In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains talk radio better than any media theory does, because the format only makes sense once you drop the liberal picture of the listener.
Take the liberal picture first. Talk radio presents itself as the public sphere in miniature. Open lines, every citizen a voice, opinions tested in debate, the individual exercising reason. That is the founding myth of the format, and almost nothing about the practice matches it. Callers are screened. The host dominates every exchange. Nobody changes his mind, ever, and the audience does not tune in to have its mind changed. It tunes in for three hours a day, five days a week, for decades, which is not the behavior of a rational actor sampling arguments. It is the behavior of a member attending his group.
Mearsheimer says reason is the weakest of the three sources of our preferences, behind innate sentiment and socialization, and that socialization works through long, repeated, protected exposure. Talk radio is adult socialization on exactly that model. The daily three-hour block does for grown men what childhood does in Mearsheimer’s account: it infuses values through repetition inside a trusted relationship, while the critical faculties rest. The host does not persuade. He maintains. He tells the tribe each morning who we are, who they are, and what happened overnight in the war between us.
The deepest fit concerns who listens. Talk radio’s core audience has always been the socially stranded: the truck driver alone in his cab, the shift worker, the widow in her kitchen, the small businessman who answers to no one and talks to no one. Mearsheimer holds that humans need group membership to survive and will seek it wherever it can be found. Talk radio sells belonging to atomized people. The voice in the dashboard is a companion, the regular callers are familiar faces, the enemies are shared. Liberal society produces the atomization, and talk radio sells the cure. The format is a compensation racket built on the social nature liberalism ignores.
Several hosts ran their shows on something close to Mearsheimer’s anthropology.
Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021). His audience named the proof. Dittoheads. The term concedes everything: agreement precedes argument, loyalty precedes reason, the caller phones in to affirm membership rather than to deliberate. Limbaugh understood this and said so in his own way. He described his job as validating what his audience already knew and giving them confidence to say it. That is morale work for a tribe under pressure, and he fused it with nationalism, the flag, the EIB Network as a country within the country. Restaurants set aside Rush Rooms so members could listen together. No one ever set aside a room for a podcast of arguments.
Alan Jones built the same structure in Sydney with a harder edge of command. His phrase was pick and stick: choose your people and never waver, a loyalty ethic with no liberal content at all. Jones ran his audience as a chief runs a tribe, distributing favors, organizing letter campaigns, punishing politicians who crossed him, and the politicians feared him because they knew the audience moved as a bloc. A bloc is a group acting on attachment. Liberal theory has no name for what Jones commanded. Mearsheimer does.
John Laws (1935-2025). When the cash-for-comment scandal broke in 1999, Laws defended himself by saying he was an entertainer, not a journalist, and owed nobody the disinterest that journalism’s liberal norms require. The regulators and the broadsheets were scandalized. His audience mostly was not, and it stayed. The liberal institutions assumed the bond between host and listener ran on disclosure, accuracy, and the norms of the rational public sphere. It ran on the voice, thirty years of familiarity, and paternal authority. The scandal measured the gap between liberal norms and tribal psychology, and the tribe’s verdict differed from the institutions’ verdict because the two run on different anthropologies.
Paul Harvey (1918-2009). Hello, Americans. The greeting itself addressed a national family, and his whole career was value re-infusion: small towns, work, church, the decent middle of the country told daily that its inherited code was right. Harvey never argued. He confirmed.
The counterexample seals it. Air America launched in 2004 as the liberal answer to right-wing talk and died within six years. Market structure explains part of the failure, but Mearsheimer’s frame explains the rest. Progressive politics in that era spoke the universalist language of rights and humanity, and universalism cannot bind a tribe, because a tribe needs a boundary and universalism dissolves boundaries by design. Right-wing talk spoke nationalism, the strongest group ideology Mearsheimer knows. One side offered arguments to individuals. The other offered membership to social beings. The format rewarded the side whose anthropology was true.
Charles Taylor (b. 1931) draws the line between two ways of having a self. The porous self of the enchanted world is open: spirits, voices, blessings, and curses cross its boundary, and meaning lives in things outside the mind, which can enter and take hold. The buffered self of modernity is sealed: meanings live inside, the world outside is neutral, and the self engages it at a distance, by choice. Taylor says we moderns are buffered. Talk radio is the evidence that the buffering is thinner than the theory.
