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March 1, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:58
March 1, 2016, Tuesday, Hour #3
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And we're back.
We're back to the fastest three hours in media, hosted by me, Rush Lindboy, your guiding light.
The telephone number is 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
And you can send an email.
I react to them.
I use them frequently, lrushbo at eibnet.com.
Now, before I share with you some of the highlights of the Angelo Codeville piece, his piece is at thefederalist.com.
And Charles Murray's piece for the Wall Street Journal back on February 12th, the Murray piece entitled Trump's America, Why the White Working Class Justifiably Angry.
But I had a good question right before the break.
Hey, Rush, what I don't understand is why none of this class frustration hasn't manifested against the Democrats.
I mean, they're the primary cause of all these problems.
Why do the unions never break with the Democrats?
Why do blacks never break with the Democrats?
What's changed?
Why the hell is it manifesting all this class anger?
Why is it manifesting against the Republican Party only?
I understand the angst versus the Republican Party, but why haven't the Democrats been accountable all these years?
That's an interesting question to me.
How come there isn't any anger at the Democrat establishment like there is, well, for the people that are angry at the establishment, they're angry at both.
To them, the Democrats and Republicans are no different.
So the fallout's the same.
But the question, I know what the guys getting at.
Why aren't the Democrats having problems?
Why isn't there a Donald Trump out there screwing things up for Hillary?
And there is.
He's named Bernie Sanders.
But see, folks, the Democrats learned a lesson.
When you're going to have an election, you don't leave things up to voters.
What did you say, Rush?
I said exactly what I meant to say.
The Democrats have learned that when you're going to have an election, you don't leave things up to voters.
Bernie Sanders is a placeholder.
But when you look at it, to try to answer the question seriously, why isn't there a bunch of fallout class anger at the Democrats?
Well, the Democrats already have succeeded in portraying themselves as for the little guy.
The Democrats, in truth, are 99% of the problem.
The Democrats are the ones that have created the vast majority of these messes.
They are responsible for the cultural rut.
But the Republicans get blamed because they're not doing anything to stop them.
This really, when you think of it, no matter what angle you want to come at it from, there is a logical answer to it.
As far as the Democrats are concerned, their voters think they're great.
They're Santa Claus.
They're socialists.
They're advancing the liberal cause.
Everything's fine and dandy.
The Republican Party doesn't stand for anything.
Conservatives have no home.
The Republican Party is not a home for conservatism anymore.
The Democrat Party is the home of liberalism, progressivism, socialism, whatever you want to call it.
But the Republican Party is just taking up space.
All of this is understandable to me.
Then you add Trump.
See, people assume incorrectly that most of Trump's supporters are angry conservatives.
And the reason for that is that Trump's running against government, it sounds like, and he's running on the Republican ticket.
So for people who are only marginally understanding of conservatism versus liberalism, Trump would be looked at and seen as conservative.
But Trump's support base covers every demographic you can think of.
He's got support from all ages, and he's winning.
You look at the exit polls and entrance polls of all these elections.
He's winning every group.
He's winning every age group.
He's winning religions.
Well, he's getting his share of religious voters.
He's evangelicals, as you know, men, women, middle-age, old age, young age, doesn't matter.
But his coalition, and I'm blue in the face of this, is exactly what the Republican Party's always said they want to be.
That's exactly what has happened here with Trump's base.
So to the extent that conservatives have joined Trump, it's because they don't think the GOP is a home.
The GOP is not interested in them.
The GOP makes fun of them.
The Democrats don't make fun of their voters.
Democrats make fun of Republican voters.
The Democrats make fun of the rich.
The Democrats make fun of the upper class.
Publicly, anyway.
The Democrats are the biggest defenders of all of these problems.
But they have succeeded in convincing people they stand for the little guy.
Now, let me get started with some of this stuff.
This is Angelo Codeville, who wrote the original piece in the American Spectator on the ruling class that we highlighted here because it was just, it was tremendous.
He had a piece at the Federalist yesterday.
Here's some excerpts.
America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of people that occupies the commanding heights of bureaucracy, the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democrat Party.
Again, America is now ruled by a uniformly educated, meaning the education is the same.
They're trained to come out of school to assume all of these positions that they're in.
Uniformly educated class of people that occupies commanding heights of bureaucracy, judiciary, education, the media, large corporations, and they wield their power through the Democrat Party.
Its control of access to prestige, to power, to privilege and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party's elites into its satellites.
