Another thing to ponder about Rush Limbaugh's legacy: He wasn't just good at skewering the Left. He was fantastically effective at presenting conservative ideas. He understood how important it was for each generation to rediscover those ideas.
There has long been a tendency among conservative intellectuals to hoard their treasures, keep their ideas hermetically sealed, impatiently point to the great works of the past instead of finding new ways to share their teachings with each new generation.
There's a whiff of snobbishness about it, a sense that well-educated people ought to know all of these time-tested arguments by heart, so it's beneath the highest rank of intellectuals to regurgitate them. Why waste energy finding new ways to teach old lessons?
Maybe some conservatives thought it would trivialize their ideas to revise and repackage them in ways that would seem relevant to young people. Maybe some thought it was silly to invest their energy in expounding upon common sense. Everyone already knows this stuff, right?
Some conservatives have always resisted engaging with a popular culture they see as thoroughly controlled and propagandized by the Left. Some hesitate to use any rhetorical technique that's even faintly reminiscent of the lefty tactics they despise.
Some conservatives internalize the relentless leftist caricature of them, or they're intimidated out of entering what Rush always called the "arena of ideas," preferring to limit their conversations to friendlier venues.
And as we've seen with most uncomfortable clarity during the last years of Rush's life, some on the Right are very comfortable with being a kept, controlled opposition - passively shaking their heads and politely objecting, but not actually DOING anything to influence history.
Rush rejected every argument for passivity and insulation. He understood the importance of re-learning and TEACHING the lessons of conservatism, over and over again, never assuming that his audience had heard it all before. He didn't recoil from that task - he relished it.
Rush never assumed this stuff was all dry or uninteresting. If a topic was important, he knew he could make it understandable, and have a good time doing it. He never accepted the common assumptions about which subjects were inherently boring - or beyond discussion.
Just to pluck one example from the top of my head, I'll never forget Rush explaining how "baseline budgeting" works - the little Beltway trick that assumes perpetual spending increases for all of eternity, and treats any reduction in those increases as a "savage cut."
Rush never accepted that some arguments were "settled," that some lessons were too dry to teach, that certain topics were beyond the ability of the common man to understand, or that common sense traditional ideas didn't require fresh interpretations and lively presentations.
Rush was a master at telling the stories the media didn't want to discuss, standing up for ideas that had supposedly been ruled off the table, and finding new ways to make complex subjects understandable and *interesting* to everyone.
His sense of humor was vital, but so were his patience and perseverance, which really shone during interactions with callers. He never groaned in exasperation because he had to explain something for the umpteenth time. He knew not everyone was HEARING it for the umpteenth time.
Rush made timeless ideas relevant to modern life, even as so much about our lives changed during his decades on the air. He didn't just offer wistful discourse about a lost world that could never exist again. He made ideas real and alive. He did more than just OPPOSE. /end
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