Requiem for a demagogue

I met Rush Limbaugh once.

It was a hazy summer's day at Fort Wayne Country Club, and I was there (and Limbaugh was there) for the Mad Anthony's Hoosier Celebrities charity golf tournament, and I corralled Limbaugh at the practice range for a couple of minutes. It was 1999, and the man who died of cancer yesterday was at the height of his powers as America's premier right-wing demagogue, the lineal descendant of Charles Coughlin and Westbrook Pegler. So of course he was column fodder.

What I learned in that brief encounter was the vast difference between the performer and the man, and that most of the vile spew Limbaugh ladled out was simply his innate understanding of his audience and its bottomless appetite for fear and loathing.

That's because the racist, homophobic, misogynist creature who commanded the American airwaves every day was nowhere in evidence that afternoon at FWCC. If I expected the swaggering bombast who mocked AIDS victims and told black callers to take the bones out of their noses, I didn't get it. 

What I got instead was a man of average size with a fading spray of Huck Finn freckles across his face, giving him the look of an aged teenager. And, like that teenager, he was diffident to the point of shyness. I've interviewed high school athletes with more presence.

I walked away thinking Limbaugh the Demagogue was mostly just a business transaction, with very little honesty to it. He preached hate because hate sold. He courted our worst instincts as human beings because there was profit in it, as there always has been. And somehow that made what he did all the more despicable, because it was deliberate and not organic.

In so doing, of course, he blazed a trail that led to Donald Trump, and to the vandalism Trump has brought to the Republican party. Limbaugh became a force within that party not in spite of his contempt for nearly everyone who wasn't rich, white and male, but because of it. He taught his ideological brethren they could say right out loud what they'd always said with a wink and a smirk, and there was a constituency out there that would send them to Washington for it.

What that's led to is a party increasingly held hostage by cranks, conspiracy kooks and barely disguised white supremacists, all of whom pander to an audience that equates a more diverse America with tyranny. And a goodly number of whom serve not America, but Donald Trump's Svengali-like cult of personality.

Limbaugh became a rich and powerful broadcasting force mining all of that. His genius was recognizing it existed long before anyone else did, and that the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 meant it would now be exploitable.

It's a hell of legacy. And not in a good way.

One can only hope Limbaugh -- afflicter of the afflicted and comforter of the comfortable -- is extended more grace in the afterlife than he ever himself extended in this one.

Could be his toughest sell yet.