No it goes way back to the 80s and 90s when radio consolidated. You had guys like Limbaugh reading off lists of men who died of AIDS and laughing at them. Same grift, different generation.
At a certain point there's a real lack of political power in the US-- specifically, I am thinking of Mark Fisher's understanding of Capitalist Realism.
In that system, it feels as if nothing material will ever change, and so all that is left is the aesthetic and apolitical hatred of other groups of people.
My dad was a substitute teacher who mostly took care of the kids and went to church on Sundays and played trombone with a bunch of Shriners. He was never politically plugged in, he just was raised in a house that operated very much like the setting of Leave it to Beaver.
So for him, watching cultural changes and being outraged over them were pretty much the only surface on which he felt connection to politics, as far as I can tell. From my standpoint, those cultural markers are pretty much the main differentiation between liberal Democrats and the GOP. They are both centrist capitalist parties that need to maintain US hegemony through foreign wars and who are both owned by the folks who own the business of the US.
It's a shit substitute for action, but for a lot of folks falling into the tribalism of that culture war is the only possibility they see for political action.
And while I find his political aesthetic to be both self-contradictory and profoundly alienating I have enough awareness to see how people who aren't evil in their intent can take up one side of culture war instead of the other.
And as someone who finds the anonymously penned "Desert" to be a plausible understanding of the current ecological/economical/political climate, I am not sure that short of a wholesale rejection of the politics of the spectacle there is a lot to be gained from these aesthetics... even if I know where I fall and who I support in that game and whose defeats I will happily cheer.
But like I said, I think that's more a product of a shitty situation rather than some evil spot in someones' soul.
He later apologized.
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-rush-limbaugh-mock-a...
In my experience, this combination of things are quite common. Their (Episcopal) church started doing a different communion process simply because it was revealed that the organist was out and parishioners did not want to share a common cup with him.
There are a lot of ways of describing why that doesn't seem cruel to those folks. To me, "culture war and political powerlessness" could be short hand for a number of things, ranging from neurosis to Žižek-ian "Ideology" to the contradictions of capitalism or the unworkability of philosophical idealism at the core of liberal practices.
It's a fact that these seemingly incompatible positions have gone together, though. So I suppose you could just say folks are "evil" but, that feels like it misses some nuance.
(Again, to be sure - not talking about your dad specifically since I am just a stranger on the Internet.)
I am hinting at depression of a kind a person experiences late in their life when all hope for change and personal growth starts to fade away. But I also don't want to limit the discussion to this observation only, there are other emotional and intellectual hardships involved: resentment, unhappiness, feeling of injustice, etc.
A daily dose of bias confirmation and drama, no matter what the politics, no matter how devoid of truth the monologue is, soothes the soul of humans everywhere.
It doesn't really matter time, nor place, nor politics. It's part of the human condition. My tribe is superior to your tribe, and if we have to piss on the graves of the other side to make ourselves feel good, By God, we'll do it.
edit: I just remembered the deaths of both Scalia and RGB. Right or left, both tribes celebrated, in PARTICULARLY DISGUSTING WAYS, the passing of SCOTUS justices of the opposing tribe. This is just what we, as humans, do.