How did we go from an administration that was the least corrupt, with the hardest-working, most highly dedicated men and women since The West Wing went off the air, to one that more closely resembles that portrayed in The Godfather II, with Putin playing Michael Corleone to Trump’s Sen. Pat Geary? From no drama Obama to a mind-numbing, delusional toilet tweeter?
Since the 2016 election, there has been an air of unreality over our politics. It’s accompanied by a sense that one must check the news every morning to make sure that we have not declared war on some nation that refused Trump’s demands for a tax break on a golf course, or a permit for a hotel.
How did we get here?
Late in the ‘80s, we visited friends in Northern Virginia. Anxious to show us their new BMW sedan, they insisted on driving us around their tony neighborhood of Fairfax Station. On the radio was a talk show hosted by a relatively unknown rabble-rouser. When we expressed our dismay, our friends insisted that he wasn’t really bad, that yes, he did attack liberals but he also made fun of conservatives. They treated his talk as amusing but harmless.
Over the years, the “harmless” rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh became hotter as his audience grew. Millions of people have been exposed to his version of alternate facts, as exaggerations became distortions and then outright lies. He racked up a huge audience while expounding on the evil of Democrats, liberals, and the well-educated elite. He provided his audience with the addictive adrenaline rush of anger, fear, and hate, every day—for three solid hours.
And then we elected Barack Obama as president. Taking that as either a personal affront or a chance to increase his influence, Rush Limbaugh put his enmity into high gear and prepped the country for Donald Trump.
Exactly how Limbaugh succeeded is the subject of an enlightening and engaging new book by one of our own, professor and writer Ian Reifowitz.
The Tribalization of Politics:
How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump
Ig Publishing, New York, New York
June 18, 2019
For those of you unfamiliar with Ian’s work, here’s a blurb from his publisher:
Ian Reifowitz is a professor of history at Empire State College of the State University of New York. He is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books, 2012). Ian is also a Contributing Editor at Daily Kos, and his articles have appeared in the Daily News, Newsday, the New Republic, In These Times, Post-Star, Truthout, the Kyiv Post (Kiev), Huffington Post, among other outlets.
Around here he is best known for his Sunday essays. In addition to that and his teaching, he has somehow found the time to plow through eight years of Rush Limbaugh broadcasts. Markos Moulitsas, founder and publisher of Daily Kos, wrote the foreword for the book and expressed my exact reaction to Ian’s efforts:
I was shocked when Ian first told me about this project. “He’s literally going to go through eight years of Rush Limbaugh transcripts? I was shocked again when he told me he was finished. “He actually read eight years of Rush Limbaugh’s transcripts?” But that was nothing like the jolt from seeing the results of that thankless labor—his comprehensive transcribing of Limbaugh’s hate, always in full context.
It is not easy teaching a nation to hate. Although it has been a part of our national identity since its founding, Limbaugh took naked, partisan racism to a new level for the modern era. By making Barack Obama the “other,” he used that racism to “spread a narrative of failure.”
Reifowitz‘ book covers some of the main areas in which Limbaugh was successful in tribalizing the American electorate. He has been able to divide us into warring camps that made Trump’s election almost inevitable, using the time-honored techniques of highlighting racial and cultural differences and preying on white men’s fears. His main strategy: Never allow the truth to stand in the way of fear or anger. Using race-baiting on his audience of mostly white men, Limbaugh portrayed President Obama as the “other”: the secret Muslim, the angry black man. But he did it all by using weasel words that, like Trump’s, gave him an out. Limbaugh called it tweaking the media.
Limbaugh also referred to the president as “Imam Obama,” asking why, since it was acceptable to refer to Bill Clinton and the first black president, why couldn’t he “call Imam Obama America’s first Muslim president? Clinton wasn’t black … Obama says he’s not a Muslim, he’s a Christian.” The host came up with “Imam Barack Hussein Obamadinejad,” incorporating the name of Iran’s Muslim president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and offered that Obama “might believe he’s the 12th imamj (a major religious figure in some branches of Islam).
Conservatives, of course, ate it up, just as they did the birther arguments that Limbaugh presented. Whether is was by calling him ”Little Barry Soetoro” or by suggesting that he was a Kenyan, he supported Trump’s birther campaign from the very beginning.
