Archive [December 1998]

What an honor to speak with the very wise and provocative Mr. Horowitz, who heads the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (www.cspc.org — also see www.front-pagemag.com). His latest book is The Politics of Bad Faith. Read it.

Rush: So, are you sorry you switched sides when you did, since the left is now winning everything?

Horowitz: No — because I never joined the conservative movement for that reason. I would hope they’d be on the winning side, but that was not my agenda in joining them. As a human being, I’m a much more reconciled and therefore satisfied person. I don’t get up every morning angry at the world for not conforming to my fantasies of it.

Rush: How do you do that? I think most people reading this are waking up pretty mad these days. And they’ve been waking up mad for quite a while.

Horowitz: I think there are justifiable reasons to be angry, but the left is in a way angry at life itself. They want the fantasy of their childhood fairy tales to be reality, and it is never going to be that way. They want the world not to have the problems that it normally has.

To be upset at the current state of affairs, the perfidy of the White House, the unfathomable debasement of America’s most important institution, that you can be angry at. You can also be angry at the ineptitude of our team in trying to set the course right. That’s different. Those are winnable battles. But to be a leftist is to be engaged in completely unwinnable battles — ending poverty for everyone, everywhere. Making people into things they’re not, ending the battle of the sexes, for instance, which has been going on for ten thousand years. Those are impossible dreams. Conservatism is about possible ones.

I think that your listeners and the people reading this are rightly upset, because we could be much further ahead than we are. But I think they also understand that our leaders are fallible, too, and we’re just going to pick up the pieces and move onward.

Rush: Let’s talk about picking up the pieces. I’ve read your book, Radical Son. It’s amazing the way you describe your own upbringing. You grew up in a Communist household, and thus you have more insight into the left. We’ve now got this election result, which the left is portraying as a huge victory. I think the Republican leadership needs to be counseled here a little bit. One of the problems so many people have with them is they seem to be so in the dark. They’re not able to anticipate the left’s moves — though the left telegraphs its moves constantly. What would you tell someone in the Republican or conservative movement, what the left is likely to do in the next two years with this so-called victory of theirs?

Horowitz: There are two things to keep in mind in this battle. One is the Limbaugh principle: Don’t play prevent defense. The aggressor defines the issues and normally in politics, wins the battle. You have to ask yourself why Republicans have not been aggressive. I think they don’t understand two very basic things about democratic politics. One is it’s all done with symbols. You don’t get a chance to do the kind of analysis that takes more than 30 seconds on TV, which is where you reach most of the people. We live in a democracy and we have to sway vast numbers of people who aren’t paying attention to anything — certainly nothing political.

Second, in a democracy, the underdog is always the people’s favorite. What the Democrats have done that’s quite sinister is they’ve created a system which is destructive to poor people, everybody ensnared in welfare; they’ve created a school system which denies poor children the tools with which they could get into the great economic success machine of the American economy; and they do it all the while putting themselves forward as the champion of children, women, minorities and the poor. Republicans appear to the public as businessmen and accountants. That’s always the bottom line, they appear to be concerned primarily about money. And they lose instantaneously when they do that. It makes them seem mean-spirited.

If we look at the budget battle — and I believe probably more than anything else, that budget deal and what it represented is what depressed our troops and let the Democrats win — you know going in exactly what Bill Clinton will do. We saw it first with Teddy Kennedy. The more degenerate Teddy Kennedy appeared in his own person, the more left he became, the more he became the champion of women, for example, because that would provide his cover. So going into this you know Bill Clinton was going to say, “Let’s throw a billion dollars at the children.” And you know he was going to pass that billion through the education bureaucracy and into the pockets of the teachers’ unions. Something that you cannot explain at great length — you don’t get the chance — in campaign sound bites. And Bill Clinton could calculate that Republicans would appear as the mean-spirited no-sayers, so he could present himself as the defender of the weak against those mean-spirited Republicans. It’s just classic. Every superman comic, every Batman, every American myth is based on this.

