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Rush Limbaugh, Ditto Nation, and Identity Politics
I still remember the conversation as if it was yesterday. I was sitting with my graduate advisor talking about my thesis. We were in the outside seating area of the student commons, and we both had half-drunk cold cups of coffee, and half-eaten sandwiches. Suddenly our conversation was intruded by the AM band from the radio of a groundskeeper. On it was Rush Limbaugh.
The groundskeeper had brown skin and talked with his partner in the Spanglish common in the border area. They were talking about their trucks, and how liberals and people like me were going to destroy them. Why? Because Rush told him. That he was the precise target of many of Rush’s rants did not phase him.
What my teacher said was far more important. He said that Rush was as dangerous as Father Charles Coughlin, who took to the airwaves during the New Deal. He was a Canadian immigrant, and increasingly went into antisemitic rants on the airwaves, and attacks on Democrats because they were communist. The whole New Deal was a Communist enterprise if you believed Coughlin.
I never forgot that conversation and the modern radicalized Republican Party, with white identity, is Rush’s legacy. The Ditto Nation grew into factions of the Republican Party that ran on white grievance politics.