Walker on Chafets on Limbaugh

Excerpts from Jesse Walker's lengthy and very interesting review in Reason-- of Zev Chafets' "breezy biography", Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One...

...leans heavily on recent events—over a third of the book is devoted to the latest two years of Limbaugh’s life—and he is generally sympathetic, though not entirely uncritical, toward his subject. There is much more here about Limbaugh’s impact on politics than his impact on radio...doesn’t really explore Limbaugh’s status as a pop icon...

This is not the distant fandom that fuels the rise of a Ronald Reagan or an Arnold Schwarzenegger...Nor is Limbaugh’s following the type that allowed earlier generations of broadcasters to influence the public debate. It’s much more participatory than that. Limbaugh interacts directly with his audience. He doesn’t just speak but listens, and the callers don’t just listen but argue. Limbaugh is always in charge of the show, and he manipulates his medium like a master. But the intimacy of radio gives him a relationship with his followers that’s considerably different from that enjoyed by ordinary politicians and pundits.

It is effective theater, and because it is effective theater it is also effective politics....

Limbaugh pushed back against the restrictions of his format, a habit that didn’t always lead to good relations with station management. When political talk radio took off in the early ’90s, it was, in one respect at least, a throwback to the old days of freeform FM: The host was in charge....Suddenly there was more creative freedom on the AM band than on FM—a radical reversal from the hippie days....

Limbaugh’s brand of conservatism is indebted to the three-legged stool associated with his hero, Ronald Reagan: a hawkish foreign policy, business-friendly economics, and social conservatism. But he built on the Reagan legacy in two other ways, each of which played a role in the right’s changing fortunes in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

One was his fealty to the GOP...The second development was Limbaugh’s loose approach to social issues. The broadcaster is, at least nominally, a social conservative....But he hasn’t led a socially conservative life....puts much more stress on economic and foreign policy than on public morals...This doesn’t add up to a libertarian stance. If it did he’d be more concerned about the effects of the drug war (which is opposed, interestingly, by his frequent guest host Walter Williams)....