RUSH: We welcome to the EIB Network, Mark Levin, who is -- full disclosure here -- a good friend, one of my best; and the author of the just-released and already best seller, Liberty and Tyranny: a Conservative Manifesto. Hello, sir, and welcome to our big and vast network.
LEVIN: You're not kiddin'. How are you, brother?
RUSH: I'm pretty good. Never better. I'm in a foul mood the last couple days, but nothing to do with you.
LEVIN: Cheer up! Cheer up!
RUSH: I'm trying. I'm trying. Look, I don't want to overdo this, but as I said yesterday, people throughout my whole career have said, "What can I read to learn what you know? Where can I go to find the intellectual truths of conservatism?" and I've always had a book list that I give them and I've always had a magazine list and so forth. Your book is now a one-stop shop. Your book... This is the book, not only to read for someone to read themselves, but to give to people while it is... Well, not too technical. And it's got it's intellectual parts, but it is readable, understandable, inspiring. It's a page-turner, which is difficult for a book like this to be.
LEVIN: Well, you know, as I was writing it, we talk frequently, you know, on the weekends I was there and you'd send me an instant message, "F-Lee, what are you doing?" "I'm writing." You know, or, "What are you doing? It's two in the morning." "I'm writing," because, you know, I have full-time jobs and this is the only time I could do and that's part of the reason it took so long.
RUSH: Now, you weren't just writing.
LEVIN: Well, I was thinking.
RUSH: There's a notes section. You were researching.
LEVIN: Yeah.
RUSH: You could have written a book that just regurgitates what's in your heart and what's in your mind, but you have backed it up here with the thoughts of the Founders, with empirical evidence and proof of what's in your heart and what's in your mind, and that's the work. I mean, anybody can tell anybody what they think. To go out and get backup for it is what took the time. And full disclosure, as I said yesterday: you worked on this for a year and a half. There were times I know that it was arduous, but all the hard work has paid off. Believe me. Here's how I want to start with you on this.
LEVIN: Yes, sir.
RUSH: I -- even now at age 58 -- still consider myself naive, 'cause throughout my childhood and my adult life, I just accepted that everybody living in America loved our country and appreciated the whole concept of America and understood it: freedom, liberty, American exceptionalism. My opinion of this wasn't due to nationalism. It wasn't because, you know, I put a pin on my lapel or 'cause I was born here or any of that. It was rooted in the way that I was raised, and then in the things that I learned, my appreciation for this country and what it is, how unique and rare it is in the whole history of human civilization. So I still have lots of difficulty today intellectually understanding -- I get it emotionally, but I have difficulty intellectually understanding -- people natively born in this country who hate it, who want to destroy it, who want to remake it in an image that will cause it to not be what it has always been, which is the single greatest outpost and location for prosperity and security the world has ever seen. Can you help me to understand why there are people who hate this country and want to tear it down?
LEVIN: The key is to understand that there are people who are of that mind-set -- and if we don't understand it, and we just think this is an academic debate or they're just slightly liberal or what have you, we're going to be devoured by it. We need to understand that these people do not share our view of liberty and individuality. They reject the Declaration of Independence, which talks about unalienable rights.
RUSH: Who are these people?
LEVIN: These people are what I call the statists. They are not liberals because liberal in the classical sense is the opposite of authoritarian, and I refuse to allow them to steal the language and use the language to attack us. You even hear Obama talking about "investments." These aren't investments. It's nationalizing the private sector. It's massively increasing taxes to confiscatory levels. We have to deny them the distortion of the language and speak the truth -- and, look, here's the problem. They have abandoned the principles of the founding. Conservatism represents the founding principles. That's who we are. We embrace the Declaration of Independence. We revere the Constitution of the United States. They try to evade the Constitution and undermine it and construct something that's expedient, that advances their political agenda, which we cringe at. We need to understand who these people are, but, frankly, I started writing this book because we need to understand who we are, that we need to have confidence. Because we have some people teaching the abandonment of conservatism or trying to rewrite conservatism or trying to create some weird hybrid, and I'd just as soon stick with Edmund Burke and Hamilton and Jefferson and Madison because I happen to think they're smarter than these people.