Rush: And you do it in October.

Horowitz: Yeah, and you knew it in January. Because they do it every time. Every election runs the same way. And so our guys decided they were going to cooperate with Clinton and play the bad hats. They said, “There’s no money.” Well, look, they’re agreeing to a $500 billion budget. You mean there’s not one itsy-bitsy billion “for the children”? So of course they end up folding, the worst possible scenario. First they show they’re mean-spirited, and then they show they’re weak.

What they could have done, just as an example, would be to have gone in saying, “We want two billion dollars for the children — but we want it in scholarships for inner city kids who are trapped in these failing schools by you liberals who are feeding yourselves off the backs of the poor.” What we need for the Republican party is one of those mantras like they have, you know: “Tax breaks for the rich on the backs of the poor.” Such as: “Enrichment for the bureaucracy on the backs of the poor.” Something like that. We need to have that morality play in which we appear as the champions of little people and they appear as the bad guys. That to me is what’s missing.

Rush: And indeed we are the champions of little people.

Horowitz: Exactly.

Rush: That’s the thing. That’s what’s so frustrating about it — we actually are the champions of little people; not just in policy, but philosophically as well.

Horowitz: Well, of course. The most oppressive thing that’s been done to poor blacks in America since slavery, for example, is the welfare system. It’s destroyed their families, destroyed their communities and destroyed their life chances. And the school system is equally bad.

Rush: But wait. I hate to interrupt you, but remember — a vote for welfare reform was portrayed as a vote against blacks. Even they got mad at the President and said, “You’d better fix this.”

Horowitz: You’re right, Rush, but the Republicans A) don’t have your eloquence and B) do not have the time that you have to explain this to people. What Newt Gingrich should have done when he started welfare reform was exactly what Bill Clinton did when he signed the bill reluctantly. He should have flanked himself with two black welfare mothers. And they should have looked into the cameras and said, “You liberals are destroying our children. You’re bribing our daughters to have children out of wedlock, when they’re not even old enough to take care of themselves. We need this bill to rescue us.” Then the argument wouldn’t have been, “If you cut more, you’re more nasty or more mean-spirited,” but rather, “The quicker we end this, the more liberating it’s going to be for these people.”

Which it has proven to be. In New Jersey, I think, it has been estimated that 14,000 welfare babies would have been born into impoverished welfare families, but parents have learned some discipline through the welfare reforms and they’re getting themselves an education and getting jobs before they have those children. What a wonderful story that is. But we’re not telling it.

Rush: Yes, in the newspaper the other day I read a story about welfare reform pointing out that hey, we’re not paying for additional babies. There are fewer births, and the education value is increasing at the same time. So it does work. But it all seems to boil down to symbolism here. Those on the left play a great game of symbolism, but theirs is symbolism over substance. What you seem to be saying is that we need some symbolism to go along with our substance to actually illustrate it, rather than mask our insincerity, which is what the left does.

Horowitz: Right. We always have to position ourselves as we are. We are the reformers. We’re not really the conservatives. We’re the reformers. But most importantly, we need to connect with people. We are the defenders of poor people against these incredibly destructive and oppressive policies of liberalism and the welfare state. Therefore, as Republicans we need symbolism to demonstrate each of these social issues — education, Social Security. We did okay with Social Security even though they twisted it.

Rush: Throughout this whole campaign Clinton’s up there saying, “We’ve got to fix Social Security.” Nobody heard a plan. But he does have one. According to The Washington Post, it’s a combination of Steve Forbes and Martin Feldstein. He believes in the privatization of a certain portion of it.