Claiming that he was “the least racist host you’ll ever find,” on the day before Obama’s inauguration, Limbaugh stated:
We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds ... that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever; because his father was black, because this is the first black president … The racist that everybody thinks exists on our side of the aisle has been on full display throughout their primary campaign … they've done a great job, the media has, of covering up his deficiencies. He’s too big to fail and so whatever goes wrong, blame it on Bush, blame it on … I mean, MSNBC’s new life will be criticizing you and me, because they can't criticize them.
Reifowitz describes this as ...
… the host’s push to tribalize American politics. We see the race-baiting and fear-mongering, the notion that being black gives one power that is denied to whites, as well as the language of emasculation and subjugation—thanks to Obama, “we” will have to “bend over, grab the ankles.”
“I hope he fails” may be Rush Limbaugh’s most well-known quote. He did everything he could to ensure that his hope became a reality. Since his policies weren't enough, Limbaugh pounded relentlessly on the color of Obama’s skin, inserting it into every mention of the man, from his religion to his interactions with law enforcement.
After the wrongful arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates and President Obama’s comments on the police, Limbaugh ranted:
President Obama is black, and I think he’s got a chip on his shoulder. I think there are elements of this country he doesn’t like and he never has liked and he’s using the power of the presidency to remake the country ...
As Reifowitz points out, what really upset Limbaugh was Obama addressing the disparities in treatment by law enforcement, depending upon the race of the suspected perpetrator. Limbaugh really lost it though, when the president commented that if he had had a son, he would have looked like Trayvon Martin, the young black man who was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, who went on to successfully use a “stand your ground” defense.
After the Ferguson, Missouri, riots, Limbaugh, speaking of Obama’s efforts to calm the situation, said that the “presumption is that the police are racist, that the police are shooting African-Americans for the fun of it.” According to Reifowitz, even though Obama never said anything like that, “that didn’t stop Limbaugh from making the accusation, an example of race-baiting as hateful as any he put forth during the Obama presidency.”
On immigration, Limbaugh flat-out lied about the facts to convince his audience that immigration reform was simply another term for amnesty, and that only 4 percent of Americans supported it.
...a substantial portion of the host’s words against the forty-fourth president were riddled with untruths. Politifact assessed thirty-seven of Limbaugh’s statements...and found two to be mostly true, five half true, nine mostly false, eleven false, and ten pants-on-fire lies. How many were rated simply true? Zero.
You see, it wasn’t just distortion that Limbaugh used: It was plain lying. This was of immeasurable help in destroying the very concept of truth, from which Trump would later benefit. His audience had been trained by the right-wing machine, in which Limbaugh would make some outrageous hate-filled comment and Fox News would pick it up and broadcast it, forcing the MSM to then cover the false claims. Limbaugh’s audience would only hear his comments and Fox’s reinforcement. To them, Limbaugh’s words were the truth.
In August 2014, stymied by the House’s refusal to act on immigration reform, the Obama administration considered using an executive order to push forward.
… Limbaugh warned his audience that, “He’s [Obama] now threatening the nuclear bomb executive amnesty.” The host then went back to several old favorites, the “Obama phone woman” from Cleveland and the “people in Detroit and Obama’s stash” and wondered how they would feel about sharing some of their government benefits with “newly made citizen illegal immigrants.” This language not only further blackened Obama, but also reminded Limbaugh’s followers about black and brown people receiving government benefits—a doubly effective statement in terms of heightening white racial resentment.
In spite of all of the evidence that Ian Reifowitz presents to show how we have been divided by race and culture, he still believes that there is a possibility for unification. As he explains it, white racial identity “has been the foundation of the single most destructive form of identity politics over the course of American history.” But it is possible to reach beyond that fear and anger to find common ground. And right now, the most common ground is how workers, white and black and brown, have been betrayed by the “economic elites.”
It is a message that Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have successfully been delivering without abandoning the fight for racial equality. I don’t know if it is going to work, there’s hope in the fact that it’s being tried.
Whether or not you believe that we can ever overcome the damage that white racial identity has done to our land, this book is one you need to read to gain a deeper insight into how we got here. Only by realizing that do we have a chance to change it.
Ian has agreed to participate in the comments today to answer any questions and more fully present his findings, so please share your thoughts and questions.