Conservatism Is Kindness

RUSH: Kevin in Fresno, I’m glad you waited, sir. I appreciate your patience.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Mega dittos.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I’ve been listening for a long time, and I’m calling about something that I believe pervades a lot of the things that you talked about here. I was reading a book by C. S. Lewis awhile back, and he said that the main corporate sin in the Western world today is the belief that kindness is the only form of love or virtue. And it really explains this whole dogfight thing. The reason that the dogfight is so much worse in their opinions than the killing of a human being, is not because the human being was killed or because it was dogs that were killed. It’s because he took so much pleasure in the killing. Cruelty is the opposite of kindness, so, you know, that’s the reason that that would be the ultimate horrific thing for them to do.

RUSH: So the way you’re interpreting C. S. Lewis here is that you can understand why people are more upset over the dogs biting the dust than, say, other examples in Atlanta?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Because kindness is the only virtue? That’s the corporate sin?

CALLER: Exactly. If you think about it, if you ask a lot of people — maybe even you, I’m not sure; conservatives tend to be a little less succumbing to this than liberals. But if you ask them, ‘What is the definition of a loving person,’ they will almost always come back to you with something with kindness, and this has to do with the immigration bill and with the Senate.

RUSH: Oh, yeah. We’ve gotta be nice. It would be nice. We have to be nice.

CALLER: Yeah, exactly, and that’s not always the most loving thing to do, and I think that your solutions or your propositions for the abortions, for the immigration reform and for this dogfight are much more loving than the ‘kindness’ that the liberals worship.

RUSH: You know what, that’s absolutely right on the money. One of the things I’ve always said is that conservatives define compassion by counting the number of people who no longer need the subsistence level support they get from liberals. I’ve always said that conservatism is the ultimate form of compassionate because it features love, expectations, and respect for everybody, with the knowledge that people can be far more — or far better — than even they think they can.