Horowitz: Brilliant. But the fact is, Clinton doesn’t even need a plan — because the Democrats have spent so many years convincing the American public, especially minorities, poor people and children they’d defend them, that they can get away with screwing them. You can see it with Hollywood. Hollywood hated the ratings system. He also screwed them on trade. But he spent so much time seducing them that it’s okay with them if he screws them a bit. You see it with the feminists. This is the biggest woman abuser in the country and they’ll defend him, because they think of him as on their side.

I read, and I know you’ve read too, this unbelievable drivel by Tony Morrison and others about how Clinton is an honorary black person because he plays the saxophone and eats junk food.

Rush: He’s the first black President.

Horowitz: Yes, exactly. But there’s something to that. That is, he is willing to walk that walk and do the symbolic gestures that matter. If you remember, John F. Kennedy, who was really weak on civil rights, won an awful lot of the black vote just by making that phone call to Martin Luther King.

And I think Republicans need to pay attention. I have tremendous respect for the Bushes, the Bush boys, and I don’t want this to sound like a campaign thing, but if you look at the difference in the response to them it almost wholly comes out of their willingness to go into the ghetto to try to win Hispanic and black votes, to be willing to make gestures. They’re trying to implement conservative policies but to do it within the framework of what the black and Hispanic communities can accept at this point. And they’ve been very successful. Joe Klein wrote a really positive piece about them in The New Yorker and Joe Klein, of course, is a Clintonite. I think all Republican candidates should take a leaf from the Bush playbook on this. This is what Ronald Reagan did in another way. He reached out to the guy in the assembly line. They identified with him. This is a trickier issue.

Rush: It is, but I think Jack Kemp thinks he’s done this.

Horowitz: Well, Jack is very cerebral.

Rush: It didn’t help him is the point. It didn’t help him win the Vice Presidency. It didn’t help him get the Republican nomination. And he loves to run around and talk about how he’s the only guy in the Republican party who has taken showers with black guys when he played in the NFL.

Horowitz: Oh, I know. I like Jack, but that moment in the debate when Gore praised him for being the only Republican who’s not a racist and he said, “Thank you,” I was sitting there saying, “Thank you, Jack Kemp.” He accepted it. But the point is I think Kemp had a lot of problems in the campaign unrelated to this. He never had a conservative thing to say about the inner city, except take the taxes off. Bill Bennett tells a funny story about when they were sitting watching football and Bennett’s kids were making a ruckus. Jack said, “Do something with these kids, Bill.” And Bill said, “What do you want me to do, create an enterprise zone?”

I mean, Kemp didn’t speak to the real issues on these things. Which takes me to the time I had George Bush in Hollywood talking about abstinence.

Rush: You mean “W”?

Horowitz: Yes. “W” was in Hollywood, and he gave a talk at this Hollywood group I have. It’s entertainment industry people and executives and so on. But “W” was going on about abstinence, and I’m sitting there thinking, “This is way too conservative. I mean, this is Hollywood!” And not only did they love it, but I had invited Richard Reeves, left-of-center Democrat, liberal, who wrote an op-ed piece in The Los Angeles Times raving about George Bush as a winner, focusing on the abstinence part of the speech.

The reason is really simple. G.W. Bush did not say, “it’s my morality versus the rest of you guys,” and put himself on a pedestal. He basically gave the audience a wink and said, “Well, I didn’t follow this wholly in my youth, but now I have two teenage daughters, and this is a really difficult world to grow up in and I want to help them.” So the point is to connect with ordinary people.

Rush: David, I read a news story about that event and the take of this particular journalist was that even the women of Hollywood were beside themselves over this guy. Is that true?

Horowitz: I believe they were. A friend of mine who is very close to Newt told me he asked her about Bush’s speech and she said, “Newt, I love you dearly but let me put it this way, if George W. Bush runs for President there will be no gender gap.” And I believe that. He’s a good old boy. He’s funny. He’s comfortable in his own skin. Anyway, I really like the guy and I think that the hope of the Republican party at least for the next couple of years is going to be to try to figure out and get behind what those Bush boys have done.

