Why Did Rush Limbaugh Stop Telling Us What He Thinks?
Victor J. Massad
(exclusive to gopbriefingroom.com)
“These conservatives… they're gonna regret this. This campaign is gonna be over at some point, and people are gonna have long memories, and I really think it's ... I don't know. It's unfortunate. “
-Rush Limbaugh, April 4, 2016
In the dialog above, taken from The Rush Limbaugh radio program, Rush is having a conversation with a lifelong Democrat who has changed his party affiliation to “Republican” in order to vote for Donald Trump. He is talking about a conservative blogger -- one who clearly believes in self-reliance and self-determination -- writing about "white Trump supporters," suggesting perhaps the working class men who support Trump have not had a raise in 15 years because of some failure on their part. Clearly, Rush was put off by it, not (it appears to me), because Rush necessarily disagreed, but because he knew that a large portion of his audience would be offended by it. I found the exchange particularly instructive because it goes to the heart of the reason I think Rush has been so cagey and unwilling to stand by his principles throughout these primaries. The make-up of his audience has shifted from upper middle class to working class, and he is afraid that if he loses the one loyal demographic remaining in his audience, he will have no audience at all.
This audience trend away from upscale toward downscale can be attributed to two long-term trends, both of which have come into focus in recent years. The first trend is the shrinking middle class. Thanks to the irrepressible forces of globalization and technology, the vast American middle class has been slowly disappearing since the 1980s. This has had both positive and negative ramifications, as many people – generally those who learned to harness the power of globalization and technology – have moved up to the upper middle class. The people left behind have been the largely lower skilled workers who found that both globalization and technology increased the competition for their services. No employer today can afford to hire a low-skilled trade worker for $25 per hour, and those jobs are not likely to return anytime soon.
The second trend is the movement away from radio listening as a medium of choice for people outside of the home. In particular, the people in the upper middle class now consume a variety of mobile media ranging from satellite radio, to mobile apps such as Pandora and Spotify, to prerecorded music and programming downloaded and stored on mp3 devices. The allure of higher quality programming without the barrage of advertising attracted many of Rush Limbaugh's upper-scale listeners away, and with them quite a few of his advertisers. What ultimately saved his program was the pay-per-action advertising model through companies such as Lifelock, and the loyalty of the working class male.
Given the audience trend, Rush Limbaugh cannot afford to alienate the anti-trade, anti-immigrant working class white males, and so he has artfully straddled the fence in this primary. Some might argue that at times he has gone beyond that, intentionally puffing Donald Trump in order to inflate his ratings. At the very least, Rush has intentionally shied away from criticizing Trump’s many departures from conservative doctrine. This, combined with the efforts of other conservatives -- such as Sean Hannity, Drudge, Breitbart and Ann Coulter -- has had the effect of legitimizing Trump within certain sectors of the conservative movement. Thoughtful conservatives who demand a certain amount of “purity” from their politicians remain unconvinced that Trump has anything resembling the conservative bona fides necessary for their support.
In the end, it may well be that some in the conservative media have decided that a Trump candidacy is in their best business interest, and therefore why not promote him? After all, the Trump v Hillary summer and fall will be a ratings bonanza, and the all-but-certain Hillary victory will keep them in business feeding cotton candy to the anti-Hillarys for another eight years. But there is one big question that remains, and it is this:
After Hillary Clinton is elected and we ponder the degree to which we were betrayed by conservative media, why isn’t Rush Limbaugh worried that true conservatives might have long memories?
