What Happened to the Tories?

RUSH: Fort Wayne, Indiana, this is Bruce. Welcome, sir, to the EIB Network.

CALLER: You changed my life, sir, thank you.

RUSH: Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

CALLER: After seeing Brown’s flipping and flopping, I have one question.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: What’s happened to the conservative movement in Great Britain itself?

RUSH: Oh! You’re talking about going wobbly and wimping out. They just gave up.

CALLER: I mean you had Thatcher and Marshall and now Blair which was kind of half and half, and now this guy, and I just — I mean, I understand parliamentary, but I just made no sense to me.

RUSH: Well, look. Defeat happens every time you try when you target it, when you give up your principles, when you become afraid, when you start working deals with the left, in this case the Labor Party, when you start working deals for compromise. They got shellacked so bad during Tony Blair’s first election they had no choice; that brought defections. It’s almost like what happened to the Democrats in 1994 when the Republicans won the House. They were so dispirited that they started defecting, quitting, leaving, and this sort of thing. But you can find a parallel here. How many Republican presidential candidates today who want the office are out there citing Reaganism? You can talk about the Tories who gave up on Margaret Thatcher. I’m telling you, liberalism is easy. Conservatism is tough. Conservatism takes a spine. Conservatism requires a tough skin. Liberalism is the most gutless choice you can make. All you gotta do is walk around and see some suffering and say, ‘Oh, boo-hoo-hoo! Suffering, that is so terrible. We gotta do something about that,’ and you feel better already because you’ve seen it; you’ve commented on it, and you’ve told yourself you’re a good person, because you’ve seen suffering and you don’t accept it.

You don’t solve it. You don’t do diddly-squat to solve it, and as a liberal, when you try to solve it, you only make it worse. But we’re not supposed to examine those results. We’re only supposed to examine the good intentions and the big-heartedness of liberals. Conservatism sees some suffering and says, ‘We’ve gotta stop that. We gotta fix it and the last thing we’re going to do is make this person a victim.’ They’re going to teach this person how to extricate him or herself from these circumstances, and we measure compassion by counting the number of people who no longer are suffering because they’ve been able to help themselves. It’s not cynical but a typical liberal reaction is, ‘Oh, easy for you to say! Easy for you to say.’ Liberals want people helpless. They want to see them as victims. They want to see them as incompetent. Conservatives want the best for everybody — and they have high expectations of all things being equal, people, some obvious people that have problems that they need help with, and we are the first to be there, and I think what happened to the Tories is it’s sort of like conservatives in Washington. You get constantly tarred and feathered as mean-spirited, racists, sexist, bigot, homophobe, and you say, ‘I gotta change my image here.’ There are a couple more intricate reasons than that that are policy related, too, but that pretty much sums it up.