RUSH: Here is Chris in Salt Lake City. You’re next on Open Line Friday. Hello.
CALLER: Huh, Rush, how you doing?
RUSH: I’m just fine, sir, thank you.
CALLER: Good. Honor to talk to you. Hey, I just have a question for you. I’ve been listening to your show about a year now, and I’m understanding liberalism a little bit more and more — well, as much as you can, I guess, but can you —
RUSH: How old are you?
CALLER: I’m 29.
RUSH: Twenty-nine. What’s so hard to understand about it for you?
CALLER: Well, you know, I just think by understanding where it all stemmed from I could try to make a little bit more sense of it, as much as it really doesn’t make sense, where did it all start?
RUSH: Ah. When did liberalism start?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: That’s sort of like trying to define, “Are we here by virtue of the Big Bang or creation?”
CALLER: (chuckles) Okay.
RUSH: But, you know, you can have some fun with this. Now, if I were my old chemistry teacher in high school, and you were me, and you called with this question, my old chemistry teacher would say, “Well, why don’t you write a report on that for us and have it in in five days,” making me answer my own question — and it’s a good learning exercise to do that, but we were talking about it because I’ve seen your call up here on the board for a while. We were talking about where did liberalism begin —
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: — and, of course, it’s a two-part question. The first part of the question is
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Mr. Snerdley thinks that liberalism domestically in this country was officially enshrined with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal.
CALLER: Ah.
RUSH: H.R. Kit Carson, my chief of staff says, “If you want to find out where liberalism began you’re going to have to go back into recorded history and find the first recorded instance of class envy.”
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Because class envy is one of the building blocks of liberalism.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: But I think you could probably go back to Ancient Rome. Any big, tyrannical government that oppressed its citizens and denied them basic freedoms, you have to say has its roots in liberalism — and if that intentions were to make everybody live as miserably but equally as possible or comfortable as possible you could say that would be liberalism as well, but, you know, there’s so many ways to… I mean, I would actually say it’s difficult to answer because most people throughout the history of the world — and there are exceptions, which is why there’s conservatism — most people around the world have been willing to trade their liberty and freedom for safety and security, and that is trusting an all-powerful government or what have you. The people who have stood for individual freedom and little, small man opposed to big odds… In David and Goliath, Goliath is the liberal. David is the conservative. That’s been the history of it. Moses you could say was a conservative and his flock became pretty liberal during times of rebellion against him because they refused to believe him. They got mob rule going and they believed in something more powerful even than Moses despite what he had demonstrated. I mean, it would be very difficult to really trace the beginnings of liberalism, but if you want official liberalism that spawned that kind of official thinking among powerful elites in this country, you’d have to say it’s Marx. You’d have to say it’s Marx and Ingalls. Read the Communist Manifesto and you’ll see that it’s ten points. You’ll see that nine of them we already have, and they always involve big government. They always involve, “To each according to his needs, from each according to his means.” I mean, that’s typical. That’s right out of Marxism and it’s liberalism today. FDR enshrined it in government with Social Security and the New Deal and the notion that government can provide all the answers and all the needs of all people.
CALLER: Yeah, which is pretty phony. If I could just give you some quick background on myself: Growing up mom and dad never talked politics at all. I want to say that my dad is very conservative like yourself, and my mom. They never talked about it. But I’ll tell you, I was raised on television — and I found myself. I was a liberal and I didn’t even know it, and growing up my eyes started to open to things. You know, I’d watch you a little bit when you were on television, and I started tuning in to your radio show about a year ago, and my eyes started opening. I was a doom-and-gloomer, a defeatist, “Poor me,” playing that card, and it just didn’t work for me, down in the dumps all the time, and I gotta tell you you’ve been very inspiring for me and I continue to listen to you to this day, and you’re absolutely right. I mean, you make sense, and I think it’s great. I really do.
RUSH: Well, thank you very much, I appreciate that and I’m really heartened to hear this because you came to it on your own. A lot of people, their ideological opinions are formed by their parents, grandparents, and the forces surrounding them when they grew up. Some people even have tried — some scientists lately have tried — to advance the notion that ideology is genetic. Did you see that? (interruption) Yeah. I think, yeah, you know, Mr. Snerdley has a point about you, Chris, and I’m going to repeat this. It’s a good point. Following the November 2002 elections, Tom Daschle — after this humiliating defeat, after the Wellstone rally that was disguised as a funeral, or maybe it was the Wellstone funeral disguised as a rally, I don’t know what it was, but it doomed them, and then of course their indecision on the war on terror response to 9/11, they just doom themselves, and Tom Daschle after this election when he thought he was going to get control of the Senate back and didn’t, held a press conference and announced that he and his party were actually very concerned about me, and they were concerned because experts — quote, unquote, experts — had told them that it wasn’t just conservatives and Republicans listening to me, like they had thought all along, that I was actually changing people’s minds and this is dangerous because I’m such a _____ whatever, fill in the blank — and so for all those years the Democrats thought I was preaching to the choir, but they obviously got some focus group data or marketing research that indicated, “Oh, you know, this guy’s converting Democrats and liberals?” and you sound like one of those guys, Chris, that Tom Daschle was talking about, and it’s happening, and it’s been happening now for 16 years.
I can imagine a number of things that would burn you up, like this whole business of war on terror and Iraq and Afghanistan. No matter how you slice it, the Democrats always seem to side up with the wrong people. They always end up blaming this country for all of these entanglements. They blame America. They just can’t help themselves and yesterday we had these unbelievable stories from the Boston Globe about both House and Senate Democrats having private meetings even now to try to come to a consensus about what they believe, when these meetings are a sham. We know what they believe. We listen to them. I can tell Tom Daschle what he believes faster than he can. Ditto Harry Reid, ditto Ted Kennedy, ditto any liberal. I can tell them what they believe before they say a word to me. All they got to do is tell me they’re liberal. But they’re having these meetings. Why? Because they’re trying to figure out what to say that masks who they really are. But if you stripped it all away yesterday, what you learned was that they were coming up with, “How should we deal with Iraq? Do we have a timetable? No. Should we get close to a timetable? Should we say we’re going to have a timetable? Should we say we’re not going to go anywhere near a timetable?” But if you boiled it all down, the Democrats were discussing variations of defeat, variations of retreat, variations of giving up, and that’s what they’re doing. They think they’re going to appeal to a majority of the American people, and they’re not. The American people don’t want to give up. The American people don’t want to retreat. The American people don’t want defeat in the war on terror or Iraq or anywhere else. For some reason the Democrats either think they do or want it themselves, and so they’re coming up with — and I don’t know that they know how they sound to people. I really don’t think. But guys like you, Chris, you hear how they sound and it doesn’t dovetail with your instincts anymore, and so welcome to the fold. We’re happy to have you, and I hope our answers to your timely question of when did liberalism begin, helped out.
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