Rush: Would you say in a strategic sense, in a philosophical sense, that the circumstances in America are such that liberalism needs to be defeated and soundly — even if it’s done by a less than “pure” conservative?

Horowitz: Yes. We need a majority. Politics is an endless battle. I think T. S. Eliot said there are no lost causes — because there are no won causes. You never get total victory. It’s always a battle, and if you don’t enjoy the battle or if you can’t handle it, you really should get out of it. I was dismayed when there was a preemptive strike by some conservatives to keep Colin Powell from even running for the nomination. Politics is about winning hearts and minds.

Rush: Not any more, sadly. Well, it’s about hearts and minds, yes; but it’s not about winning for far too many people on our side. There is a virtue-in-losing segment on our side.

Horowitz: Absolutely. They’re very comfortable having a political ghetto where they’re a minority and where they can be pure. But that spells disaster. I remember you took so many hits in the last Bush campaign. But people have to grow up.

Rush: You ought to see my mail now! I’m just as responsible as Gingrich. I’m too polarizing. I’m too opinionated. If I want to help the movement, I’ll get out of it too.

Horowitz: I don’t think this movement would be anywhere without you and Newt Gingrich. I mean that sincerely. You guys have kept it not only alive but growing and strong since Ronald Reagan. You know, I do about 80 campuses, where I go talk. I get out in Pocatello, Idaho and I’m picked up by some conservative kid and first thing, he flips a cassette into the tape deck. I’m expecting country and western, and it’s Rush Limbaugh. He missed the show. Somebody taped the show for him. That’s where these kids get their stuff. We have a good younger generation coming up and I always ask them where they get it, and they were all listening.

Rush: That’s very kind. But right now the venting and whining going on is depressing. It’s been going on ever since the election and I’m hard-pressed to get people to stop. Okay, roll up your sleeves now and get back to work.

Horowitz: It happens after defeat.

Rush: I want to go back to what you said in the discussion of welfare reform and how the liberals have so successfully used symbolism to fool their own ostensible constituents. And many people worry that we are dealing with a segment of our population which is — and I don’t know if you want to use these words — just plain ignorant, uneducated, or downright stupid, and that intelligent approaches don’t work. Factual approaches don’t work. I’m talking about the electorate in general.

Horowitz: Take Matt Fong in California. I’ve been aware of Matt Fong, he was the treasurer of the state for many years. When he got the nomination, people from out of state would ask me, “What are Matt Fong’s politics?” I would have to say, “I have no idea.” He was painted by Barbara Boxer, one of the most left-wing Democrats in Congress, the No. 1 spender, as an extremist. She ran as the moderate and successfully defined herself as the moderate and painted Matt Fong as the extremist. You can’t blame the voters for that.

Rush: Wait. Why can’t you?

Horowitz: All they’ve got is those TV ads, and our side just didn’t do its work. Most people, it’s not that they’re stupid — although, God knows, Jerry Springer has shown there are many like that out there — they’re just unaware. The blessing of a democracy is people are less interested in politics. But that has its costs as well.

Rush: It does strike me as general stupidity when you say to somebody, “The Republicans are going to starve your kids.” I think you’ve got to be stupid to believe that.

Horowitz: Except when there’s a budget bill and they look on their TV screens and Bill Clinton says, “A billion dollars for education,” and the Republicans say, “There’s no money.” That’s where it comes from. Even on Social Security, the TV news showed old folks in old people’s homes, and what practically looked like soup kitchens, with Bill Clinton saying, “I want to protect the old people.” We have to figure out how to convince people that we’re the ones who are protecting the old people. Clinton and the Democrats are bankrupting the damn Social Security system.

This new book I’ve done, The Politics of Bad Faith, I think gives a clue why liberalism is as strong as it is. It’s a religious phenomenon. These people really aren’t liberals; they’re leftists. And as leftists, they believe that they can create the kingdom of heaven on earth.