Now, we're talking about the Washington, New York, Boston corridor here, the Northeast power corridor.
And his point here is that if you want prestige, if you want power, you want to have perks, privilege, you want to be in line to get rich, then you do what the Democrat power structure says.
And to the extent that there are Republican elites, they've been converted into satellites, and they get, depending on their behavior, they're given access to some of this stuff.
Mr. Codeville continues, the fatal feature of this uniformly educated ruling class is its belief that ordinary Americans are a lesser intellectual and social breed.
Its increasing self-absorption, its growing contempt for whoever will not bow to them, its dependence for votes on sectors of society whose grievances it stokes.
Codeville is such a brilliant writer.
What that means is the Democrat Party has succeeded in creating dependence among groups of people whose grievances it stokes.
They've created this grievance culture.
They give them the reason to keep grieving and getting ticked off, claiming they're going to be the solution to it, which they never are.
All of this has led this ruling class to break the most basic rule of Republican life, and that is deeming its opposition illegitimate.
Deeming its opposition illegitimate, which is what's happened to the conservative/slash Republican political wing in this country.
The left has succeeded in delegitimizing it.
Without that, there cannot be a republic.
We're going to end up with authoritarian, tyrannical dictatorship or something along those lines when the opposition has been deemed illegitimate.
And yet it's the Democrats that run around talking about cooperation and a level playing field and bipartisanship and working together when they have ended any possibility of any of that.
They have delegitimized the opposition.
And the opposition has sat back and let it happen.
The ruling class insists on driving down the throats of its opponents, the agendas of each of its constituencies, and on injuring people who get in the way.
This has spawned a Newtonian, i.e.
gravitational reaction, a hunger among what may be called the country class for returning the favor.
In other words, all of this has created in average ordinary middle-class America a desire to pay these people back for what they've done.
Ordinary Americans have endured being insulted by the ruling class's favorite epithets, racist, sexist, and above all, stupid.
They've had careers and reputations compromised by just saying the wrong word in front of the wrong person.
They have endured dictates from the highest courts in the land that no means yes, that public means private, that everybody's entitled to make up one's meaning of life, and that whoever thinks marriage is exclusively between men and women is a bigot.
He's citing Supreme Court decisions here that violate all tenets of common sense.
Trying to stop the cycle of political payback with another round of it, that's Trumpism.
Codeville is not a Trumpist.
Trying to stop the cycle of political payback with another round of it, while not utterly impossible, is well-nigh beyond human capacity.
No wonder then that millions of Americans lose respect for a ruling class that disrespects them, that they identify with whomever promises some kind of turnabout against that class, and that they care less and less for the integrity of institutions that fail to protect them.
But not only do opposing sets of wrongs not make anything right, as I have argued before, trying to stop the cycle of political payback with another round of it, while not utterly impossible, is beyond most human capacity.
Neither Obama nor Trump seem to know or care that cycles of reciprocal resentment, of insults and injuries paid back with ever more interest and ever less concern for consequences, are the natural fuel of revolutions, easy to start and soon impossible to stop.
He's including Obama here.
Obama's done exactly what Trump's doing.
Everything Obama's doing is based on resentment.
His group of people resent the way the country was founded, resent the way the country grew, resent what the country became, resent how the country became structured, resented this, resented that.
Obama's sole mission has been to pay everybody back, and he's doing it.
And Codeville is right about that.
I don't even need to read it from Code Villa to understand it and agree with it.
It's exactly what Obama's all about.
Giant chip on his shoulder.
We've been at countless times.
Codeville's point is that Trump comes along and is encouraging similar payback.
I mean, he said it's totally understandable people want to do it, but it never works.
It doesn't lead to reinstitutionalizing the greatness of the country.
It just leads to more anger, disappointment, and he thinks, eventual revolution.
America's founders, steeped in history, as few of our contemporaries are, were very aware of how easily factional enmities deliver free people into the hands of emperors.
America is already advanced in this vicious cycle.
The only possible chance of returning it to republicanism lies in not taking the next turn and in not following one imperial ruler with another.
So that's the excerpts from Codeville's piece in the Federalist, in which he does two things.
He makes the case for total understanding of the anger and frustration that exists and then suggests that following somebody like Obama with something similar but from a different angle is not a solution.
Now, many people disagree with that, but that's Codeville.
Now, here's Charles Murray, and his piece Trump's America, why the white working class is justifiably angry.
Now, this is a much longer piece, but I will excerpt enough of it to give you the flavor.
