Wit & Attitude Quote by Evan Thomas

Evan Thomas isn’t praising Rush Limbaugh; he’s sketching a scorched-earth theory of political rehabilitation. The line “good for the party” lands like a bait-and-switch, because the real “good” here is punitive: let the loudest, most polarizing voice accelerate the party’s descent until the damage becomes impossible to ignore. It’s a gambler’s logic, but with reputations and institutions as chips.

The intent is strategic cynicism dressed as pragmatism. “Drive it all the way down” reads less like analysis than like a dare, a belief that only a full-blown humiliation can break a movement’s addiction to outrage. Thomas frames extremism as a detox: bottom out, then recover. The “complete fools” phrasing is deliberately humiliating, telegraphing contempt for the party’s current incentives - performative anger, media spectacle, ideological purity tests - and suggesting those incentives can’t be reasoned with, only exhausted.

The subtext is that moderation is no longer persuasive on its merits; it needs the contrast of catastrophe. “Always darkest before the dawn” borrows a familiar moral arc to justify waiting out the wreckage, implying that voters and elites require pain as instruction. That’s a bleak view of democratic learning: change doesn’t come from argument, but from consequences.

Context matters: Limbaugh symbolized talk-radio’s ability to discipline Republicans through mockery and amplification, turning media into a parallel party infrastructure. Thomas is diagnosing a feedback loop where entertainment becomes ideology. His “maybe” is the tell - the rescue is not guaranteed. Sometimes you don’t get a dawn; you just get used to the dark.