http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/09/07/the_shaming_of_the_never_trumpersThe Shaming of the Never Trumpers
September 07, 2016
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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I said earlier during the speech and in my momentary commentary during the speech that Trump's speech is actually a great introduction or transition for what I intended to lead the program or intend to lead the program with today. And this gonna be a real challenge for me, I have to tell you, because I have here a column that I would love to read to you in entirety and I can't because it is 10 pages long. It prints out to 10 pages. So I spent a lot of time this morning highlighting those parts that I really want to focus on.
And if I had to synthesize the description of this, the column appears at the Claremont.com website, Claremont review of books, Claremont University. They are a highly respected conservative organization. Dr. Larry Arnn, who runs Hillsdale College, used to run Claremont. And there's a piece by somebody who is not using his name in the byline. He's using the name of a famous Roman, Publius Decius Mus, seeking to be anonymous here. This piece is a shaming of the conservative intellectuals that comprise the Never Trump movement.
It is shot between the eyes of conservative intellectuals who say that Trump is beneath them. They can't stomach Trump. They can't possibly vote for Trump. It would be distastefully, personally unacceptable and so forth. And the reason this piece appeals to me is because it validates so many of the instincts that I have had over the years, in recent months particularly and that I've shared with you about what is happening to the conservative movement and how conservatism's being defined, and who seeks to define it and what it means going forward.
And there's even a term used for the conservative Never Trumpers. He calls them "the Washington Generals." I wonder where he got that? That happens to be my term for our side. Specifically, the Republicans in Congress. I think I named them the Washington Generals, happy to be on the field, happy to wear the uniform, but supposed to lose and happy to do so. And that's just a flavor.
The piece is so good. It is just a home run, every paragraph. So I'm gonna... Folks, this is on a par with Dr. Angelo Codevilla's ruling class versus country class piece from the American Spectator a few years ago. The title of this piece, by the way, is "The Flight 93 Election." What does that mean, "The Flight 93 Election"? Yeah. I'll explain that when we get back.
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RUSH: You remember Flight 93. That's the plane on 9/11 that the passengers rushed the cockpit and captured the cockpit from the terrorists but the plane went down in a field in Pennsylvania. It still was denied its target, however. And in one sense, it was considered a greatly heroic and successful action by the passengers, the civilians on that plane. Well, this piece -- and, by the way, we've linked to it at RushLimbaugh.com. I imagine you're gonna have trouble getting to it since I've ballyhooed it here.
I'm telling you, folks, it is really good. It's one of these pieces that you'll read it and wish you had written it. In my case, I read it, and I was silently jumping for joy because it contains so much of what I said. But it's said so well here and so pointedly and the gloves off. As I say, it's a shaming of conservative intellectuals by an anonymous conservative intellectual. Now, I don't know why the writer chose the route of anonymity. Maybe to maintain the focus on the piece.
The name is gonna leak; it always does. Remember Primary Colors, the book that came out about the Clinton campaign, and eventually people found out it was Joe Klein who wrote the book? So we'll find out who wrote this, the point is. "The Flight 93 Election -- 2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You -- or the leader of your party -- may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain."
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RUSH: "The Flight 93 Election -- 2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You -- or the leader of your party -- may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don't try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto[matic]. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances." This is a shaming of conservative, Never Trump intellectuals is what this piece is, and it's powerful.
"To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic," to say, "a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto[matic]. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances." The "ordinary conservative" says, "The stakes can't be that high because they are never that high -- except," well, sometimes. "Conservative intellectuals will insist that there has been no 'end of history' and that all human outcomes are still possible. ...
"But how great is the crisis? Can things really be so bad if eight years of Obama can be followed by eight more of Hillary, and yet Constitutionalist conservatives can still reasonably hope for a restoration of our cherished ideals? Cruz in 2024!" Yeah! He's mocking this whole idea that eight years of Hillary on top of eight years of Obama will leave us anything. "The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues -- immigration, trade, and war -- right from the beginning.