It's in the Wall Street Journal on February 12th.
That means it's behind a paywall.
We'll still link to it at rushlinbaugh.
Maybe it's gone freeside by now.
We'll find out.
If you are dismayed by Trumpism, don't kid yourself that it will fade away if Donald Trump fails to win the Republican nomination.
Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger many Americans feel about the course their country has taken, and its appearance was predictable.
It is the endgame of a process that's been going on for 50 years.
That is America's divestment of its historic national identity.
The eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote in a book, his last book, 2004, Who Are We?
Two components of that national identity stand out.
One is our Anglo-Protestant heritage, which has inevitably faded in an America that is now home to many cultural and religious traditions.
The other component is the very idea of America, something unique to us, unique to us.
As the historian Richard Hofstadtler once said, it has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to rather be one.
Americanism is an ideology.
So what does this Americanism, this creed, consist of?
Its three core values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty, and individualism.
From these three flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have long identified.
Equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free market economics, decentralized and devolved political authority.
But that creed has lost its authority.
It's lost its substance.
What happened?
Well, many of the dynamics of the reversal can be found in development across the whole of American society in the emergence of a new upper class and the emergence of a new lower class and in the plight of the working class caught in between.
The new upper class consists of the people who shape the country's economy, politics, and culture.
The new lower class consists of people who've dropped out of some of the most basic institutions of American civic culture, work and marriage.
Both of these new classes have repudiated the American creed in practice, whatever lip service they may still pay to it.
Trumpism is the voice of a beleaguered working class telling us that it is falling away.
Successful Americans stubbornly refused to accept the mantle in the old days.
Even Marx and Engels commented on this, and so did Tocqueville.
Successful Americans refused to accept the mantle of an upper class, typically presenting themselves to their fellow countrymen as regular guys.
Can I illustrate this, show you what he means by this?
Now, I grew up in a small town, 25,000, 30,000 people.
And even in that small town, there were classes.
There was the rich.
There was the rich industrialist in town that owned the concrete company that paved all the highways and so forth.
And then there was this guy and that guy.
But they didn't hold themselves out as separate and apart from the rest of the town.
And they didn't laud it over the rest of the.
They went to the places everybody in town went to eat.
They went to the same churches.
They were just, they were part and parcel of the community.
And everybody knew they were the rich guys in town.
But nobody hated them for it.
They didn't laud it over anybody.
And they did not seek to separate themselves from the rest of the town.
Oh, yeah.
Commercial time.
Sorry, folks.
Don't go away.
Be right back.
Okay, just one more excerpt from Murray here, explaining the differences in the upper class today versus long ago and not that far ago in America, particularly white working class versus current upper classes.
Another characteristic of the new upper class and something new under the American sun is their easy acceptance of being members of an upper class and their condescension toward ordinary Americans.
It used to not be the case, not nearly as badly as it is today.
Try using redneck in a conversation with your highly educated friends and see if it triggers any of the nervousness that accompanies other ethnic slurs.
Refer to flyover country and consider the implications when no one asks what does that mean.
Or I can send you to chat with a friend in Washington who bought a weekend place in West Virginia.
He will tell you about the contempt for his new neighbors that he has encountered in the elite precincts of the nation's capital.
I told you this story earlier about how he told his buddies he was going to buy a house in West Virginia and say, why are you going to go to live next to people with no teeth that play the banjo on the front porch?
And they were serious.
Why are you doing this?
Why are you going to live among the shrubs?
And Murray's point is that these people in the white working class know exactly all of this.
They know they're being condescended to.
They know they're being laughed at.
They know they're looked down on.
They know they're being made fun of.
And yet they think of themselves as the backbone of the country.
They're the ones that join the military.
They're the ones that lose family members in war.
They're the ones that are making the country work.
They are the backbone.
They're being laughed at, mocked, made fun of, and they're tired of it.
And they're tired of being blamed for all the problems by the media, and it's that simple.
Now, the Charles Murray piece delves into much deeper detail.
Such as this work and marriage have been central to American civic culture since the founding, and this held true for the white working class into the 60s.
Almost all of the adult men were working or looking for work, and almost all of them were married.
But then things started to change.
For white working-class men in their 30s and 40s, the prime decades for working and raising a family, participation in the labor force dropped from 96% to 76% in 2015.
Over that same period of time, the portion of these men who were married dropped from 86% to 52%.
