Rush-ing around

TO MAKE sense of the Republican race for the White House, here is a short cut: get in a car, turn on the radio and drive. On the face of it, the conservative activists tasked with choosing the Republican Party’s next presidential candidate are in a confounding mood. Until about five minutes ago, the received wisdom was that grassroots Republicans prize ideological purity above all—yet in the New Hampshire primary on February 9th they handed a thumping win to Donald Trump, a New York billionaire who invited Hillary Clinton to his most recent wedding and thinks government should play a much bigger role in providing health care.

The same wisdom holds that in a time of anti-establishment rage, voters are desperate for plain-spoken authenticity. But on February 1st activists handed victory in the Iowa caucuses to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Princeton and Harvard-educated lawyer whose wife works for Goldman Sachs, and whose highly polished campaign speeches lurch from sermonising—“Father God…awaken the Body of Christ, that we might pull back from the abyss”—to Ivy League pomposity, as when he tells crowds that this election represents an “inflection point” in history.

Mr Cruz did well in New Hampshire too, coming in third even though the state’s Republicans are less pious and more live-and-let-live than most. At snow-buffeted campaign rallies, a surprising number of New Hampshire conservatives said they liked both Mr Trump and Mr Cruz, two very different candidates who between them eventually scooped nearly half the state’s Republican primary vote.

A key to this puzzle can be found on conservative talk radio. It is a world of its own, built around codes of tribal identity, grievance and scorn for The Other. Each day such radio stars as Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin or Glenn Beck describe a simple world, in which good guys would win and America’s foes tremble if only its rulers were braver (talk radio is keen on Mr Trump’s plan to bar Muslims from America, and likes Mr Cruz’s talk of carpet-bombing Islamic radicals). On talk radio Barack Obama is an America-hating, anti-white racist, and Republican Party bosses his collaborators. Even the advertisements seethe with paranoia, promoting gold coins as a hedge against economic collapse, or ammunition and survival provisions for those wishing to prepare themselves for civil unrest.

In recent elections, notably in 2008 and 2012, talk-radio hosts could not prevent the nomination of candidates whom they considered traitors. For Republicans, that was a relief: hewing to talk radio’s sour, chauvinist world view is no way to win a general election (for all their clout, even the top-rated talk-radio hosts pull in just 13m listeners a week, most of them older white men).

One way of summing up the crisis facing Republicans in 2016 is this. Mr Trump and Mr Cruz are each, in their own way, tribunes of talk-radio America. Mr Trump has the medium’s temperament down pat—one minute playing the snarling demagogue, and the next gleefully hurling schoolboy insults at rivals. Mr Cruz is a master of talk radio’s politics of insinuation, suggesting that Mr Obama has yet to defeat Islamic State not because that fight is complicated and hard, but because he is an “apologist for radical Islam”. No plausible candidate with a broader, sunnier message has yet emerged from the Republican pack.

Talk radio despises the Republican who came second in New Hampshire, Governor John Kasich of Ohio. Mr Kasich may have balanced budgets and put forward conservative priorities. No matter. Along with such figures as Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, Mr Kasich is derided as a quasi-Democrat. His crime is to defend the pragmatic business of governing. Worse, Mr Kasich often expresses empathy for the poor and those who “live in the shadows”, and says that conservative hardliners lack Christian compassion. Mr Kasich is an interesting man, but he lacks a clear path through the mostly southern states up next.

Beck and call

Not every Trump or Cruz voter is a Rush Limbaugh fan. Mr Trump, in particular, offers (false) hope to many Americans buffeted by such large forces as globalisation, automation, female emancipation, civil rights and cultural change. But talk-radio’s power in this cycle is real. Just consider Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a young Cuban-American raised by working-class migrants, with the knack of advancing sternly conservative policies while expressing personal sympathy for underdogs.

News reports focused on the gaffe that hurt Mr Rubio just before New Hampshire’s primary: a stilted performance in a TV debate when he used the same line on Mr Obama four times. The attack line causing Mr Rubio such trouble was a sop to talk radio. His stump speech used to be about the future, and how 21st-century America needs to equip its citizens to compete with workers anywhere in the world and with machines at home.

More recently, though, to reassure the hard right (who think him soft on immigration) and to quash the idea that as an inexperienced first-term senator he is a second Obama, Mr Rubio has started painting the president as a malign super-villain. On the home-front, he accuses Mr Obama of deliberately transforming America’s “identity”. Turning to foreign policy, he says that Mr Obama sees America as “an arrogant country that needed to be cut down to size, so he guts our military and betrays our allies.” Mr Limbaugh duly praised Mr Rubio this week for saying what other Republicans “do not dare say”.

The coming weeks of gruelling campaigning will show whether Mr Rubio can survive as a candidate. If you watch the senator work a rope-line, his sympathy for The Other—as when he praises the family values of some undocumented migrants—suggests he could be a champion for a more generous, open-minded conservatism. But in this race just now the loudest voices belong to the pinched demagogues.