Start with the medium. Radio has no screen and no page, nothing to hold at arm’s length. The voice arrives inside the skull, in the earbud, in the sealed cab of the truck, in the kitchen at dawn. Print addresses a reader who sits apart from the text and works on it. Radio enters. The listener does not decode the host; he hosts him. Every other medium asks for attention. Radio asks for admission, and the listener grants it, hours a day, for decades. That act of letting a voice in past the boundary is porosity, performed daily in the most disenchanted suburbs on earth.
Watch what duration does. After enough years, the host’s voice colonizes the listener’s inner speech. Listeners quote the host’s phrases as their own, hear his cadence when they read the news, anticipate what he will say about an event before he says it. The buffered self maintains a wall between my thoughts and the thoughts of others. Long listening dissolves the wall. The host’s mind and the listener’s mind interpenetrate, and the listener cannot say anymore where one stops. Possession is too strong a word by a degree, but only by a degree, and the older language would not have hesitated.
Now the content. Taylor says disenchantment drained the world of personal agency: things happen through impersonal systems, markets, statistics, viruses, rates. The buffered self lives in that flat causal weather and finds it cold. Talk radio re-enchants the cosmos in secular dress. On talk radio, nothing happens through impersonal process. Everything happens because someone did it. They wrecked the economy. They opened the border. They are coming for your way of life. The host narrates a world of agents, intentions, malice, and protection, which is the structure of the enchanted cosmos with demons swapped for elites. The listener under threat from personal forces is a porous self again, vulnerable to powers outside him, and the format keeps him in that state because the state is the product.
The host stands in the old role of the one who manages the boundary. Priests and cunning men once mediated between the porous self and the forces that pressed on it, naming the threat, prescribing the response, offering protection. The talk host does the same office. He names the danger each morning, tells the listener what it means and what to feel, marks the births and deaths of the audience, reads out the names of the sick. Alan Jones ran his program as a parish. John Laws, the Golden Tonsils, was called the voice of God for fifty years, and the joke was only half a joke; the voice carried an authority that no argument in it could account for. The authority was in the presence, which is where enchanted authority always lived.
The caller’s experience confirms it. Long-time listener, first-time caller, and the voice shakes. Why does it shake? On the buffered account, a citizen is phoning a media program to contribute an opinion, and there is nothing to tremble at. The trembling makes sense only if the caller is approaching a presence, entering a charged space where a power can bless him with airtime and agreement or banish him with the cut of a line. People do not tremble before content. They tremble before powers.
Liveness completes the structure. A podcast is buffered media: chosen, paused, skipped, consumed on the self’s own terms, the listener sovereign. Live radio is a flow the listener submits to in real time. It happens to him. He cannot stop the voice, only leave it, and he does not leave it. Submission to a continuous presence beyond your control is the porous posture, and the dial position never changes.
The purest case is night radio. Art Bell (1945-2018) broadcast Coast to Coast AM from a trailer in the Nevada desert to millions of people alone in the dark, and the content was the old enchanted world without disguise: ghosts, possession, visitations, voices from elsewhere. The biggest overnight audience in American radio belonged to a program that treated the porous cosmos as fact. The buffered self was supposed to have outgrown all that. At 2 a.m., alone, with a voice coming out of the dark, the listener discovered he had not.
Taylor gives the reason the whole format works. Buffering bought the modern self invulnerability and paid for it with flatness, the malaise of a world where nothing outside you can touch you and nothing outside you means anything. Talk radio sells the cure for flatness. It offers a daily cosmos where things mean, enemies threaten, a familiar power speaks to you by name, and you are open to all of it. The listener drives to work enchanted. He would never put it that way. He just says he likes the company.
Randall Collins (b. 1941) says rituals need four ingredients: bodies assembled in one place, a barrier against outsiders, a shared focus of attention, and a common mood. Run those through each other and you get the outputs: group solidarity, emotional energy in the individual, sacred symbols, and righteous anger against whoever profanes them. People then chain from ritual to ritual, seeking the energy charge, and a life is the chain. Collins doubts that media can do this at full strength, because the bodies are missing. Talk radio is the great test of that doubt, because it engineered around the missing ingredient and built the strongest ritual chain in broadcasting.