"But let us back up. One of the paradoxes -- there are so many -- of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad." Now, I'm gonna take some time to translate what this means as I interpret it. As you know, there are people in the conservative movement who just can't bring themselves to support Trump, vote Trump, say anything good about Trump, and they've made it known they'll vote for Hillary.
originalAt the same time, they indicate that they're trying to tell us that things are very bad. But if they're willing to vote for Hillary they must not think they're that bad, if voting for Hillary and what all that means for the next eight years leaves us anything after that. "On the one hand, conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism.
"Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes," like ISIS. "A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don't know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can't (or won't) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six-figure debts for the privilege. And so on and drearily on.
"Like that portion of the mass where the priest asks for your private intentions, fill in any dismal fact about American decline that you want and I'll stipulate it." The point is, nobody on the conservative right disagrees: We're all in a downward spiral and these illustrations are what a lot of people on the conservative right agree with. Culturally and morally and politically we're in a swamp, we're in a sewer, and we're trending downward, and there's no end in sight.
"Conservatives spend at least several hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines, conferences, fellowships, and such, complaining about this, that, the other, and everything. And yet, these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want their pet ideas adopted -- tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?"
In other words, we've got a lot of conservative intellectuals at the tanks writing policy papers, position papers, as though everything's the same, as though everything's normal. "We're just through a normal election cycle. We win some; we lose some. We gotta keep plugging away. Eventually we're gonna win," with no acknowledgment of the reality of what we face. They're in it for themselves. They want their pet ideas adopted. They want their paychecks.
originalThey want their paychecks to be cashed. They want to stay in the game. They want to be part of whatever the movement is in Washington, DC. But here's the thing: "If conservatives are right..." This is a key 'graph here, folks. "If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if [conservatives] are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed 'family values'; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right..."
f conservatives are right "about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if [conservatives] are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere -- if [conservatives] are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe -- mustn't they? -- that we are headed off a cliff.
"But it's quite obvious that [some conservative intellectuals] don't believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff. A recent article..." I hate naming names, but since this guy did it I'll mention who the names are. "A recent article by Matthew Continetti may be taken as representative -- indeed, almost written for the purpose of illustrating the point. Continetti inquires into the 'condition of America' and finds it wanting. What does [he] propose to do about it?
"The usual litany of 'conservative' 'solutions,' with the obligatory references to decentralization, federalization, 'civic renewal,' and -- of course! -- Burke. Which is to say, conservatism's typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes?
"What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption? 'Civic renewal' would do a lot of course, but that's like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve 'civic renewal'? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy." The point here is -- and it rings true to me because we've discussed I don't know how many times. My way of saying this is I turn on TV or I read various things and I look at all of these people on our side who properly detail all the things going wrong.
original"They get it all right: We're losing our culture, we're losing our morality, we're losing our politics, we're losing education. We're losing everything and they get that all right. But there's no sense of urgency to stop it or to fix it, and there's no willingness to join the battle! They just write what they write, say what they say, and then go back and do it again the next day, get the Fox News gig or the book deal and keep talking. But joining the fray...? And then when people who are joining the fray get hit and attacked, they're nowhere to be found defending anybody. In fact, many of them join the attack on whoever it is on the conservative side that's getting hit!
And so this author is really calling them out, he's saying, "Look, you guys are just as good as anybody at identifying the problems. The idea that you can have eight more years of Hillary Clinton and still employ these traditional conservative solutions to a population changing before our eyes that doesn't have the slightest idea what you're talking about is insane."
And I'm still only on page two. Let me skip a couple of paragraphs here. "Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that Things-Are-Really-Bad -- But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious answer is that they don’t really believe the first half of that formulation," that things are really bad.
"If so, like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it. Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others. Whatever the reason for the contradiction --" the contradiction is identifying the problems head on, getting them exactly right, and then doing precisely nothing about it. "-- there can be no doubt that there is a contradiction. To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs -- to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society --"
In other words, we're being torn apart in front of our eyes, and to hold that conservative, cultural, economic, political beliefs are incompatible with the transformation going on at the moment, "-- and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.
original"Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism."