RUSH: Well, I'm going to get into the internecine conflicts in the Republican Party, the conservative movement in due course in our discussion here. But what I gather from what you're saying is, the motivations of these people really aren't necessary, all we have to do and understand is that we gotta beat them.
LEVIN: Well, we needed to understand that their motivations are not good, that they're destructive. I talk about the civil society, as have others in the past. The civil society is what we call organized liberty or the social compact, and there are various elements to it, and this is the heart of conservatism. You know, that man has a spirit, that each man and woman is unique, that we have duty to promote our unalienable rights and to protect them, that we have a duty to our families and ourselves, to take care of ourselves, to contribute to charity, that we have a duty to support a just and righteous law that is stable and predictable. And I go into some of these things and what the statist does is, they believe in human experimentation. I'm not talking about Mengele here, I'm talking about society and turning it on its head, and this is why Edmund Burke was so crucial.
He explained the difference between change is reform, which is what we conservatives believe in, reform that promotes and preserves the civil society, and change is radical innovation that destroys the civil society, that destroys the culture. And this is what we are fighting off. So people say we always say no. You're damn right we say no to destroying this society! But we have a lot of yeses to say, too, about liberty and free enterprise and all the other things that are one linked to the other -- and if I might make a footnote, too. I keep hearing, "Well, there's the social conservatives, the free market conservatives, and the national security conservatives." No, there are not. In a civil society you must have a moral order. Right versus wrong, good versus evil, just versus unjust, and means versus ends. They're not the same thing, and when we talk about moral order, you must have a moral order to have a rule of law, for the free market to work, to advance national security. There are not three branches to conservatism; there is Conservatism.
RUSH: And it doesn't need to be refined or reformed. It doesn't need to be remade or rebuilt.
LEVIN: Well, why would we surrender our core principles that have served this nation so well, that have served humanity so well? I mean, Americans have contributed so enormous to mankind. Why would we surrender those principles to these politicians who are only in office on a temporary basis, who are advancing their own political careers and their fairly radical agenda? Why would we make peace with people, make peace with such philosophy? Why wouldn't we take our case -- be confident in our case and take it -- to the American people? We can link it to current events, we can promote policies through it, but we can't promote policies that are not based on sound philosophy.
RUSH: You mention a lot about the founding and you quote John Adams frequently in the book. One of the quotes that I like from John Adams -- and I'm paraphrasing this, but -- he said that the Founders had written the Constitution for a religious and a moral people, that the document wouldn't work for people outside those realms. So is it safe to say that those who oppose the Constitution are afraid of it, they don't like the concept of morality, they don't like the concept of a natural order of things, natural law, this kind of thing?
LEVIN: This is a great point. First of all, let's go to the Declaration first. The Founding Fathers created a society, and that's what they created in the Declaration of Independence, founded on natural law, divine providence, God-given natural law, alien rights. The only thing that makes life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness unalienable is the belief in a Creator, not the belief in man or some government. Man and government can't, in the end, confer these rights or legitimately deny them. This is a huge difference we have with the statists, whether the modern statists or past statists. They believe rights are something to be rationed. If you agree with them, they give you rights. If you don't agree with them, they take rights away. They believe that they're all-powerful. We don't. We believe they're earthly.
This is a huge difference between us and the statists. When you watch Obama doing his press conferences or Pelosi, these people sound like they're God! I mean, they think they're God. "We're going to do this," and they also exploit something. Man is imperfect. Every religion will tell you that man is imperfect. So man's institutions aren't perfect, and what the statist does is he exploits that. He tries to create this phony notion of a utopian state where, if you'll surrender your will, surrender your liberty, surrender your property -- more and more of it over time, to them -- they will make the impossible possible, the unequal equal. And what they really will do is destroy your humanity, because they're not about humanity; they're about government. And that's why we need to call them statists.
