RUSH: This is Leanne in Olney, Illinois, you’re first on Open Line Friday. Great to have you, hi.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush, longtime listener, first-time caller.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I just wanted to say, to your point with the convention speech, he also talked about how the pundits like to slice and dice our country up and separate us into red or blue, and so he was the purple America. He was bringing the purple message and we were all gonna unite. But it just doesn’t happen, so people need to stop listening to what he says and start looking at what he does, because that will paint the true picture.
RUSH: I’m beginning to think that some of the low-information people have actually tuned him out. That doesn’t mean they’ve tuned in somewhere else, they’ve just tuned out. They’re fed up with him, fed up with government, fed up with America. That’s what worries me. And so what he does is, in many cases, largely going unnoticed now. I think it’s one of the reasons his approval numbers are down. But despite that, I’ll never forget. I mean, you’re right, that’s exactly what he said. That’s where this whole notion that he could unify everybody really began, was that speech at the Democrat convention in 2004.
And people did respond to it then. But anybody that knows that’s paying constant attention — well, not even constant. We’ve never stopped arguing since before the country was founded. There’s never gonna be a day where there’s total unity. And so the desire for that’s almost a desire for utopia. Desire for, “Stop the arguing and bipartisan, can’t we all get along?” to me is just an illustration of how much ignorance there is in the general population about the real nature of politics.
People look at politics as solving problems, and that’s not what solves problems. Victory in politics solves problems. Politics does not involve fixing things by sitting down and agreeing and compromising on a mutually agreed purpose because that common ground is more and more unattainable because it doesn’t exist.
There is — and this is a striking truth — but there is less and less the warring factions, political factions in this country, have in common. I would say to anybody that thinks politics is about solving problems, “No, no, no, no.” Politics is how we try to manage our affairs, but victory in politics is how you solve problems. Not compromise in politics. Politics by itself doesn’t solve anything. Victory in politics is what fixes things.
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RUSH: Here, try this, folks. This is guaranteed to tick off the low-information voters and probably some on the left. But I would go so far as to say, in addition to saying that politics is not how we solve our problems, victory in politics is how we solve them. I would go further. Our problem is not that there is too much conflict in Washington. Our problem is there isn’t enough.
JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!
RUSH: Now what did I mean by that? Because if you’re really sharp and on the ball you can say, “Wait a minute, Rush, you’re being a little hypocritical here.” And for those of you who remember that I have extolled the virtues of gridlock, you might have a point. However, what is gridlock? Conflict! Gridlock is when they can’t agree on anything. And what happens when that happens? The media and the Democrats go nuts. Why? Because the Republicans aren’t letting ’em have what they want. That’s what gridlock is, when the Democrats are losing.
Gridlock is not when the parties can’t get along. Gridlock is when the Democrats are unable to advance their agenda. They just call it gridlock so they can gin up public support against gridlock. What is the solution to gridlock always? The Republicans have to cave, right? Isn’t it always the case that whenever there’s gridlock, things aren’t getting done. Who’s the problem? The Republicans are the problem. Why? ‘Cause they just won’t agree. They’re just standing in the way of our poor young president who only wants the best for everybody. But the problem really is, when there is gridlock, that the Democrats’ agenda has been shut down. That’s why I love it.
When there is gridlock going on, there aren’t any new laws passed. We got plenty of laws, folks. There are already plenty of immigration laws, for example. We just need to start enforcing them again. We don’t need anymore restrictions on movement or liberty or freedom. We have plenty of that. Have you noticed the daily measure of Congress is how many laws they’re passing, how much legislation is being passed. Screw that. The measure of success is how much isn’t. We have enough. But just as politics is not how we solve our problems, victory in politics is, our system was designed for conflict. Our system of government was set up for it, knowing full well it would exist.
That’s why there are three branches with checks and balances to make sure that one can’t run roughshod and end up dictatorial. That’s exactly how it was set up. That’s the design. It was assumed that all three branches would stand up for themselves. It was assumed that all three branches would vigorously defend their power, and it was also assumed that all three branches would try to take as much power from the other branches as they could. All this was assumed. All this conflict was built in. All of this competition was built in, understood.
The Founding Fathers were not idiots. They were citizens of the world. They knew, they had studied every form of government, and they found, as any reasonable person would, that wherever in the world you find the least opposition and theoretically the most peace, you’ve got a dictatorship where the people have no power to oppose what’s happening to them. They didn’t want that.
