limbaugh project didn’t want the gravy train to end,” wrote Tucker. “What better way to keep the good times going than by hiring Limbaugh to promote Reaganism into the 1990s and beyond, while rhetorically butchering anyone who disagreed with the 40th president’s wayward economic policies? Limbaugh was simply the vagrant recruited to distract the cops while the thieves looted the bank.”
Tucker noted that the story has a semi-happy ending for the left, since Limbaugh “has never recovered from the advertiser backlash following his 2012 rhetorical assault on Sandra Fluke,” and conservative talk radio as a whole has long been in what one media bigwig calls a “death spiral.”
From Tucker’s post (bolding added):
Progressives in Massachusetts—and, heck, anyone in Massachusetts with a lick of common sense and common decency—are still celebrating over the news that WRKO-AM, the state’s longtime distributor of right-wing agitprop, has decided to drop Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated radio show, which the station has broadcast for the better part of two decades. This news comes just weeks after Limbaugh’s program was tossed from an Indianapolis wingnut-radio station.
Limbaugh, of course, has never recovered from the advertiser backlash following his 2012 rhetorical assault on Sandra Fluke. As former iHeartMedia executive Darryl Parks noted earlier this year, Limbaugh has essentially killed his own industry:
Today’s talk radio, as we know it, is fast fading into the sunset because of a format stuck with 1990’s rhetoric, each day addressing topics few care about. A constant right-wing political drumbeat that no longer resonates. A format where its practitioners can’t define the word entertainment. A format attracting fewer people, men or women, under 65. A format fewer advertisers are interested in buying because of its aging audience…
…[T]he death spiral for talk radio…began years ago.
…[T]he aging, pissed off Baby Boomers…were no longer relevant. Extreme political ideas no longer resonated with listeners as generational power shifted from Boomers to Gen X’ers and now Millennials, [who are] mostly OK with Hispanics, lesbians, smoking pot and women using birth control. Many are even OK with the first African American President.
You have to wonder if the folks who were responsible for the launch of Limbaugh’s syndicated program in 1988—the folks who essentially wanted to create a “Radio Reagan,” who wanted to artificially extend the Reagan administration past its constitutionally limited time by propping up a man who would defend and attack the same ideas and politicians Reagan defended and attacked during the course of his political career (something Reagan himself alluded to in a 1992 letter to Limbaugh) knew it would probably start falling apart by this point, that the man they handpicked to fill this role would begin his decline about a quarter-century after this bizarre enterprise started.
The folks behind the Limbaugh project were obviously ideologues, but they weren’t stupid. Reaganism shifted wealth upwards in the 1980s, and the folks behind the Limbaugh project didn’t want the gravy train to end after the conclusion of Reagan’s second term. What better way to keep the good times going than by hiring Limbaugh to promote Reaganism into the 1990s and beyond, while rhetorically butchering anyone who disagreed with the 40th president’s wayward economic policies? Limbaugh was simply the vagrant recruited to distract the cops while the thieves looted the bank. However, those cops couldn’t be distracted forever.
The folks behind the Limbaugh project had to have known that at some point, Limbaugh would fall down while the American people woke up. Thus, I assume they’re not really upset by Limbaugh’s self-destruction. They’ve completed their heist. They stole civility, decency, rationality and democracy—not to mention billions of dollars—while Limbaugh distracted the masses. Now that the masses appear to be waking up, let’s resolve to get our stolen property back.
