Rush Was Right

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On April 20 of this year, onetime liberal firebrand Alan Dershowitz announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he was officially leaving the Democrat party and registering as a Republican. Discussing his decision the next day with Newmax’s Greg Kelly, Dershowitz stated, “I cannot be associated with the Democrats in any way. I want to see them defeated.”

A longtime listener of the late, great Rush Limbaugh, I had to smile. For thirty years, Limbaugh had said the same thing, and been vilified for it. The “reach across the aisle” crowd, including Republican lawmakers and failed presidential nominees, condemned him for being divisive. But Rush was adamant. “These people cannot be dealt with, cannot be compromised with,” he told his radio audience for the umpteenth time on May 7, 2018. “They have to be defeated.”

Dershowitz is only the latest of a growing number of commentators who, knowingly or not, are echoing El Rushbo’s most controversial statements. For example, in the early 2000s, America’s Anchorman was denounced for suggesting that critics of the Iraq war were actually rooting against American success so they could gain political advantage. “They not only wanted the war in Iraq to fail; they proclaimed it a failure,” Limbaugh told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting on February 28, 2009. “There’s Dingy Harry Reid waving a white flag: ‘This war is lost.’”

In April 2026, conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson said virtually the same thing about critics of the Iran War. “Anything that looks unfortunate from the point of the American success in Iran, they cling to,” Hanson told the audience of his April 14 podcast for The Daily Signal. “They don’t look at the war empirically. They look at it entirely in political terms. In fact, people as diverse as Tom Friedman or Bill Crystal, if you collate what they have written, they almost feel that anything that happens negatively in Iran might be positive because it would hurt Donald Trump and then therefore that would be in the long-term interests, forgetting that we have 100,000 soldiers in the theater, risking their lives.” On May 5, Hanson was even more direct: “Donald Trump has ... to deal with an opposition who feels the war was a mistake or they’re actually rooting in some cases for the Iranians.”

No one called out Hanson for his remarks. Rhetoric that was considered irredeemably divisive when Rush used it seventeen years ago is now mainstream.

One reason the outrage has dissipated is that the Democrats are no longer trying to pass themselves off as centrists or moderates. Commentators like Dershowitz, Hanson, and former speaker of the House New Gingrich frequently point out that the party has taken a hard left turn. “We talk about a Democratic Party as if it’s the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton,” says Hanson. “It doesn’t exist. It’s gone. It’s gone forever.” Gingrich agrees. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the Democrats,” he told Fox News. “You have groups of left-wing cuckoos, and then you have a handful of rational people.”

True enough, but it’s hardly news to anyone who listened to Limbaugh. “JFK ... was not in any way a liberal as you know liberals today,” Limbaugh remarked in 2013. Rush played a soundbite of Kennedy saying, “It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.” Rush remarked: “John F. Kennedy, 1962. Not a Democrat alive today who would say that, who believes it, and who could get elected saying it.”

This change in the Democrat party was at the heart of what has become Rush’s most famous (or, his critics would say, infamous) statement. When asked by the Wall Street Journal to write four hundred words on what he hoped for the new Barack Obama presidency, Limbaugh remarked: “I don’t need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.” He went on to explain: “I’ve been listening to Barack Obama for a year and a half. I know what his politics are. I know what his plans are, as he has stated them. I don’t want them to succeed. ... Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what’s gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here. Why do I want more of it?”

Limbaugh was excoriated for refusing to participate in the national love fest surrounding Obama’s election. Michael Harrison, publisher and editor of TALKERS Magazine, called Limbaugh “petty” and predicted he would lose credibility. Yet fourteen years later, former attorney general William Barr, who once stated that Donald Trump committed a “grave wrongdoing” in the January 6 riots, echoed Rush’s thoughts on NBC’s Today show: “I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party.” Hanson agrees, stating that today’s Democrat party, which he likens to the Jacobins who hijacked the original goals of the French Revolution, is putting forth “a radical agenda that wants to remake the United States into a social welfare state and to completely redirect the course of Western civilization.”

It is fascinating to watch today’s pundits repeating Rush’s talking points almost word for word. No one shrinks from his bold statements anymore. Rush often proclaimed that he was on “the cutting edge of societal evolution.” The mainstreaming of his once controversial views proves, once again, that Rush was right.

Bradley Steffens is the author of two novels and seventy-five nonfiction books for young adults, including Donald Trump: Controversial 47th President and Leo XIV: The First American Pope.

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