The book is being published by Ig Publishing on May 21. It explores how Limbaugh sought to tribalize our politics through his racially divisive, falsehood-ridden portrayal of President Obama. By playing and preying on white anxiety, Limbaugh laid the groundwork for the election of a president who essentially adopted his view of the Obama presidency. A longer overview is below. I would love to see you there!
And thanks so much to kathny and the folks who manage the NYC Daily Kos group for their wonderful help in publicizing this event, and also to our wonderful Daily Kos Director of Community and Special Event Coordinator, Neeta Lind, for her efforts as well!
The Tribalization of Politics: How Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump
“How did we get here?" is the essential question right now in American politics. How did we go from a society that elected Barack Obama twice to one that, popular vote loss aside, elected Donald Trump? Although there are no simple answers, we do know that white anxiety, fear, and anger aimed at non-whites and about demographic change became far more strongly correlated with support for the Republican Party between 2008 and 2016. We also know that the right-wing media played an outsized role in encouraging that development, specifically through the way they talked about President Obama. During those years, the individual media figure who played the largest role was Rush Limbaugh.
While Obama was president, Limbaugh constantly, almost daily, talked about him using a technique that scholars call “racial priming”—in other words, he race-baited. Limbaugh aimed to convince his audience that Obama was some kind of anti-white, anti-American, radical, Marxist black nationalist, and possibly a secret Muslim to boot. This was neither a bug nor a supporting element of his presentation, but instead stood as a central feature deployed strategically in order to accomplish a very specific task, a task reflected in the title of this book. The Tribalization of Politics is exactly what Limbaugh set out to achieve.
Tribalization refers to a transformation much more profound than merely convincing Americans to be conservative partisans who vote based on a shared set of policy preferences. It means cleaving America in two, and creating a conservative tribe animated, yes, by political ideology but more so by racial and cultural resentment that feeds a hatred of the opposing tribe. When speaking about Obama, Limbaugh’s primary goal has always been to advance the tribalization of our politics. What were the results of his efforts? He helped lay the groundwork for the election in 2016 of a president who essentially adopted his view of the Obama presidency.
A detailed, nuanced exploration of Limbaugh’s racialized rhetoric about Obama offers valuable insight into how the conservative media machine operates. I examine that rhetoric as a case study whereby the most influential part of that right-wing media during those years represents the whole.
Since Talkers, a radio industry magazine, began keeping records in 1991, Limbaugh has always had the largest audience of any radio host. As a result, he has been the single most potent media voice worsening the tribalization of our politics. Limbaugh’s efforts on this front trace back much further than the emergence of Obama as a national figure. Nevertheless, to say that Obama’s years in the White House saw that push break new ground would be an understatement. Limbaugh’s most direct objective was to define the president in a way that would scare his older, overwhelmingly white audience. Racial fear stands at the core of Limbaugh’s telling of the story of the Obama Administration. And white conservatives have been listening.
Additionally, Limbaugh has spawned multiple other media voices who spread a similar message built around the politicization of racial anxiety and hatred, with some on the fringe forging an even more radical path than he has. Limbaugh planted the most fertile seed by far in what has now grown into a full-blown extremist ecosystem. He has thus played a major part in one of the most impactful transformations in American politics, one that placed hate at its center.
Examining how Limbaugh ginned up white racial anxiety about a black president sheds light on why our country chose as his successor a man who began his campaign for the White House by serving as the nation’s birther-in-chief and who, in his reaction to the white nationalist terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, among many other examples, has shown his continued fealty to white identity politics. As Jamelle Bouie wrote: “You can draw a direct line to the rise of Trump from the racial hysteria of talk radio—where Rush Limbaugh, a Trump booster, warned that Obama would turn the world upside down.”
Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (forthcoming in May 2019); and Obama's America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity