Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One by Zev Chafets

invective, but it is all in the service of the same cause.”
    That cause, of course, was Limbaugh’s promotion of conservatism as he understood it. “This is a work for its time,” Goodman wrote. “Despite Bill Clinton’s recent victory, right-wing populism, an American perennial, is in bloom, and at the moment Mr. Limbaugh is its gaudiest flower. His appeal is to a part of middle America—call it the silent majority or The American People or the booboisie—that feels it has been on the receiving end of the droppings of the bicoastals as they wing first class from abortion-rights rallies to AIDS galas to save-the-pornographer parties.”
    When a writer uses “gaudiest flower” and “booboisie” in the same paragraph, you can be pretty sure he is attempting to channel H. L. Mencken, the journalistic patron saint of irreverence, self-promotion, brutal satire, and public combat. Mencken often expressed his contempt for the influential right-thinkers of his time with a theatrical mockery. In 1926, for example, after an issue of his magazine, The American Mercury , was banned in Boston for publishing an “obscene” story about a prostitute who conducted her business in a graveyard, Mencken publicly broke the law by selling a copy of the magazine to the famous Massachusetts moralist J. Frank Chase—comically biting Chase’s coin to ascertain its authenticity (in an odd coincidence, the offending story, “Hatrack,” was set in Farmington, Missouri, just down the road from Cape Girardeau). The New York Herald Tribune editorialized against Mencken’s “incurable vulgarity” and “business acumen,” and derided him as a “professional smart-Aleck.”
    A less antagonistic reviewer might have noticed that Limbaugh and Mencken had quite a lot in common, from self-educated disdain for schoolteachers to their incendiary satire and the impact it had on the culture. 1
    To Goodman, Limbaugh was merely a demagogue, devoid of ideas worth considering. Like most liberal intellectuals, the reviewer knew next to nothing about American conservatism, and it showed, especially when he tried to put Limbaugh and Pat Robertson into the same bag. Limbaugh did share many of Robertson’s political views—the two men were, after all, both conservative Republicans—but Robertson was the sort of televangelist Limbaugh had been mocking since his “Friar Shuck” bits in Pittsburgh. Rush might have a daily chat or two with Jesus, but his on-air banter about adult beverages, sexual innuendo, and at times profane language was anything but pious, and he certainly didn’t share Robertson’s belief that the Reverend Robertson could perform miracles.
    Goodman conceded that dogmatic liberals sometimes invited Rush’s mockery and that he was a pretty fair radio comic. “The satire here is not subtle . . . I especially like the commercial for the Bungee condom, which has a daughter bringing Dad up to date on ‘the Bungee X27 model himhugger with extra torque capability’ which came in a Kennedy Weekend dozen or the Wilt Chamberlain carry-home crate.”
    The review ended with a prediction based on a quotation. “ ‘We conservatives are the future,’ announces Mr. Limbaugh, and the reader may construe that as a political promise. On the evidence of The Way Things Ought to Be , with its deference to religion and patriotism, its relentless self-promotion (which may be a put-on, but then again maybe not), its no-budge line on crime, welfare, and sexual disarray, its massagings of honest, hard-working, clean-living, do-it-on-their-own folks, I’d guess Mr. Limbaugh will be running for office before very long, as America’s white hope.” Mr. Goodman would have lost that bet. By then Rush Limbaugh was too rich and too influential to run for anything.
    Limbaugh was not only rich—his income in 1993, from books, radio, television, and his other ventures, was estimated at between fifteen and twenty million dollars—he was still growing. The