If you go to the official Rush Limbaugh website these days, what’s striking is both how sanitized an image of Limbaugh it projects and how much smaller this makes him seem. His eyes are in soft focus, with the slight glisten of a tear starting to form. The non-Rush pictures are of soldiers, children, and bright-eyed scholarship beneficiaries. You can’t even find links to his best-selling books like The Way Things Ought to Be and See, I Told You So. The featured product on sale, instead, is Radio’s Greatest of All Time, a posthumously published coffee table book, assembled by his widow and his brother, that brings together selected texts by Limbaugh with glossy photos of him and laudatory testaments to his greatness from the likes of Ronald Reagan and Clarence Thomas. “A Timeless Gift of Rush’s Wisdom,” is the tag line for it.
This Rush is a Reagan-esque figure, a generous bestower of compassion and patriotic blessings now smiling down on us from Heaven, beaming gentle energy our way. Almost nothing, in other words, like the Limbaugh who dominated the conservative AM airwaves from the moment his show went national in 1988 until his death from lung cancer in 2021, the man who set the mold, and tilled the soil, for the style of right-wing politics that is now ascendant in the U.S. The real Rush was a high energy, high wire maestro who dealt in bombast and resentment and comic provocation.
It’s not surprising that Limbaugh’s loved ones have chosen to try to burnish his image in this way. Their discomfort is a clue, though, to one of the most important but least understood aspects of his work, and more broadly of the style of politics he so successfully advanced, which is its fundamental relationship to unacknowledged guilt.
Rush was such a powerful foe of the liberal worldview in no small part because he felt in his bones its critiques and narratives, its symbols and memes, above all its power to induce doubt, anxiety and guilt. And he understood, like a good (or evil) therapist, that you can’t effectively neutralize distressing feelings if you don’t spend some time in their company. So that’s what he did. He rhetorically and dramatically inhabited the other side. He did voices. He summarized arguments. He riffed and rolled. He granted the surface plausibility of his enemies’ perspectives. And then he dispatched those perspectives, explaining why they were wrong and sick and self-loathing and, importantly, corrosive to the very people—black people above all—they were ostensibly meant to help.
We deeply misunderstand the emotional and cognitive connection between Limbaugh and his millions of listeners if we imagine them chugging bigotry in a kind of undiluted and unimpeded pour, smacking their lips as the dark potion goes down the hatch, sad*stically thirsting for more. It was much more complicated than that. In the performative space of his show, Limbaugh was always dancing between the liberals he was critiquing and those on his own side who might be vulnerable or even naturally sympathetic to certain of their arguments. He seemed to take it all in and then, ultimately, to deliver a clear verdict: The intuitions of his own side were right all along.
Take the surrounding context for a show I listened to, almost at random, which aired on April 28, 2015, the week that the Freddie Gray riots were convulsing Baltimore. Imagine your average American trying to process not just those events but everything else they evoked: the protests and riots in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of Michael Brown; Eric Garner’s death in Staten Island; Trayvon Martin’s death in Sanford, Florida in 2012; and George Zimmerman’s acquittal. Then imagine pulling the lens back even further, and thinking about all the swirling attendant issues. Amadou Diallo, Rodney King, Emmett Till, Uncle Tom, Abraham Lincoln, slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, police brutality, redlining, the whole heavy and tortured history of white and black in America.
What Rush intuited, in much the same way his enemies on the left did, was that when certain kinds of events come to the fore of public consciousness, these associations are triggered. And what they produce for so many people—not just liberal but conservative, not just white but black, brown, and other—is anxiety, guilt and confusion. The weight of injustice and suffering is just too heavy to ignore, as is the distance between who we want to believe we are, as Americans, and the actual society in which we live. We experience distress, and therefore the psychological need for the relief of that distress. We seek soothing. Rush was immensely soothing to his listeners.
At one point in the show, Rush gives extended, rather articulate voice to what he sees as the worldview of the liberals trying to make sense of the Freddie Gray riots: “The people of Baltimore, the African American population in general, have been screwed from the day the Declaration of Independence was signed,” he says. “They were set up to be slaves. They were set up to be second-class citizens. The Constitution was written to guarantee that, and it’s about time that changed. [So the African American] … has a legitimate grievance against the country, and the expression of that grievance, even if it is in the form of violence, is understandable and should be allowed to happen because their grievance is real.”
