Political Ideology Is a Circle

RUSH: This Washington Post editorial, the utter ugliness of Trump's campaign with examples cited, and that woman in Trump's audience who called Cruz a kitty cat and then Trump repeated it and so forth, the Washington Post is outraged.

By the way, some people didn't know what I meant when I said "undefeated" the other day. Stop and think about it. Just... (laughing) At any rate, the editorial making this big deal about Trump's campaign being so ugly it should scare us all. In the same editorial, the Washington Post says that Bernie Sanders "means well." Now, can we be a little honest here? Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Bernie Sanders honeymooned in Cuba. Bernie Sanders' ideology is communism. Forget this "socialism" business.

Bernie Sanders' ideology is communism. Bernie Sanders' ideology, communism, is responsible for at least a hundred million deaths around the world. By the time you finish with what they did in Russia and the Soviet Union, Ukraine and you name it -- and couple that with Mao Tse-tung. Wherever you have found communism imposed on a people, one of two things is true. They have to build walls to keep people in. They murder dissidents. It is a fact of life of communism. Look at Cuba. And this is Bernie Sanders ideology.

And they try to tell us that Trump represents utter ugliness. By the way, you Bernie people, can I tell you something? You are in the process of being shafted. All these young Millennials and idealists who have bought into the silly notion that social is utopia, and we cut them some slack because this is what they've been taught us. By the way, a brief interruption of myself. There is a story. A friend of mine sent me a story today about somebody who's come up with a brilliant new way to diagram the various ideologies.

I looked at that and I said, "Well, I did this years ago. I explained this years ago." And whoever came up with this theory says that it is incorrect to look at ideology on a straight line. Most people look at ideology the following way. In the center you've got... Well, the way that people do it today, in the center of that ideological line you had the Drive-Bys who put the Democrat in the center, okay, and then anything to the right of that -- be it the Republican Party, conservatism, you name it -- is considered to be far right-wing fringe.

How many times have you heard people claim Hitler was an extreme right-winger? How many times have you heard Jewish people say they don't like conservatives 'cause Hitler was one? That's when I formed my theory, by the way, to blow this to smithereens. And then on the left they go ahead and put some of their fringe ideologies. They put communism out there. But the point is, they put themselves right in the middle. But I long ago made the point to a caller... The first time was in either the late eighties or the early nineties.

It was a caller calling to ask me in the early days of the program what I thought of the often repeated thought that Nazism and Hitler were conservatives, and this is why Jewish people don't vote Republican. I said, "Nothing could be further from the truth! In the first place, I said, you cannot diagram the ideological existence in a straight line. You have to do it as a circle." I remember the caller reacting like a giant lightbulb had been turned on. And I said, "At some point in these circles, everybody meets.

"And at the top of the circle is where the fringe of everything is. It's not a straight line. They meet. The fringe of the right, the fringe of the left meet," and I said in this story, "Nazism is an extreme, left-wing ideology. It's National Socialism. Take a look at the parts of Nazism that people don't study much because of the Holocaust. They focus on that, but if you look at Hitler's desire for national health care? Hitler did everything he could to expand his government, bring everybody under its grasp and control."

National Socialism! That's what the Nazi party is, and it's always been a left-wing movement. And I went through this notion, belief that you have to express this on a circle. You can't have this straight line with the right over here, the left over here, and wherever you want to put the various elements in between, because it's a circle. They meet at some point. This story came out making this very point and a friend of mine said, "Boy, this is brilliant!" And, of course, you know me, I said, "Of course it is. It's my creation. Whoever's doing this stole it."

So I then began an immediate search of RushLimbaugh.com and found the most recent iteration of my discussion back in 2008. And then Cookie went and grabbed the audio sound bite of it. And since I'm mentioning it, let's go ahead and grab that sound bite. It's the very last one, number 22. Here is the actual explanation. There was a caller named Scott asking me about the differences between political ideologies and how somebody like Hitler could be labeled "conservative," and this is what I told him...

