What Is Conservatism in the Age of Trump?
Feb 24, 2017
RUSH: Well, now, I’ve had some people email me about it — and, I mean, it never occurred to me. (interruption) You think I should? (interruption) Well, okay. Maybe. I’ll think about it. … I have some people emailing me since last night that I ought to play parts of my CPAC speech from back in 2009 when Obama took office. It never even occurred to me. That’s eight years ago.
Anyway, greetings. It’s great to have you with us, folks. It’s Open Line Friday. Rush Limbaugh here, ready and revved up to go. I’m eager to speak with you today. If you’re new to the program — and there’s a good chance you are — the audience of this program is continuing to expand at near geometric proportions. Thank you very much for that. It’s incredible. If you’re new to the program, Monday through Thursday when we go to the phones, people have been screened, and it’s been determined that they’re going to talk about things that I care about, because the focal point is the host sounding interested.
If that doesn’t happen, then it’s a near disaster. If the host sounds bored (laughs), you’re flirting with disaster there. But on Friday, we don’t do that. On Friday, pretty much whatever you want to talk about is fine. It doesn’t really differ that much from Monday through Thursday, as it turns out, but we still present the opportunity. If you want to talk about something other than all of this that is front and center in the news, this is the day to do it: 800-282-2882; the email address ElRushbo@eibnet.us.
Okay, we’re going to get to the president’s speech at CPAC today. Mike Pence, we have some excerpts of his speech at CPAC last night. We have some commentary about CPAC, particularly Dr. Larry Arnn’s speech yesterday morning. I want to review some of what he said. He attempted to define conservatism, which is key. I think there’s something fascinating going on here, this year with Trump being elected president, and that is a lot of people questioning: “What is conservatism now? Is this, for example, my father’s conservatism?
“Is it my conservatism when I was young and growing up? Is it the conservatism of William F. Buckley, Jr., the modern day godfather/founder?” You can go back to Burke and others probably, but in the modern era it would be Mr. Buckley. “What is it? Is it that or has it become something else? Has conservatism modified and expanded so as to be able to include in it President Trump and his supporters, or is that indeed populism and nationalism and it really doesn’t have much to do with conservatism?” And this has all come to the forefront because it’s CPAC time.
And that’s the Conservative Political Action Conference. And it is assumed that what happens at CPAC is the definition of conservatism of the day. And that largely depends on who they invite, who they give prominence to. And there’s been some controversy about that this year with their invitation to Milo Yiannopoulos. Then the president shows up today and he didn’t talk much about conservatism philosophically or theoretically. And the president very seldom explains why he believes what he believes. He just lets you know that he believes what he believes.
But you don’t really know how he arrived at it. Now, conservatives love to tell you why they think what they think, and it’s usually a means of persuading people to accept it and join it. So now it’s up for grabs largely because the Trump campaign fractured conservatism into many different splinters. And many people who thought that they were the modern-day leaders of conservatism, in fact found themselves in a new category called Never Trumpers. They were the group of people that thought no matter what, Trump should not win.
Even if it meant the implosion and the end of the Republican Party, even if it meant we go back to zero — we go back to the Dark Ages and rebuild from nothing — that would be better than having Trump win. And many of those people are still there. And they are still active in what I call the academic or intellectual side of conservatism. Many people think that I am what conservatism is, and I don’t say that with ego in any stretch. I’m just telling you that I realize how some people look at me. I’ve always thought of myself as a conservative, philosophically, and that’s the way I try to live my life.
But in terms of actual leader of a movement, that kind of thing has never been front and center in my mind. I just believe what I believe and tell people what it is and try to explain it, and I indeed try to persuade people to join it. And I’ve found myself at odds with others in the conservative movement, who themselves think that I have contributed to the watering down or the bastardization. In many ways, the Never Trumpers thought I was performing a great disservice to conservatism by not slamming Trump.
And because I didn’t slam Trump and because I didn’t come out and forcefully oppose Trump that I was myself a leading agent of destruction and compromise of the modern conservative movement. But I don’t think it’s had a leader in a long time. I don’t think there’s any one person that can tell you what it is and have other conservatives agree with it. We could get most of it. But I think conservatism, largely, became an academic exercise. It became a movement that wasn’t really fraught with much action. It was a lot of philosophizing.
It was a lot of thinking, expression of those thoughts. But in terms of action… I said something during the campaign that I caught a lot of flack for. I’ll repeat it for you again. When I was being accused of betraying conservatism by not denouncing Trump… It would be probably advantageous for me to tell you that what really has guided me in terms of politics for a huge number of years is defeating the left. Now, defeating the left with conservatism, obviously. But if it meant a slight departure here or there, defeating the left is it to me. That has to happen.