Start with shared focus, the ingredient radio does best. At 9 a.m. the host begins, and hundreds of thousands of people attend to one voice at one moment. Liveness does the work here. A podcast is consumed alone, on the listener’s schedule, and no one knows who else is listening or when. Live radio synchronizes attention across a city or a country, and the host labors to make the audience visible to itself: the folks, you out there, the calls read out, the texts read out, the town named with each caller. Frank from Penrith. Every named caller proves to every silent listener that the assembly exists and he is in it. The bodies are absent. The mutual awareness is not.
Then mood. Collins says rituals run on rhythmic entrainment: voices and gestures falling into a shared beat until the feeling becomes collective. The monologue is an entrainment engine. The host opens with the day’s outrage, builds it through repetition and escalation, and the audience’s pulse follows. Limbaugh’s pacing was a precision instrument. Jones escalated like a man climbing stairs. And the audience invented its own entrainment device: ditto. The word compressed the affirmation so the rhythm never broke. A caller who restated the argument in his own words would have slowed the beat. Ditto kept time. The dittohead was a man announcing that he was synchronized.
The barrier against outsiders is the insider code. Feminazis, the drive-by media, Struggle Street, the running jokes, the villain lexicon, the nicknames that take years to learn. Tune in cold and the show is half unintelligible, which is the point. Mastery of the code marks membership, and the daily broadcast extends the code faster than outsiders can learn it.
Now the outputs. The first sacred object is the host. Collins says the focus of a successful ritual becomes charged, a symbol of the group to itself, and the charge needs periodic renewal. Three hours a day is the renewal schedule. Around the host, lesser sacred objects accumulate: the golden microphone, which Laws possessed in literal gold, the EIB Network, the catchphrases that members exchange like tokens. And sacrilege produces what Collins predicts. When sponsors boycotted Limbaugh or regulators came for Jones, the audience experienced it as profanation and responded with righteous fury, flooding stations and advertisers. Punishing the profaner is itself a solidarity ritual, and a host under attack often emerged with a tighter tribe than before.
Emotional energy explains the listening itself. Collins says individuals leave good rituals charged with confidence and enthusiasm, and they organize their lives to get back to the source. The talk listener drives away from the show pumped, certain, ready to argue at the lunch table, and the charge drains by evening, and tomorrow at nine the source resumes. The schedule is an EE subscription, timed to the commute, with the car as the ritual chamber. The listener then recirculates the charged symbols, quoting the host at work, and each quotation is a micro-ritual that links him to other members and back to the chain.
The call-in segment is the ritual at maximum intensity. The first-time caller’s trembling voice, which Taylor’s frame read one way, reads in Collins as the physiology of high-stakes ritual entry: the member steps from the congregation to the altar. A successful call synchronizes with the host’s rhythm, receives his blessing, and delivers an energy payoff the caller will remember for years. A dissenting caller serves another function. The host crushes him, the group’s anger fires in unison, solidarity spikes, and the line goes dead. The format needs occasional heretics the way the ritual needs occasional sacrifices, and screeners admit a few for exactly that use.
Collins also explains the hosts. Emotional energy stratifies: whoever stands at the focus of a successful ritual harvests the largest charge, and becomes an energy star who needs the ritual more than anyone. This is why the great hosts never stop. Laws broadcast past eighty, retired, and returned, because retirement was withdrawal from the richest EE source he knew. Jones fought to stay at the microphone long after the money meant nothing. Three hours of focused attention from a million people, daily, for decades, produces men who are radiant on air and reportedly diminished off it. The chain holds the host hardest of all.
Two confirmations from the edges. First, the secondary rituals: Rush Rooms, listener cruises, station family days. The audience kept converting the mediated ritual back into bodily assembly, recharging at full Collins strength what the airwaves could only sustain at partial strength. The members themselves sensed what the medium lacked and supplied it. Second, the failures: balanced panel formats, point-counterpoint shows, the respectable forums that program directors love and listeners abandon. Balance prevents a shared mood by design, and without shared mood there is no entrainment, no solidarity, no charge, no chain. The audience was never seeking information. It was seeking the ritual, and it can tell within minutes which stations hold one.