RUSH: Now, okay, let's talk. But the statists and their voters. I've always thought they're two different people. You've got the Obamas and the Pelosis, the Barney Franks, all the Washington statist elite, if you will -- and the statehouse, all the states, statist elites. But let's look at their voters. How many of their voters -- how many of the people who are fully enraged and angry on their fringe blogs, how many of them -- are actually of the same belief that the leaders of this statism are, in belief of it, or how many are just sheep? And therefore if they're sheep -- if they're not as committed and they don't understand, really, what they're voting for and what it leads to -- are they salvageable?
LEVIN: You know, many of them are what I call malcontents. They're victims. They think they are. They always have agreements. They don't look inside. They don't analyze their own lives. I write about this, too. They don't take responsibility for their own situations. They don't know how because they refuse to look beyond their own situations. They don't know how to prosper in the freest, most generous, most benevolent society ever established on the face of the earth. And so they feel the rest of us shouldn't survive or can't survive in a similar society. They're the malcontents. They're what I call the drones, what de Tocqueville referred to as -- my phrase -- these drone-like characteristics where more and more of them surrender their independence, their human sensibilities to the state. They want to be told what to do. And then there's the elitist side of this.
It's academia where you have professors and teachers who get a sinecure from the government, and what are they doing? Well, not everyone. I'm talking about the rule, not the exception. They are promoting this quiet counterrevolution in the classroom against the civil society, against our country, same thing with Hollywood, here you have people who luxuriate in the most magnificent society on the face of earth. They have fame; they have fortune. Nobody bothers them. They can do whatever they want, say whatever they want, and yet they act as if they're revolutionaries, when in fact they're not. And they have enormous influence in the political process because of their wealth and their ability to contribute and affect the media. Are they salvageable? Well, we won't know if we don't try our way. If we keep doing these half measures and create clutter and doubting ourselves rather than have confidence and articulate our positions and do it with our friends and neighbors and in our neighborhoods, well, we'll never know if we can reach these people.
RUSH: So it makes no sense to you, in a political sense, let's say the Republican Party is the home of conservatism, just theoretically or hypothetically for a moment. It makes no sense to you to accept publicly some of their premises so as to attract them and then when we get them, start to work on them to change their minds?
LEVIN: No. What we need to do is challenge the language and the content of what the statist does. And the statist is extremely manipulative, and they will deceive. You can see they're politicians. They deceive, and they want to buy votes, they'll change their positions on a dime because, really, they march at a relatively standard pace. Right now they're marching faster than in the past. But they're incremental and persistent and they have their goals in mind. And too often we conservatives are fighting with each other, over, "Well, should we do this? Should we do that?" In other words, we're tweaking on the edges. We're debating over nonsense. We're allowing people who claim to be conservative to demoralize conservatives.
We have nothing to be demoralized about. Let me tell you something. You said it a hundred thousand times. This is the greatest nation on the face of earth, and we cheerlead for it, and they attack it. We love this society. We love the Declaration. We love the Constitution. We love what it's brought forth. We love the capitalist system with its imperfections. Of course it has imperfections, and that's the capitalist system itself, deals with that. The other side wakes up in the morning on the attack. They reject the Constitution and evade it day in and day out. They reject the founding principles and evade them day in and day out. They want to recreate our society, and that is what we're up against.
RUSH: Mark Levin, the author of Liberty and Tyranny, is our guest here, and we will continue our discussion right after this obscene profit time-out here on the EIB Network.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We are back with Mark Levin, who, by the way, is the host, as many of you know, of his own radio talk show, syndicated nationally. We have the same flagship station, WABC AM 77 in New York. Mark, you'll get a kick out of this, I checked my e-mail during the break and I just found this note. Subject line: "'Interview awesome.' I was stopped at a stoplight when it began, I saw a friend who I know to be conservative, I rolled down the window and I yelled at her, I said, 'Turn on the radio.' She said, 'I already am.' I just ordered four copies of Levin's book."