If we don’t do that, then we’re forever going to be challenged and in trouble. In other words, they are not to be compromised with. They can’t be. They don’t have any interest in that. They represent the greatest threat to this country in my lifetime. The modern day American left and its agents all over the world represent that, and so this is not a time for purity to me. This is a time for reality and recognition and necessity of saving the country, and that’s where I think Trump is. I don’t think Trump’s philosophical or ideological much.
He may becoming more so as he is assaulted day in and day out by agents of the left. We would hope that that’s the case. But I think that the situation in our country with the left — and it’s bigger than the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party is its home, and the Democrat Party has become so radical now that Democrats of 30 years ago would not recognize it. It is so far and gone. But they populate the judiciary, and they populate much of the bureaucracy, and even after they lose elections they are still in quite a few positions of power. They have to be rooted out. One election isn’t going to do the trick.
You’ve got to win the election and then you have to implement the agenda and whatever it takes. And you have to withstand all of the assaults that are going to come your way in the process. And this has been something that many on the right, the Republican Party… They haven’t wanted to endure the assaults. They just haven’t wanted to put up with that. So they’ve been pragmatists or compromisers. And the conservative movement — define it as you will — while it was winning elections it was stalled out in terms of the implementation of ideas.
And I can demonstrate that by simply asking you: How many times did you vote — 2008, 2010, 2012 — for Republican conservatives running for office, saying exactly what you wanted them to say, telling you they were going to do exactly what you wanted them to do, and when they get there it didn’t happen? And that’s what I mean. There wasn’t any action, and we didn’t seem to have very many warriors that were interested in implementing the ideas. They seemed to be content with owning the ideas. So enter Trump into all of this, and now we’ve got action.
We have action. Whether by design or by accident where Trump is concerned, we have action against the left, and this is what it looks like. And it’s always going to be ugly and it’s always going to be upsetting — and it’s not going to get better. Bannon was right about this yesterday. I mean, not in the near future it isn’t going to get better. I’ll give you an example of something that happened at CPAC. There was a tweet by somebody named Peter Hamby. I don’t know who Peter Hamby is. The name rings a bell but I can’t place it. But it doesn’t matter.
This guy tweeted out: “Crowd at CPAC waving these little pro-Trump flags that look exactly like the Russian flag. Staffers quickly come around to confiscate them.” Okay, so you read that tweet and you say, “How the hell…? This is CPAC. What in the hell are a bunch of miniature Russian-type flags doing in there and why are people waving them around? This is not something that would organically happen at CPAC,” and it turns out it wasn’t. James O’Keefe of Project Veritas tweeted, “This was Ryan Clayton from Bob Creamer group ‘Americans Take Action’ handing Russian flags. Ryan was forcibly removed. [Peter Hamby] edited that out.”
So what happens is this guy Creamer… We played sound bites of for you yesterday. Creamer is the guy (dah, dah, dah, dah, dah) the husband of Democrat congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, who had over 350 visits to the White House during Obama’s term, and 50-some-odd of those were Obama himself in the Oval Office. This was the guy caught by Project Veritas secret video admitting that Hillary Clinton paid for this guy Creamer to go out and hire agitators and protesters to show up at Trump rallies during the campaign and disrupt them and to make themselves look like Trump supporters.
So they’re on the ball, and they somehow get into CPAC, and they hand out these little Russian flags to try to make the connection that CPACers are very happy with Trump’s connection to Russia and that they’re happily waving their flags around. That creates the pictures in the video that the media can fly into and say: “Look at this! My gosh, they’re not even hiding it!” That’s what I mean by, “They’re not going to go away.” This is all they’ve got. They can’t win elections right now. As I said yesterday and two days ago, there are some real upsides to this happening.
They’re exposing themselves. They’re marginalizing themselves. They’ve come out of the closet, so to speak. They’re not hiding. They can’t hide behind their camouflage. They can’t hide themselves as harmless, lovable, fuzz ball leftists only interested in civil rights. These are a bunch of really mean and deranged people — seriously, genuinely mean people — and they have to be fought and they have to be defeated, and thinking alone isn’t going to do it. The ideas that thinking and writing and sometimes appearing in the media and proselytizing conservatism will magically penetrate the minds of undecided and uninformed people and persuade them?
That’s not how it happens.
Well, not en masse. It doesn’t happen.