Now, I imagine that this prototypical 25-year-old woman that we’ve heard about that’s scared to death of hearing me talk politics because I might raise my voice now and then, and they just don’t like that, can you tone it down? And also, can we just put aside our differences and find our common ground and can’t we agree? It’s human nature to want everything to be copacetic, human nature to want everybody to get along. And families, yeah, politics, a whole different thing. At work, yeah, but even there, turf wars are happening all the time. Politics is occurring in businesses everywhere as underlings plot takeovers, climb the corporate ladder, try to undermine the people above ’em. It’s the way of the world.
Victory and defeat are the way of the world. Competition’s the way of the world. You can’t weed it out of the human body. You cannot breed it out of the human mind. You can beat it and suppress it and overpower it with thugish statism and so forth, but the actual spirit, it takes a lot of effort to quash that.
So I imagine young people, Millennials, my tech blogger buddies, if they listen, driving around and hearing me say all this, they’re probably just going batty because they’ve been taking, what, conflict resolution 101, and they think the solution to everything is possible and that it can be peaceful and that it can result in compromise if somebody just comes up with a brilliant point. It’s all it takes.
If somebody will just find that one brilliant point that will dazzle everybody so that they agree, but that’s naivete. That’s not how it works. Maybe now and then, if you’re dealing with a super intellect who has the ability to dazzle with charisma and other things, but for the most part things happen in the world because there are winners and losers. And in that sense, who happen to be the enemy right now in this country? The winners.
The winners are stigmatized. The winners are treated as suspects. The winners are treated as cheaters. There’s nothing legitimate about winning, in the view of the left. And because there are winners, there are losers, and that is what troubles them. There shouldn’t be any losers. Everybody should be a winner. Not possible.
So the left is made up of people with their head in the sand. They are idealist, utopians that live in a dream world of impossibility. Meanwhile, people who have their feet and their souls grounded in reality and they got their sleeves rolled up every day trying to make the country work, understand exactly what the task is every day, both personally, professionally, politically, what have you.
Now, while all these leftists are out there wringing their hands over all the winners and losers and all the unfair competition and all the arguing and all the conflict, the people that make the world go round are out winning, or trying to. And for the most part the losers are trying to win, too. Because people do both, you see. Winners lose all the time. Losers win some of the time, too. It’s an ongoing process.
But our system was set up for conflict in mind. It was designed for conflict and disagreement. It’s why there’s a press. It’s why there’s a freedom of the press clause in the First Amendment, supposed to be a referee of sorts — maybe not referee, they’re supposed to be an agency that keeps everybody else honest by seeking out culprits who exceed the bounds of propriety and law in the quest for their power. That’s what the press’ original charge was in the eyes of the Founders.
You’ve heard it expressed as “speaking truth to power.” What it means is basically ferreting out corruption. Unfortunately, the press has become corrupt and instead of ferreting out corruption, the press has decided to throw in with the Democrat Party and do whatever it takes to advance that agenda. And so therefore there is no referee or there is no fourth estate that’s looking for corruption. There is only a bunch of frauds and pretenders, Democrat Party activists and hacks who are described as journalists.
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RUSH: But the overall point here, and I frankly, I must be honest, I love envisioning — you know, empathy is a key element to success for any broadcaster, the empathy being my ability or the broadcaster’s ability to be in the audience hearing the program as the audience does while hosting it. That’s empathy. And I love to envision these 24, 25-year-old sorority type women who think they’re really hot stuff but hate politics, it’s just, “Ooh, these conservatives are so loud. I just don’t want to hear it. I just don’t want to hear it!”
When I say that politics is not a solution, that victory in politics is, and when I say that a problem with our system is not that there’s too much conflict, the problem is there’s too little, I love envisioning their reaction the moment they hear that. And not just them, but Millennials, the leftists, whoever. But I really believe it, folks, it’s the way the country was founded. There are winners and losers every day. The winners lose all the time. They win a lot as well. Losers sometimes win. People exist in many different groups. Nobody is usually poor all their life. Many people, most people are not wealthy all of their lives, other than the inheritors, and even they sometimes aren’t ’cause they blow it all.
Life is a constantly moving, giant blob. People are in and out of various groups all the time. Success, failure, winning, losing, arguing, agreeing, disagreeing, pacifying, it’s a giant cauldron out there, and it was designed with this conflict in mind. And in any compromise, if you still believe that compromise is the order of the day, in any compromise, there is a loser. I think that’s what people either are mistakenly, erroneously taught or just instinctively believe is incorrect, that when there’s compromise, everybody wins. And it’s not the case.
Compromise is just a different kind of warfare, with a different definition of winning and losing. But it’s all about winning and losing. And it’s all about if you lose you keep fighting ’til you win. Nothing’s permanent. It’s why the battle’s never over. But this mythical idea that got Obama elected, that there’s some magical day out there where we’re all gonna agree and all this partisanship’s gonna end, fat chance, ain’t gonna happen, until there aren’t any of us left.