How does a racist run for reëlection? Even more complicated, how does a candidate “consolidate the base” and, at the same time, lure just enough voters of color to make a difference in a close Presidential race?

In 1986, I spent weeks travelling with and reporting on Lee Atwater, George H. W. Bush’s theatrically down-home political consultant and a veteran of race-baiting political wars, particularly in the South. Atwater fancied himself a scholar of political history, particularly the history of campaigns and demagoguery—a tool he was not slow to employ or foist on his clients. He encouraged me to read his “Bible,” T. Harry Williams’s biography of Huey Long. Before signing on with Bush, Atwater had run some ugly campaigns, and yet he knew the game was changing, if only in its surface courtesies. In 1981, he described with a certain obscene precision the shifting mores of the race card and how to deal it. “You start out, in 1954, by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” he told an interviewer. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So, you say stuff like, uh, forced bussing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Forgive the language. Such was Atwater’s ugly, unvarnished sense of things, the shift from the bald racist language of mid-century politics to the coded racist language of late century and beyond. George H. W. Bush thought of himself as being above such ugliness, but Atwater was not reluctant to press on him the tactics he believed were necessary for victory. It was Atwater who, in the 1988 Presidential campaign, helped conceive of the famous Willie Horton ad that sought to depict Michael Dukakis, the former governor of Massachusetts, as a weak-on-crime sap foolish enough to let an incarcerated man—a black man, of course—out on furlough so that he could commit mayhem again. “By the time we’re finished,” Atwater said at the time, “they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.”

As I watched Rush Limbaugh receive the Medal of Freedom from Donald Trump during the State of the Union grotesqueries on Tuesday night, it was hard not to think of Lee Atwater, the continuing tradition of race-baiting, and how it infects our debased politics.

Limbaugh is sixty-nine and, as he just announced on his daily radio program, has been diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. Empathy is due to anyone who is suffering. But not high honors, not a celebration of a life’s work devoted to the mockery and derision of the Other. For the President of the United States to bestow one of the nation’s highest laurels on Limbaugh is a morally corrosive and politically cynical act. It is a kind of assault on the achievements of so many previous award winners, a list that includes Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Václav Havel, Rosa Parks, and John Lewis. It is appalling to see Rush Limbaugh’s name listed alongside theirs.

Limbaugh is hardly an American original. He derives from a line of radio bigots like Father Coughlin, who made racism into a form of demagogic entertainment. Subsequent call-in haranguers like Joe Pyne and Bob Grant were major broadcast figures years before Limbaugh. But no one before or since has reached audiences that match the scale of Limbaugh’s. And the Bartlett’s of Limbaugh’s hateful insults is as thick as a Russian novel: in 2004, Limbaugh said the N.B.A. might be renamed the T.B.A.—“the Thug Basketball Association, and stop calling them teams. Call ’em gangs.” A few years later, he hosted the conservative political satirist Paul Shanklin, who sang “Barack, the Magic Negro” to the tune of “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” The N.F.L. “all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons,” he said. The women’s movement is something he admired “from behind.” In 1989, Limbaugh cut off unwanted callers with what he called “caller abortions”—and his engineer would set off a tape of a loud vacuum followed by a prolonged scream. The quotations are endless, outrageous, and readily available.

Highlights from President Trump’s State of the Union address.

Over many years, Limbaugh has played a distinct role in the radicalization of the Republican Party and the conservative movement. He is a satirist, but one who has always tended to hit down; he has always found immense profit in disdaining the disadvantaged, the Other. William F. Buckley’s National Review put Limbaugh on the cover in 1993 and called him “The Leader of the Opposition.” Ronald Reagan, who knew when to signal support of states’ rights and his disdain for “welfare queens” to his own advantage, wrote Limbaugh a letter, saying, “Now that I’ve retired from active politics, I don’t mind that you have become the Number One voice for conservatism in our Country. . . . Keep up the good work.” In 1992, George H. W. Bush invited Limbaugh to stay overnight at the White House and carried Limbaugh’s bag for him to the Lincoln Bedroom. (Limbaugh’s fellow-guest that night was Roger Ailes, a kindred spirit.) Most leading conservatives have overlooked Limbaugh’s racist trespasses in order to curry his favor. His scorn, and the scorn of his most loyal fans, carried a high political price.

There is a certain Trumpian cast to Limbaugh’s biography, a coddled son of the élite who made his political name and gained political power by aligning himself with the currents of white resentment. Limbaugh was born and raised in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. His grandfather was an attorney who served in the Missouri House of Representatives and as an envoy to India during the Eisenhower Administration. His father was a county Republican chairman and a lawyer. Just as Trump avoided Vietnam by claiming to have bone spurs in his foot (it’s never been clear which foot), Limbaugh achieved his 1-Y classification with an abnormal growth on his backside—a pilonidal cyst. And yet Limbaugh righteously mocked Bill Clinton, in 1992, for avoiding the draft.