Part of the political genius of talk radio was its promotion of a message that could comfortably resonate with two different, sometimes contradictory, flavors of conservatives. On the one hand, hosts appealed to the persistent rage of the Nixon-era “silent majority.” Diane from Los Angeles, a 2005 caller to Sean Hannity’s program, observed that—in spite of Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and the 1994 revolution that delivered Republicans full control of Congress—for 40 years the silent majority had no voice, until talk radio gave it one.
Talk radio won over Diane and likeminded conservatives by championing the interests, opinions, and frustrations of blue-collar whites and anti-feminist traditionalists. Hosts had great appeal to so-called Reagan Democrats. Limbaugh attracted many former Democrats, such as St. Louis listeners Patty O’Neill and Barbara Potzman. Potzman, the Catholic daughter of union member, came from a traditional Democratic background.
On the other hand, talk radio also offered up something for the new Sunbelt suburban conservatives and wealthier Americans more broadly. Hosts equated economic success with deregulation, low taxes, and personal responsibility. At times Limbaugh referred to the graduated income tax as “an assault on achievement.” In his view tax cuts should benefit the wealthy because “there’s nothing wrong with earning a lot of money—you do it the right way—hard work.”
Limbaugh was so successful in pairing the fury of the dispossessed with the optimistic terms of “achievement” economics that, by the early 2000s, the majority of his audience were members of the middle and upper-middle class.
Even if Limbaugh was not trying to tell listeners what to think, he undeniably advanced the Republican and conservative agendas.
This fusion of two strands of conservatism in Limbaugh’s broadcasts makes sense when one considers his background: as David Remnick put it in 1994, Limbaugh’s “conservatism is a mix of the traditional Republicanism of his father and grandfather and the fury of the pro–George Wallace forces that became so popular in his hometown” of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Limbaugh is a son of Missouri political royalty; his father even ushered vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon and his wife through town during a 1952 campaign stop.
One in a long line of well-to-do lawyers, Limbaugh’s father represented many corporations and appears to have imparted in his son a great deal of respect for the social value of unfettered profitmaking. Whether Limbaugh shaped his listeners’ opinions, or simply voiced them, was difficult to discern. He admitted that he liked “to try to persuade” but with the caveat that he wanted “it to happen genuinely. I don’t want to be pointing fingers in people’s face . . . and force them to agree. I want them to come to it on their own.”