It may not sound big, but they're stunning changes, manifested themselves throughout communities and neighborhoods.
Half the children were born to unmarried women.
All the problems that go with growing up without fathers, especially for boys, drugs have become a major problem in small towns.
Anyway, he goes on to detail how all of these demographic and cultural shifts have led to the destruction of the families of the working middle class that is the backbone of the country.
And he affixes blame to this, to the social architects and engineers in Washington, primarily liberal Democrats, who've brought about this destruction and then taken sides with the feminists and the other minorities in these arrangements.
They've taken the side of everybody but the white male, essentially.
And so the anger out there, in his estimation, is justified.
And it's deeper than Trump, and it'll survive Trump.
It's going to exist long after this election is over.
Anyway, it's a fascinating read, and it's got to be included in part of the mix to anybody trying to explain what seems to be the inexplicable here, although it isn't to me.
Okay, cruising back to the phones here.
Debbie in Alexandria, Virginia.
It's great to have you.
I really appreciate your patience and hi.
Hi, Rush.
Dittos from the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Thank you.
And I just want you to know I graduated from the Institute of Conservative Studies long before Patrick, who was in your first hour.
And Snerdley was so funny because he said he's never taken a call from a John Kasich supporter yet, so I feel duly special.
You are a John Kasich supporter.
Yeah, and I just wanted to tell you in our offices in Alexandria, Virginia, I've done thousands of phone calls.
We've put out thousands of yard signs.
And I would say 60% of the calls we take say John Kasich is the most qualified candidate, but can he beat Clinton?
And if you think I'm kidding, I'm not.
Now, wait, wait, wait.
Hold it.
Hold it.
Debbie, I can't understand what you're saying because it sounds like the wind is blowing through your phone.
Are you saying are you taking calls or answering calls or making calls?
We're making, we make calls to people.
And when you call them, you're...
And what they say on...
Are you...
When you call them, are you supporting...
This is awesome.
But can he beat Clinton?
Okay, but wait, before we...
They're not big Trump supporters.
Debbie, wait.
Wait, are you calling people to push Kasich or are you calling just to ask them generically who they're for?
What we ask them is, are you going to vote on Super Tuesday in the primary?
And if so, have you decided who you're going to vote for?
But are you working a Kasich phone bank?
Yes.
Okay, that's I need to.
At his headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.
Right, understand that.
So you're pushing Kasich and you're getting a lot of support for him because people think he can beat Hillary.
No, what they say is 50% of them say, can John beat Clinton?
That's why we're voting for Trump.
We think only Trump can bury Hillary Trump.
Oh, so you've got a lot of Kasich supporters.
We've got some Kasich supporters, but the ones that really love him and think he's the most qualified aren't supporting him because they don't think he can beat Clinton.
Yeah, so it's the old electability question.
You know, this, Debbie, thinks, this is so stop and think of that.
It's a Kasich phone bank.
They're calling, encouraging people to vote Kasich.
Find Kasich supporters, but they don't think he can beat anybody.
They think he's the best, but so they're siding with Trump because they think Trump's the only one that can beat Hillary.
Now, if you go to the polling data that the establishment puts out, Hillary creams Trump.
That's what they want you to believe.
They want you to believe that Hillary creams everybody except Rubio.
But this electoral season is so unlike anything that I can recall.
I mean, this is way, way beyond Perot.
And again, the big difference is that Trump wants to win this.
Perot never did.
He had an entirely different agenda.
And I'm not criticizing Perot with this.
I'm just telling you what he had a he didn't want to win it.
He didn't want to be president.
Not that he wouldn't have been a good one, but all of this conventional wisdom is based on so many flawed foundations.
Like an outsider can't win anything.
Like they say, Trump has no prayer.
You know, I wouldn't be surprised if whoever the Republican nominee is beats Hillary Clinton in a landslide.
I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if that happens.
Now, the circumstances today are not going to be what they are in November.
But folks, there's no excitement on the Democrat side.
Their turnout is even you've got the forehead and Don of Brazil openly admitting they're losing sleep over this on CNN.
You've got other Democrat operatives and strategists.
Now, I know you think, Rush, they're just saying that.
They're just setting you up.
They're setting us all up.
They're trying to make us relax so that we think we got a landslide awaiting us.
They do it every election.
I understand all that.
But I can look at the turnout numbers.
Nobody's showing up to vote in these turnouts in these Democrat primaries.
And nobody's showing up.
