I love a good critical dissection of lowbrow culture, and there is arguably no more widely influential lowbrow figure in my lifetime than Rush Limbaugh. I’ve never taken the time to give him credit for being anything besides a blowhard shock jock, and to be clear, that’s what he was. In the context of his rise to notoriety, however, we find a microcosm of media and politics and American life over the last several decades.