The Purdue Pharma of Copium Dealers

There are only a handful of media first experiences that I can still remember from my teens and early twenties. I remember the first time I saw the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, the first time I heard Rage Against the Machine. I remember witnessing the beginning of the O.J. Simpson saga (a saga which spun off media franchises that are still relevant today), as we saw live shots of his friend’s white Bronco being chased slowly down the LA freeway. And I remember the very first time I heard a broadcast from Rush Limbaugh.

At the time I was 17, working a summer job at the park district in the heartland of Illinois, where I grew up. My immediate boss was a guy in his early 20’s who seemed barely older than me, but at the same time way older than me. I was a (small) city guy whose parents were both professors, he was a farm-raised, corn-fed country boy who barely spoke. And don’t worry, I’m not about to go all “Brokeback Mountain” on you. The thing he introduced me to wasn’t the pleasures of uncut farm boys, it was Rush Limbuagh’s show, which he turned up as we sat in our green work truck and munched on our food, mine in a paper bag, his in a proper lunchbox that I once saw him sheepishly get from his wife on a day he must have forgotten to bring it to work.

What I remember most about my first Rush show was that it was hilarious, and so different from anything else out there. Looking back on that time period, a lot of people seem to think there were no conservative voices in the media, or on radio, before Rush came along. That’s doubly wrong. There were, and Rush wasn’t really a conservative. Rush was a shock-jock with a non-liberal audience. He wasn’t as out there as Howard Stern or Don Imus, but he was serving the same needs of his audience, it’s just that Rush’s audience was different. I remember in one of the early episodes he had on a caller who considered himself a “male lesbian”. Rush wasn’t horrified by this label, he thought it was endlessly amusing. Imagine the very first conversation Howard Stern must have had with porn star and future show regular Buck Angel, a woman who had become a man on top, but was still a woman below. Just like Stern, Rush knew the first rule of radio was that you had to be entertaining. That male lesbian caller wasn’t Rush’s enemy, he was the freak show entertainment for his middle-America audience.

Limbaugh wasn’t at all like the existing conservative voices in media, who suffered from two main problems. First, they were boring. Drab. Square beyond belief. Second, they existed within a tightly controlled framework of debate. The most prominent conservatives were the most controlled, and controlling. They were people like William F. Buckley, whose primary contribution to the national conversation was to gatekeep the right, kicking out any libertarian or isolationist voices. Buckley’s motto might as well have been: Bend thy knee to liberals, but so slowly that it looks like defiance, and always do so with the utmost dignity.

Rush was different. He had enough understanding of free-market economics to make the case for pure capitalism with surprising vigor. He knew how to engage both with opponents and “dittoheads” in ways that made for great radio. A good part of that good radio was skewering the hypocrisies and the craziness of the left (he popularized the term “femanazi”), and he was ruthless in pointing out how decidedly biased the rest of the media were. At the time this was new, and it absolutely had to be done, as a first step towards taking back the culture and the institutions, including the GOP itself. But to say Rush failed at moving beyond that first step would be a profound understatement. Instead, Rush capitulated to the GOP squishes, and left his audience in a state that was some mixture of learned hopelessness and copium-induced stupor (don’t worry, I’ll explain that one soon).

I said at the beginning that Rush wasn’t a conservative, and he certainly wasn’t a cheerleader for the Republican party, though that’s how he’s now remembered most in terms of his politics. Rush, in those first shows I listened to, was Howard Stern meets Ayn Rand during her realpolitik, “at least NASA got us to the moon”, phase. But then I watched, or rather I should say listened, as Rush was slowly captured by George H.W. Bush over the course of the 1992 presidential election. Bush Sr. was never fully trusted by the right, including by Limbaugh himself. From his “kindler, gentler” rhetoric to his “read my lips, no new taxes” flip-flop, Bush Senior had very little support from the conservative base going in to that reelection campaign. But he wooed Rush, aggressively, personally. and won his on-air support. After that I rarely heard a bad word from Rush about the GOP, even as the party embraced spending and big government beyond what even Democrats dared to ask for.

Rush’s show became less interesting, and it settled into a pattern I would notice whenever I checked back in, as I did from time to time over the years. He was etching into stone the template that would be followed for 30 years, and still is today by his protégées, only without his talent for ironic humor. Sean Hannity follows it to a tee: complain about the Democrat’s policies, complain that they are hypocrites, whine about how unfair the rest of the media are, and provide cover for Republican failures and capitulations. That’s it. As far as I can tell Hannity’s one great innovation is to flatter the guests he likes by repeatedly calling them “Great Americans!”, though I have no idea if Hannity was the first show host to do this.

The most over-used neologisms these days are “cope” and “copium”, which, for my readers who are not obsessively online, refer to the stories that losers tell themselves to avoid facing the harsh reality of their failures, which often are the result of their own flaws. Copium is the drug that numbs people to the need to peer inward for answers, the drug that can delude them into thinking that maybe they’re not even losing.

From his capture by Bush Sr, to the last time he held that golden EIB microphone, Rush was the most prolific and enduring dealer of copium for the right. He was the Purdue Pharma of copium, the undisputed king of making losses go down easier. Over time, Rush defined what it meant to be on the right as someone who followed a limited script of reactionary patterns that, over time, equated to learned helplessness. The problem was always the crazy left, the biased media and institutions, the blatant hypocrisy of Democrats. The solution was to laugh at them. To mock them. To point out the lunacy and bias and hypocrisy over and over. Democrats won. Republican pundits whined. Over and over. Rinse and repeat.

It wasn’t until the middle of last decade, with the Trump campaign and the New Right (or the Alt-Right) that we saw the rise of a new, much more aggressive approach. Trump was the transitional figure. He wined about the media, but also tore them a new one from time to time. He craved their approval, but also called them out unflinchingly. In his last State of the Union address, Trump awarded Limbaugh the Medal of Freedom. By all accounts from those close to Rush, at a personal level, he was gracious, generous, and loyal to a fault. But at the political level, he deserved to be called out as an insider who fed millions of members of the “silent majority” their daily dose of GOP-flavored copium.

The official time-slot replacement for Rush is The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton show; they even kept his iconic intro music. But the person I hear most often touted as the true successor to Rush is radio host Jesse Kelly. But as an anti-communist and self-described member of New Right, I don’t see Kelly as the successor to Limbaugh. He’s the antidote, the guy trying to wake up those millions of silent majority members from the copium-induced spell Rush and his copycats have had them under for decades.

I wish him luck with that.