BRETT: Rush had a way of explaining things that made it easy to understand. He also had a way of making us think, which is why we’re gonna revisit some of those thoughtful think pieces with our Monday Musings segment. We’ll kick it off with Rush explaining how Washington works and why the battle to preserve conservatism never ends.
RUSH: Way back in the late fifties, early sixties (I forget the exact date), William F. Buckley Jr. started National Review. He wrote then of his conservative buddies who were the purebreds, the thoroughbreds, versus the (as he called them) “well-fed Republicans.”
We call ’em the Republican establishment. “Well-fed” is exactly right. He talked about how the well-fed Republicans referred to Buckley and the gang at National Review as extremists and they were dangerous and they were gonna destroy the party. I think this may be a shock to some of you to think that this battle in the Republican Party establishment versus conservative has been going on this long. It has been, and it really is not just the Republican Party.
It is the Washington establishment. I think that word’s getting overdone, overused, including by me. But Washington is its own fiefdom, and for the longest time has existed as odds with the American people, other than at election time. At election time everybody in Washington goes out and makes the people think that they’re number one and what they want is what’s gonna happen. “Vote for me, and that’s what’s gonna happen! Vote for me and that’s what you’re gonna get! Vote for me, and what I’m gonna campaign on, I’m gonna implement! I’m gonna govern this way,” and it never happens.
You get to Washington, the culture takes over, the establishment takes over — and for the longest time it’s been the Washington establishment versus people. It’s a natural outgrowth of power. Inside the Beltway is the seat of power. It’s where all the money is, and there’s all kinds of hands trying to grab the money — and it’s a lot of money. It’s trillions.
It’s trillions, produced by you. It’s trillions of dollars produced by you every year that these people are trying to get their hands on. Many of them don’t work. They run think tanks, they run nonprofits, whatever. They have grants. Everybody’s trying to get their hands on the money, and people outside the Beltway resent that. We send the money to Washington for efficient use in running the government.
“Don’t waste it. Don’t make people dependent. Don’t create a bunch of serfs,” and the exact opposite has happened. So those inside the Beltway miss a lot that they don’t have any idea they miss it. One of the things that we learned out here in flyover country, and actually something we already knew, is that one guy with some supporters, one guy standing up can change everything.
We learned that one guy standing up can stop the status quo in its tracks. We see how one guy — unflappable, courageous — standing up against that machine can in fact stop it. We also learned it’s gonna take more than one. We can’t do it all with one. That’s why I say, “Imagine if there were five or ten of ’em. Imagine 45 of ’em,” and that, of course, is the objective outside the Beltway.
That’s the objective with attempt people who are not giving up and not going to away and not slinking away and cowering in the corner. They’re not. They’re energized. People involved in this know that you never win forever, and you don’t lose forever, either. It’s just that some people get depressed that they have to continue to fight every day.
I understand that. It’s easy to slip away. I always said, after eight years of Reagan, “Why in the world do the American people not realize it works?” I mean, it was a booming economy, people were going back to work, the country was no doubt the world’s lone superpower, brought down the Soviet Union. How in the world did people forget that and start voting Democrat again? The answer is very simple.
The minute Reagan was gone — actually while he was there, but the minute he was gone — even the Republican Party started revising the history of the eighties, and it became a depression, a recession, a decade of greed, decade of selfishness, racism, bigotry! “Reagan hated, gay people; that’s why they got AIDS!” I mean, it was a full-court press, because the left cannot permit the people to see on their own how liberalism fails.
They must not allow that. When liberalism is defeated, whoever engineers that defeat (i.e., whoever wins) must be destroyed. That’s why it’s an ongoing battle. It never ends. You never win it forever. Now, you can win it for a long time, as the Democrats have shown, something that we haven’t perfected.
BRETT: Just think about where Chuck Schumer was four months ago, when he was out there running around yelling and screaming that first we’re gonna do it to Georgia and then we’re gonna do it to the rest of the country. I mean, he said that. He said, “First we do it to Georgia and then we do it to the rest of the country.” He got Ossoff and Warnock in there as senators.
Think back just, I don’t know, four weeks ago to that bizarre news conference with Jerry Nadler and the Democrats standing there telling you that they were coming to back the court. They had the power. “We’re gonna pack the court! We’re gonna adopt new states! We’re gonna bring new states into the union! We’re gonna do all of this!”
They can’t control the border. They can’t fix a pipeline. They can’t do anything but set up these universal basic income programs. They don’t have results to show for it. So this line of control is gonna be very short-lived, because they’ve promised all this stuff to the kooks and people are looking at this going, “This is not what we signed up for,” not the kook voters, but the regular voters, Republican and Democrat.