Rush: More symbolism.

Horowitz: They feel that they are doing the Lord’s work — except most of them don’t believe there is a Lord. And those who do have confused their role; they really believe it is they who are saving the world, something that only a Divinity can do.

They believe that, and that’s what gives them their incredible strength. Whittaker Chambers said the Communists have ideas they’re willing to die for, and that’s where they have the passion. Republicans for the most part, do not — I wouldn’t say this about conservatives, but about Republicans. You’re a missionary, but all too many people are just making careers out there in the Republican party. Newt was a missionary and he got chewed up for it.

Rush: No question about that. They got mad at him for various policies. They were frightened of his ideas. That’s why they had to destroy him.

Horowitz: But again, they see themselves as the armies of the righteous versus the armies of Satan — except they don’t put it in religious terminology. When they saw Gingrich being effective, they said, “We’re going to get him.” When they started filing those ethics charges and it kept mounting up, it struck me: Why didn’t Republicans just start filing charges against Bonior? They were completely frivolous. It’s like with Clinton and Starr. One thing you respect on our side is that Republicans have a respect for American institutions that you don’t see with liberals, who are really leftists. In the first part of The Politics of Bad Faith, I try to impress on people that these are not “liberals” anymore. These are leftists. They don’t have respect for our institutions. But Republicans do. That’s why the Reagan White House said, “Don’t attack the Independent Counsel,” even though conservatives were opposed to the Independent Counsel statute. They said, “Don’t attack it, because it’s the judiciary.” But Clinton had no such scruples. Why didn’t the Republicans back in January defend Starr and point out it was an assault on the Constitution?

Rush: Now you’ve really hit on it. You’ve pushed a button of mine. Why don’t they defend any of their own? I don’t understand it, either.

Horowitz: What I tell people when I’m doing my little radio interviews and I can reach people out there, especially disgruntled or dispirited conservatives, is: “Look, the conservative movement is 30 years old. Never forget that.” The Republican party today not only is not what it was 30 years ago when Goldwater got that first nomination. It isn’t what it was five or six years ago, before Gingrich, before the revolt in the party that produced “the Contract With America.” This is a very young movement. The left has been around for 200 years. They’ve learned soldiering; the winter soldier and the sunshine patriot. They understand that you never, never give up. And they never, never give up — and our people have to get that in their blood.

Rush: Do you think Newt gave up?

Horowitz: No. I actually just finished a memo that one of his people asked me to do, saying that he should step back. He was destroyed; what crippled him was the problem of trying to manage a disparate coalition, being a lightening rod always in the public and with the Democratic left having him always in their gun sights. He was paralyzed. It was like Gulliver. The Speaker of the House is not what he should have been doing. He’s really a leader; the Speaker is too much a manager, and the party is too riven by different agendas.

Rush: Which reminds me of one of the observations I made today — and it’s depressing, but I nevertheless made it — that when you talk about unity, the one thing the left is able to do, they take all their disparate constituency groups. That coalition of labor and minorities and the feminazis and all. They all are able to unify around one easy-to-understand theme: that the greater good is performed by government — and that the bigger the better.

Horowitz: I heard you say that on the air. And I agree with you — except they never say it explicitly. The government is a kind of abstraction. They never promote “big government” in those terms. They always talk in terms of the greater good of real people: “If we’re not there to stop the mean-spirited Republicans, what’s going to happen to the children? There will be nobody to push education. The Republicans want to eliminate education.”

Rush: I had a caller today from Louisiana who said not one Republican candidate got any support from the national organization, they weren’t in there backing up the candidates, they weren’t doing anything. It was almost as if to campaign was to risk an attack.

Horowitz: Exactly. And when Newt was under attack, he was also under attack from the conservative press in a very ugly way. They had those horrible caricatures on the front of The Weekly Standard, I think even National Review did it. I was so upset when that was going on.