I mean, the total numbers, even Sophal, all this so-called energy for Bernie, it's not there in the raw numbers.
The Democrat turnout in South Carolina was barely half what it was in 2008.
And we've got a potential historic first year, first female president, just like Obama, the first African-American president.
But back in 2008, there was a Republican villain by the name of George W. Bush and a subsidiary villain called Iraq.
And then a third subsidiary villain called the financial crisis, the bailouts.
This year, they're all in power.
Democrats are in power, and everything's, it's worse than it was in 2008.
And they still blame Bush for it, by the way.
Then you have this story here in Massachusetts and the Boston Herald.
Nearly 20,000 Massachusetts Democrats have fled the party this winter, doing so to join the Republican Party.
This, according to Boston's or Massachusetts top elections official, the Secretary of State William Galvin said that more than 16,300 Democrats have fled the Democrat Party and become independents.
3,500 more became Republicans so they can vote in the Super Tuesday presidential primary today.
And there's no operation chaos going on per se.
I mean, there's no reason.
Why would these people leave the Democrats and move over in Massachusetts to want to vote Republican?
What do you think is driving that?
You think there's a massive operation chaos going on that they have?
You think this is a trick?
This is not organized.
These people were blindsided by this.
The Democrats in Massachusetts are blindsided that this happened.
Absolutely.
So I'd throw out every bit of conventional wisdom that there is and make up your own mind on this.
Because I'm telling you, we're in new territory.
Nobody knows what's going to happen here.
We still don't have any idea.
It's impossible.
It's the future, obviously.
Look, I have to take a quick timeout, folks.
Hang on.
We've got more right when we get back.
Here's Clem in Mac Allen, Texas.
Clem, I really appreciate your waiting.
Thank you.
Appreciate you being donating your life to the radio so we can get on and tell what we feel.
Thank you very much, sir.
Appreciate that.
Yeah, well, I love the Bush family, especially Barbara, and I think G.W. was the best governor Texas has had in a long time.
And I think he was one of the best presidents.
But it last seven or eight years has been terrible.
I think a couple of things need to be pointed out about the Republican that's running.
Well, who are you for now, Clem?
If you like the Bushes, who are you for now?
Donald Trump.
I think he's the only hope this country's got.
Wait a second.
Are you voting?
You're from Texas and you're not for Cruz?
No, I'm not for Cruz, and you shouldn't be either.
Oh, come on.
I wouldn't vote for Cruz or ex-Governor Perry for Dog Catcher.
And I voted for him before.
What in the world?
What?
What do you not like about Cruz?
Ever since his dirty tricks and lies out of Iowa and all the way up, and he's still telling them every day.
What dirty tricks and lies?
I can't believe you asked me.
He told lies on Ben Carson to steal some of his votes.
Delegates.
Oh, my God.
You know, a lie is a lie.
When you catch one in a lie, he's no good the rest of the way.
Finished with him.
Never vote for him again.
Voted for him before.
Never again.
Clem, he didn't steal any Ben Carson votes.
He didn't lie about any events.
Marco Rubio did the same thing.
Rubio did the exact whole thing is traceable to a CNN news.
I ain't going to vote for him for nothing either, because I don't live in Florida.
What did he lie about?
Forget Ben Carson.
What's he lying about?
Cruz.
Cruz?
Yeah, what's he lying about?
What's he told on Trump?
What do you mean, what's he told on Trump?
You mean things he said about Trump?
Yeah, anything he said about Trump.
Everything he said.
Borderlines on lies or induce dirty tricks that don't mean anything.
This is Donald Trump language.
This is Donald Trump language.
It's Donald Trump that's calling him a liar and a vote stealer and all that.
Yeah, he is.
He's not.
He's not.
He's one of the most honorable guys in politics.
Ted Cruz is not a liar.
I'm going to vote for him again.
I voted for him last time, but he's not going to fool me anymore.
He's a liar.
One lie, and I'm finished with anybody.
And he is a liar.
Clem, Clem, you're just echoing what Trump is saying here.
He's not a nasty guy.
He's one of the most honorable people in politics that so far has not been corrupted by it.
That Ben Carson thing, that's so everybody's acting like babies in that Ben Carson thing.
That's Chump change what happened there, and it's directly traceable to a CNN news story in the first place.
I'm out of time here, but this Clem, he didn't steal no votes, my man.
Ben Carson didn't lose any votes.
This is one of the biggest slabs of BS in this entire campaign.
See, that whole thing.
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