Rosenwald is right that talk radio hosts like Limbaugh never took orders from Newt Gingrich or Dubya. If anything, it was the other way around. But arguing that there was no Republican Party plot to create talk radio is akin to arguing there was no automobile industry plot to invent gasoline: The party as presently constituted was not just boosted by Limbaugh, it was invented by him. The reach of his radio program allowed him to foment conservative anger on a scale that McIntire and Hunt could only have dreamed of, and to leverage that anger into a conservative takeover of the U.S. government. The xenophobic, anti-elitist sentiment that he instrumentalized had of course existed before him, but it did not become the predominant influence in the Republican Party until Limbaugh marshaled it into an electoral weapon, beating the plowshares into swords. Republicans did not always win, even with his support, but they never won without it.
The lingering question in both The Radio Right and Talk Radio’s America is whether there is something essentially conservative about the radio medium, whether the airwaves were always destined to be filled with far-right ideas. Neither author sees the Republican-radio marriage as having been inevitable, in part because the social function of the radio changed dramatically over the years after the rise of television and the internet; there are always counterexamples, too, not least of which is the persistent popularity among liberals of National Public Radio.
Nevertheless, there is something telling about libertarian radio host Dean Boortz’s description of his ideal listener: “I’m in the bathroom with these people … I’m in bed with them, taking showers, eating breakfast. This personal relationship gets built up. They think I’m talking to them one on one.” Uninterested by conventional politics and alienated by a changing culture, such a listener would gravitate day by day to Boortz or Limbaugh’s way of thinking while on his daily commute. There was a similar kind of bond between McIntire and the suburban housewives Matzko describes, the otherwise apolitical women who took up arms against the Communist menace after hearing about it on the radio one day while cleaning the house. The low-cost, lightweight nature of the medium, as well as its technological capacity for following one into the car and onto the job, seem to have allowed it to penetrate the consciousness of Americans whom politicians could not or did not reach by traditional means. In the words of a Democratic senator from Wyoming who diagnosed the threat of the radio right in the 1960s, “it would be difficult to exaggerate how the concentration of these programs in limited population areas ultimately captures the public mind.”