I had to listen to this bit twice before I realized Limbaugh wasn’t just saying this straight, as himself. He sounded rather convincing, which is the point. He doesn’t try to avoid the distressing thing. He grants it its power, even amplifying it in certain ways, while steadily and masterfully deploying an arsenal of strategies designed to transform the baseline distress it causes—which is almost always tied to anxiety about the ways in which Americans and American society are failing to live up their ideals—into other, more tolerable emotions and cognitions. Grief, shame, guilt and confusion become anger, resentment, contempt, and certainty.
In the April 2015 show it all came together in a classic Limbaugh monologue, wrapping together Obama, liberalism, anti-imperialism, the history of American racism, and the riots in Baltimore into a sweeping indictment of Limbaugh’s political enemies and their worldview. The Obama Doctrine, as Limbaugh frames it, is that “America is and has been wrong, and America has and does mistreat people, and finally all those people who have been mistreated are rising up and not putting up with it anymore.” In the end, having been amplified, having been heard out, the perspective can be rejected—“it’s 100% wrong”—as anti-American, unmanly, secretly enthralled with weakness.
When he was alive, I couldn’t bear to listen to Limbaugh for long. I was never on his team, and in any case my coping strategies for dealing with the weight of America’s history don’t run that way. I wasn’t ripe for his kind of consolation. I offer that not as evidence of my virtue, but simply to say that listening to him again, and at length, was both a chore and a revelation.
Looking back, I was reminded how good he was, for what he was. Incredibly toxic. Flamboyantly unfair. Totally full of sh*t. All the qualities that have always repelled me. But also a master of his craft. He was virtuosic on the radio for hours a day, verbally creative from minute to minute and also able to architect the show, on the fly, into a pretty coherent whole, and then to weave each show into a larger extended Limbaugh universe with its own lore of jokes, heroes and villains, terms and myths. Calls were rarely taken and were kept brief. It was just him in the booth, day after day, week after week.
I have a hard time, in general, tracing lines of influence. It’s easy to see, for instance, that Limbaugh was a direct influence on other right-wing talk show hosts like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson, Mark Steyn, Laura Ingraham, and others (I’m probably behind the times). They are clearly his heirs. Would we have Fox News without him? What about Donald Trump? I don’t know. Limbaugh was an influence on them, certainly, but a necessary one? He was not the first right-wing demagogue in American history. It’s a role we have that seems always available to be cast.
What is clear is that the rhetoric and style of politics he advanced earlier and better than almost anyone in late 20th century conservatism have now consumed the whole movement. Trump is their culmination, but Rush was the founding father.
There are surely echoes of him on the left too. I find it impossible to spend much time watching MSNBC, for instance, or scrolling left-wing Twitter, without detecting many of the same patterns that one finds in Limbaugh, just fleshed out with different content. There’s the compulsion to marinate in the sins of the other side, the extraordinary degree of repetition, the endless hunt for scapegoats, the obsessive fixation on race and racism.
This can’t all be traced to Limbaugh, but it does point to something important about the service he supplied, and about the great demand for it. It’s not just people on the right who want or need that daily transmutation of unacknowledged unease, confusion, and guilt into explicit politics. We all have to process our history, bear that burden, whether we want to or not, whether we admit to doing so or not. We all need our strategies, our stories.
From this perspective it’s not too surprising that the stewards of Limbaugh’s legacy aren’t able to see or represent him clearly, even though their failure to do so thoroughly compromises what they surely see as their main task, which is to sustain his influence over time and keep him present in the public consciousness. Wise, benevolent, low-key Rush is not a Rush who will endure.
They can’t promote him properly because they’re trapped in the same dynamic he was, and his listeners were: animated by the same kind of guilt and anxiety, coping with it via the same kinds of self-deceiving and self-perpetuating strategies. They’re not sad*sts. They don’t revel in the bigotry. They can’t even admit to it. Rush couldn’t either, but he had his genius and his radio booth, where at least he could enact it.
That many of these same dynamics are operant vis-à-vis Donald Trump—and Fox News 2024, Tucker Carlson, and the rest of the merry gang of right-wing resentment mongers—should go without saying. Except it needs to be said, because we continue to misunderstand them as we misunderstood Rush, perceiving simple, smooth bigotry where vastly more textured dynamics are in play. On the left, too, we need to see better how often we cope with the weight of America’s sins not with mature strategies of introspection, acceptance, and integration but with our own dysfunctional dramas of guilt and projection.
On the left we always used to talk about how we needed a Rush of the left. We really don’t. But we would do well to understand him.
Daniel Oppenheimer’s Substack is Eminent Americans, a newsletter and podcast about the contemporary American intellectual scene. He is the author of Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century.
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