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.
Ditto nation became one of the early cults in the party. I always wondered if the gardener understood that he was not really part of that club. As the years passed, he might, since Rush’s radio show targeted immigrants, whether legal or illegal, in cruel ways. At one point he even argued that those born in the United States were not truly Americans if they were not white. This is why he embraced birtherism. After all, a black president was not an American.
Earlier Rush celebrated the deaths of AIDS patients. He attacked Democrats, and feminists, calling the latter Feminazis and the former Democrats. He demonized half the country, to the point that he made them the enemy within.
Rush and his army of ditto heads preceded a lot of what Donald Trump said while running for office in 2016. He also lay the groundwork for embracing white supremacists. Ironically, the same group that complained of identity politics by others, fully made it it's own. Many middle-class whites see…