Now, let me give another hint where this is headed. What this column is really about is a shaming of Never Trumpers who proudly and loudly proclaim -- conservative intellectuals -- it's a infinite audience that's being targeted here. It's not you, folks. It's conservative intellectuals, the think tankers, the people that rely on fundraising and donations and the magazine types. I'm not naming any names and he doesn't do so, either, but he's written for that audience, and he's basically calling them out for their holier-than-thou attitude about Donald Trump.
Because the whole point of this is this guy's opinion. He is every bit the intellectual conservative of those he's criticizing. The point of this whole piece is that Donald Trump's the only hope, that conservatism no longer applies. We're way past that. Conservatism, as has been applied the last ten years, what do we have to show for it? We have a bunch of midterm election victories, but nothing done with them.
And if you're really serious about how bad things are but you can't find yourself to oppose Hillary Clinton, then you're worthless. That's what this is essentially saying, but in 10 pages. It's great.
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RUSH: Just a few more excerpts here from the column The Flight 93 Election from Claremont.com. Folks, I want to tell you, if I chose to I could spend probably two hours on this today. It is that deep. I should say in depth. It's not deep in the sense it's hard to understand. Quite the contrary. But in a nutshell the message and theme -- and there are a couple of them here, but if I had to whittle it down, conservatism can't just be an academic exercise when the country is hanging in the balance.
And the focus within the conservative movement on who is and who isn't a genuine conservative misses the entire point and is a waste of time when the country is hanging in the balance. There's only one possible way to stop the downward trend we're on, and that's to beat Hillary Clinton, and the only way to do that is to vote for Donald Trump. And it's a plea to intellectual conservatives who refuse to do so.
originalCan you separate your vote from support? If you can't bring yourself to support Trump, can you at least vote for him to stop the downward trend that you all acknowledge is occurring? This is one of the big themes of the piece: How can you sit there and agree how rotten things are, how we're in a downward spiral, how everything we believe in is being transformed and torn apart and not react as though we're in a big crisis, as though we can just continue to do what we're doing, writing our same old policy papers, enunciating our same old principles to an audience that is further and further removed by virtue of immigration and other tricks the Democrats are using to totally change the face of the electorate in this country.
Here's another excerpt. "More to the point, what has conservatism achieved lately? In the last 20 years?" Take over the House is about it, when you get right down to it, 1994. That's my interpretation. The writer here says that, well, practically nothing has been achieved in the last 20 years. But then if you go tell conservatives that, they'll say, "Well, our ideas haven't even been tried."
"Except that the same conservatives who generate those ideas are in charge of selling them to the broader public. If their ideas 'haven’t been tried,' who is ultimately at fault?" This gets to the point. You can sit there and you can enunciate conservatism all day, you can write conservatism all day, but you can't sit there and say, "Our ideas haven't had a chance," because if you're not trying to get them implemented, if you're not actually trying to persuade people, if you're not out there fighting for hearts and minds, if you're just pontificating, then you can't sit back and say, "Our ideas haven't been tried."
"The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks of failure. Its sole recent and ongoing success is its own self-preservation. Conservative intellectuals never tire of praising 'entrepreneurs' and 'creative destruction.' Dare to fail! they exhort businessmen. Let the market decide! Except, um, not with respect to us. Or is their true market not the political arena, but the fundraising circuit?"
Now, if you are a conservative intellectual and you're reading this, that is a deep cut. That is a deep wound. That is an allegation that you're only in it for the money and that you don't want to upset anything that might interrupt your fundraising.
So whereas you might really acknowledge that we're in dire straits and you might, in your heart, think the only thing we can do is vote Trump, you won't dare say so because it might upset your strident conservative donors who might freeze you out. That's who he's calling out in this paragraph. Anyway, really, I can't go through the whole thing, folks, it would take too much time. I've gotta take a break now. But you really should read it.
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