With the loss of life of Rush Limbaugh, a issue for the audience
I have puzzled, on and off around the years, to what extent the large phenomenon of political talk radio is relevant to America’s driving culture and basic dependence on cars. Numerous of us commit hours on your own in a auto each individual day, with practically nothing but the radio. A lot of folks who drive for a living—truckers, for example—tend to lean proper, in the Reagan Democrat sense. I’ve always suspected that the geographic polarization of the state experienced something to do with this, that there was a sort of feedback loop concerning residing in a additional remote or fewer-regarded component of the country, investing heaps of time by yourself, and listening to radio plans which frequently bolstered equally a feeling of grievance and a sense of self-reliance. Absolutely the polarization close to city issues—for example, the SUV as a society war symbol, and the notion that motor vehicle dependency and free of charge highways had been the final results of absolutely free organization alternatively than plan and governing administration spending—has something to do with the interplay of politics and the auto.
I wrote in this space, almost accurately two many years in the past, the next:
“Consider that converse radio, with all of the unattractive and polarized politics it has aided to spawn, is in a lot of approaches an epiphenomenon of American driving tradition. But that lifestyle alone is, to some extent, an outgrowth of our broad measurement and pioneer spirit, which are irreducible and intertwined American characteristics. Is a significant nation like ours doomed, by some regulation of psychogeography, to generate Hurry Limbaugh and Mark Levin?”
That isn’t a knock at Limbaugh the person, RIP. It is extra a conversation starter. I’m curious to what extent other individuals have believed about this issue, and can back up, or push back, against my supposition.
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