RUSH: It's like the Soviet hardliners back during the Cold War, Scott, were also referred to as conservatives. The extremist Ahmadinejad and his mullah buddies in Iran are called conservatives. This is something that the American left, from your spot in academe, all the way down to the Drive-By Media, has continually done to try to discredit and impugn the reputation of conservatives in America. Now, the Hitler thing, I've been doing this for 20 years. Every year I've gotten a call from a college student like you every year of this program wanting to know how in the world can Hitler be a conservative?

The truth is, you know, the problem that people have here, if you look at the political spectrum, most people look at it as a straight line, and on the left you've got the Soviets and you've got the ChiComs and all the extreme communists, and in the center you have the wonderful moderates and independents, and, of course, the Democrat Party. And then, just go a little bit to the right, and you've got all the nuts in the world, and this line, Hitler ends up on the right side of the line. That's the wrong way to view the political spectrum.

You have to view the political spectrum as a circle. Because eventually these two things will meet, which is what happened to Hitler. The bottom line was, what did you end up with Hitler? You had Hitler who was deciding who was fit to live and who wasn't; you had Hitler mesmerizing people taking away their freedoms; you had Hitler using the instrument of business and government together to limit freedom of people. He started out promising them just the opposite, the best and -- just like liberals -- this guy was a classic leftist is the point, Scott.

RUSH: Right. But you would never be able to express that if you diagram this on a straight line. You would never be able to. In order to convince people, you have to demonstrate the ideological makeup as a circle. We'll explain all of this in great detail at RushLimbaugh.com later today.

RUSH: This story on the circle, by the way -- the political diagram, ideological diagram -- the point this story's trying to make is that we have now gone full circle in 50 years, from socialism and liberalism right to communism and Nazism. It's what the circle demonstrates. And the purpose of the story is to show how 50 year ago you had students opposing the military on campus at Kent State, you had the students of America opposing any authority, opposing all government, wanting nothing to do with it, protesting the Vietnam War, protesting the banks, protesting everything.

Today, 50 years later, the students want to get in bed with all of that. They want to get in bed and be taken care of by government. There's no longer any suspicion. There's no longer any doubt. There's no longer any distrust. There is a flip in 50 years. This is the track record of success that liberal education has had, and my contention all along that even going back 50 years to the sixties and the campus radicals... You know, Midge Decter -- a great conservative intellectual thinker, the wife of Norman Podhoretz -- once said that those people are obedient.

That's the last thing I would have thought of them. So when I had a chance to ask her what she meant, I said, "Obedient? They're out there burning down everything they could burn down. They're protesting the military." They were obedient. They were doing what they were told by their radical leaders. There was not an individual strain of thought, at a certain point. It was much more involved than that.

RUSH: Here's Brian in Mountain Pleasant, South Carolina, as we get started on the phones. Great to have you, sir. Hello.

CALLER: I appreciate you taking my call. I've listened for a long time, but I've never called in before. I have to admit I'm a little nervous.

RUSH: Well, you don't sound it. You sound like you're really composed and focused and ready to let her rip.

CALLER: Well, I guess the reason I'm calling you, I'm not sure if it's a question or a point. But I was really hoping to just try to and understand a little bit better, and your point of view would be greatly appreciated.

CALLER: I heard you say earlier... This really ties in with Bernie, socialism, young voters' apparent fascination with socialism, with freebies, and the college institutions that tend to promote this type of ideology. And I guess my question or point is: Doesn't it go beyond that or earlier than these college institutions and their influence on these young voters? Isn't it true that today with parenting and the changes we've all seen in parenting, that there's a kind of a mini-socialistic type of environment in a lot of households when you consider they've taken away competition from these kids? Bloody lips no longer exist on the playing fields. They've taken score out of the game. In many cases in schools, elementary and high school, whatnot, they've taken away the A, B, C, D, or F and substituted it with "meeting the standard" or "above standard" or whatever have you. Would you care to opine on that point?