Rush: That’s the disunity that I was talking about. It seems there’s a whole lot of ground that has to be made up here. If there’s anything good to come out of this, it’s shining a light on it to illustrate just how big and Herculean a task it is.

Horowitz: It’s a wake-up call before 2000.

Rush: It is, and we’re damn lucky. To go through all this and still have the numerical majority is a godsend.

Horowitz: Yes, and we can’t forget that we won some big races, like the ones in Florida and in Texas. Those guys showed it could be done, they just creamed the opposition.

Rush: One question before we go. The consensus in official Washington, it appears, is that the problem with the Republicans is the right wing, the cultural conservatives, that they are the cause of all the evil partisanship and mean-spiritedness. Do you agree?

Horowitz: I don’t think so. To me, it’s the way the message is packaged. I think there are elements in the party, there are some people, who are completely inflexible, and this is bad; and there are some people who confuse the religious realm which is about saving souls with the political realm which is about achieving the possible. But I think a lot of the things conservatives and social conservatives say resonate with people. Where it stops resonating is where people are afraid that some group will use the power of the federal government to impose their morality on others. That’s always the issue. Therefore, it’s so much better to do it the way George Bush did in our group, the befuddled father groping for the principles that will help his daughters survive in this world.

A lot of it is style. Stylistically, Republicans do appear to confirm the leftist caricature of them, and that has to be avoided. I think in the debate over welfare, Republicans seem to be concerned about the budget rather than the people who are on welfare. When you know conservatives as we do, of course they’re concerned; that’s a lot of what’s pushing the agenda about welfare, that it’s so destructive to people. But that was never projected by the party leadership, the people who actually get out on camera.

Rush: Are you optimistic about the ultimate outcome, not that we’ll ever defeat the left, but are you optimistic that they can be dominated and kept in the minority, can be overcome?

Horowitz: Yes, I am absolutely optimistic about that. Amidst all this debris, to me probably the most important principle currently at stake in America is the principle of one standard for all Americans. In a way, it’s even more important than the tax issue, because if racial preferences were to stay in place and even to spread, this country would be so balkanized, it would be so much a racial spoils system, that within a generation or two we would lose our way entirely.

But who’s carrying the battle in this campaign? It’s not the Republican party. There’s a little group of individuals, there’s Ward Connerly and a couple of college professors in Washington state — where Patty Murray was reelected and Republicans took a beating all over. Prop 200, which is such a hot issue that Republicans won’t even go near it, won. Three strikes wasn’t a Republican party initiative; a father whose daughter was murdered went out and changed the whole face of the discussion of crime. And you could go on and on.

The grass roots has shown how to do it. Take Ron Unz’s Prop 227, on bilingualism. What Ron did was position it from the very beginning as being for the Hispanic kids. There’s a good case that can be made, a very strong one, that if we have a bilingual country we’ll go the way of Canada, that it will disintegrate the country. But the way to win in a democratic election is to do what he did. He said he created the initiative responding to Hispanic parents who wanted their kids to learn English so they could have a chance at the American dream. And it won with 55, 60 percent, with Dan Lundgren, our standard bearer, opposing it.

So that’s where I get my hope — from two things. One is the youth of the conservative movement. It’s going to take it a while to learn how to conduct this battle, that it is a war and it’s not just the old kind of politics we used to have in this country before the 60s; that’s what I’ve been trying to bring from my background to tell people. Two is that the left is always banging its head against human nature and against reality, and therefore in the long run all the forces are really pulling on our side. I don’t care about the media, I know all the hazards we face and all the biases in the system against us. But what’s working for us is much more powerful, and that is that conservatism is in touch with real people, with their real nature, and it answers to that.

That’s why your show is so crucial, even though you get the flack. There are so many people out there listening, who need the coach to tell them to get back in the game. We haven’t lost — and in fact, we’ve been winning. I read the leftist press, so I know how discouraged they are.

Rush: That’s good to know!