BRETT: Every Monday, we revisit a compelling monologue or a thought piece by Rush. We dub it our Monday Musing, and in today’s Monday Musing, Rush explains the Never Trumper mentality and why it’s hurting the party. He cites a piece from the Federalist that presents an interesting analogy involving Elliott Ness and Capone.
RUSH: You have a bunch of Never Trumpers, you have conservative intellectuals who don’t think there is anything particularly odd about what’s going on in the country. We’re certainly not in a crisis. They don’t see immigration as a crisis. They don’t see losing the culture as a crisis. They think we’re nuts for looking at things this way!
They believe the country is more threatened by Donald Trump and his lack of sophistication than by anything the left is doing. And it’s causing us to be very, very frustrated. Well, there’s a column that’s shown up at The Federalist. I’m glad to see this piece! I’m glad to be joined in this take, that the problem we’re facing is that too many people on our side do not see the real threat or enemy or whatever — in the political context — in the country today, and instead they see Trump!
It’s a piece by John Ericsson, “It’s Time For the Right to Realize the Left Is a Much Greater Threat Than Trumpism.” Yeah. You and I have been on this page since Trump first announced his candidacy. The Never Trumpers and even some conservative intellectuals who are not Never Trumpers. They’re not particularly anti-Trump. They voted for him or voted against Hillary or whatever. The point is there’s a bunch of people that do not realize the real threat that our country faces — and it’s not Trump, and it’s not Trumpism, and it’s not nationalism or populism. It’s liberalism. It’s the left.
What amazes me about these Never Trumpers is these people — particularly the conservative intellectuals — why do they exist? They exist to be in opposition to liberalism! Starting with Mr. Buckley and National Review and God and Man at Yale, the whole point here was to illustrate the follies, the fallacies, and the dangers of the left.
And somehow a bunch of conservative intellectuals have forgotten the liberal component of what they do — i.e., opposing it — and have somehow centered on Trump. And we all know why. I’ve explained psychologically why. I’m just happy that they’re somewhere other than this program that says it. The Federalist is a good site, and I’m glad they’re publishing this. It harps on Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg primarily, and one of the points Mr. Ericsson makes is to compare…
Jonah believes, for example, that the power of ideas will win. Our ideas are superior; we just have to be expressing ideas, enunciating our ideas, the power of our ideas will prevail. And of course the ideas do prevail in a vacuum, but in the real-world setting that we’re in now, who knows what the ideas are? They’ve been so distorted, they have been impugned and literally lied about for so many years by the media and the left that nobody knows what the ideas are. They think it’s racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia.
But the highlight of it is that the conservative intellectuals don’t want to fight back. Ergo, Trump. People that voted for Trump realize the threat posed to the country by the left. They don’t think Trump is. Trump’s the solution simply because he’s the one person will be to push back against it, fight back against it, roll it back, and in many ways he has succeeded. There’s an interesting analogy that’s used here.
Look at Eliot Ness. How did Eliot Ness first try to stop Capone? Well, a little raid here, and a little raid there on Capone’s massive illegal booze movement and operation and Prohibition. Ness didn’t do a damn thing to stop Capone or any of the other mobsters. It required something much larger and much bigger rather than just these little hit-and-miss raids that express their ideals and maintain their principles. “We’re opposed to booze; booze is illegal.
“We’re gonna make sure you can’t traffic in it.” So they hit them there, hit them there, but didn’t stop them. But they were being true to their ideals. They were being true to their principles. But being true to ideas and principles wasn’t stopping anything. It wasn’t resulting in victory. Ness and people that came later had to resort to different strategies. Anyway, I’m just glad to see it, and I wanted to point it out and give a couple of attaboys to The Federalist.
BRETT: One of the things that the left is very good at doing — and they are very good at doing — is creating this impression that there is either an imperative that must occur now. “We’re going to die if we don’t do this,” or what they’ll do is, they’ll create a popular talking point attached to it. Sometimes you’ll hear people say, “Is this a thing now? Like, when did this become a thing?” Right? You hear that from time to time.
You go, “Wait a minute. When did this become a thing? This snuck up on us.” No. It’s because they are very, very strong, at controlling the cultural conversation. Conservatives, by and large, look at the social conversation. I don’t mean social like friends, but the societal implications for things — and also, of course, the policy front of things. But we have ceded a lot of real estate to the culture there, and it’s a very interesting thing to consider.