RUSH: That's no question all that's true, and there's no question all that's been going on the last 50 years. I am 65, and I can say the last 50 years. When I was 15, 20, there was none of this. There was none of this. There weren't any "participation trophies." You only got trophies if you won. There wasn't any protection against humiliation. It was facing adversity and learning to deal with it. Even bullies were part of growing up, and it was all about learning how to deal with adversity and becoming tough. So when I say it is the last 50 years and maybe fewer -- it might be 40, but nevertheless -- it's true.

Your point is that it goes way beyond simply what's happening at university classrooms. And there's no question that's true. All the examples you gave are valid, and not only have happened, they continue to happen in even worse ways today. The self-esteem movement that was designed to make sure every child thought he was great and special, without having to have done anything to earn it. Outcome based education: 2+2=5 if you thought it was. They would humiliate people in classrooms in outcome-based education if they were wrong. Let 'em take whatever time it took.

By the same token, they eliminated the tracks in education. When I was in school, it was Track One, Two, and Three. Track One, fast learners. Track Two, average. Track Three, slow learners. They got rid of those. When I was in school, they were there. You wanted to be in Track One; you got out of everything sooner. But you had to work at it. But now they got rid of that because Track One people humiliate Track Two and Track Three people. Can't have that. So they slowed down the fast learners -- which is what liberalism does, what socialism does.

It punishes and penalizes achievement, and seeks to make everybody the same by lowering people from the top down to the level of average or even mediocre. Liberalism, socialism has never, ever sought to elevate. Despite what they say, liberalism has never sought to elevate. It's never taken people at the low end of any scale and sought to educate them, motivate them, inspire them to do better. That has always been criticized as unrealistic and unfair. Epitomized by me one time being really roasted and criticized for suggested the homelessness get a job. That was insensitive, cold-hearted, and mean-spirited, and easy for me to say; I had one.

But the recent focus on Millennials coming out of college and blindly supporting Bernie Sanders is resulting from a study that has been done that shows that socialism per se -- not disguised, not hidden in the curriculum, but socialism as an objective -- has been successfully taught. And so that young Millennial college graduates come out of school having been indoctrinated when you combine that with all the things you talked about they grew up with, and this is new. It is the completion of a circle. This was not the way the country operated, raised its young, raised our young, inspired our young, as recently as 40 years ago or 50.

I always preferred the political graph that was at the far left Anarchy and at the far right totalitarianism with an absolute democracy dead center.

The reason is that at the extreme left or right to the average person living under it on the normal right left scale there is really little difference.

Stalin and Hitler Mao and lesser extent Mussolini were much the same to the commoner under them (Mussolini at least did not commit genocide against his own but that is not much of a claim to goodness)

Economics is a triangle: Socialism, Capitalism and Corporatism, the arch-enemy of Capitalism. In third world agricultural societies Tribalism or other economic systems may be a factor. But they arent much of a factor in the developed world.

All developed societies are a mix of the 3 systems. No society is pure socialist or pure corporatist...although the US has moved rapidly away from Capitalism and toward Corporatism in our lifetime.

Obamacare is a movement of society away from Capitalism ... But n ot totally toward socialism. Medicaid expansion is socialist insurance replacing private insurers. But (so far) Obamacare has not socialized hospitals, doctors, or drug companies anymore than they already are.

Obamacare has bribed the healthcare providers to support Obamacare. $30 Billion of the bribes were called EHR.. money for doctors and hospitals to send our healthrecords to a central database where the government can track and control who gets what healthcare service.

Billions more go to Republican governors to buy them off with bribes. The Republican governors hate going to their legislature begging for money. So Obamacare gives them FEE MONEY and they don’t have to be accountable to the legislature of the voters of that state for how the money is spent.

What could go wrong?

Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under 'communism' and 'fascism'. As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of unfreedom and in- equality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany. No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
What is promised to us as the Road to Freedom is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. For it is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when democracy embarks upon a course of planning. The goal of the planning will be described by some such vague term as 'the general welfare'. There will be no real agreement as to the ends to be attained, and the effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all. - F A Hayek,
The Road to Serfdom (Reader's Digest Condensed Version)

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