Levin: Populism is Progressivism, Which is Statism (audio: 12:41)

Conservative Review ^ | March 17, 2016 | Mark Levin

[Veracious Poet]

Mark Levin has developed the worst case of Sore Cruzerman butthurt I have every diagnosed. :-)

Maybe we should all pitch in for a case, sounds like he needs it!

[VanDeKoik]

“This is very true. Mix in a dash of authoritarianism with personality cult and Bingo!”

Anything from the Cruz crew to keep the delusion alive.

DONT PAY ATTENTION TO THE GOPES IN THE ROOM!!!!!!!!

UH.....POPULISM IS LIKE PROGRESSIVEISM!!!....YEAH THAT’S IT!

[Theophilus]

Reagan did us no favor by selecting Bush.

[Georgia Girl 2]

LOL!

[bugseye]

Both Levin and Beck have driven me away from Cruz. Funny how that worked out.

[proust]

Mark lost all cred when he was forced to admit his fiance’s son was working for Cruz. She must really be something for him to shill as much as he has.

[Theophilus]

Cruz needed no convincing, his record was all we needed to know. Same with Trump. What he says changes midsentece. Focus on what he has done.

[TheConservativeBanker]

Compared to statism run by crony capitalists, their government and media buddies - using globalist libertarian arguments as faux “full throated conservatism”.

[beandog]

And the Donald and his supporters have driven me away from him. Funny how that worked out.

[Veracious Poet]

Has New York been heavily chemtrailed the past 2 months?

I swear there is mass inexplicable insanity among the media

Maybe the bunker needs an air filter

The New Yawk locale should be a dead give away that they've already been infected and gone full retard:

[PJBankard]

I don’t think Reagan understood Bush as we do now in retrospect. I also think that Bush was pushed on Reagan.

[onyx]

I'm not going to give Mark Levin one second of my time.

I will instead post this informative column for YOU to read and digest.





The Hollow Man

For 26 years, Rush Lim­baugh has insisted that con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues, clearly and pas­sion­ately artic­u­lated, will win every time.  By con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues Rush meant:  God, coun­try, fam­ily, com­mu­nity, lib­erty, indi­vid­u­al­ism, per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity, lim­ited gov­ern­ment, and free mar­kets.  Rea­gan was the model, and the promise:  it had hap­pened once, and could hap­pen again.

Eas­ier said than done.

Year after year, can­di­date after can­di­date mouthed the plat­i­tudes, and botched the exe­cu­tion.  They could over­come nei­ther the oppo­si­tion, their own estab­lish­ment, or per­sonal foibles.  Yet year after year, fail­ure after fail­ure, Rush kept the faith, exhort­ing, cajol­ing, com­fort­ing, and dream­ing of the per­fect can­di­date.

In 2012, that can­di­date arrived on the national scene; and in 2016 he ran for Pres­i­dent.  Bril­liant, artic­u­late, prin­ci­pled, and tough, Ted Cruz couldn’t have been more per­fect had Lim­baugh molded him out of clay.  Unlike the breath­less ingénue Marco Rubio, who is so scripted you can see the hand in his back, Cruz was the real deal.  Seem­ingly impreg­nable, Cruz over­came tremen­dous oppo­si­tion, and sev­eral of his own mis­steps, to become a for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge to the cur­rent front-runner, Don­ald Trump.

But Neme­sis will have his day.  In clas­si­cal Greek tragedy, the pro­tag­o­nist is brought down by his own flaws.  For the Greeks this was fate; it could not be oth­er­wise.  For us, it is the result of choice; every man, high and low, must make choices as he is con­fronted by cir­cum­stance.  Some­times those choices are mon­u­men­tal, and some­times they destroy us.  In order to avoid calamity, we must be self-aware enough to see how our own flaws are influ­enc­ing our choices.

For Ted Cruz, the cen­tral flaw is a malig­nant nar­cis­sism that erupts into con­de­scen­sion, intel­lec­tual arro­gance, and a sense of inevitabil­ity.  He is no longer car­ry­ing the mes­sage; he is the mes­sage.  That atti­tude, of course, leads to the mes­sage get­ting lost, as prin­ci­ple after prin­ci­ple is sac­ri­ficed to get the man into office, because that is all that mat­ters.

As the desire for power has swamped him like a tidal wave of sew­er­age, Ted Cruz has allowed GOP Inc. to hol­low him out like they’ve hol­lowed out the Amer­i­can econ­omy.  I never liked Ted Cruz, but I admired him, because once he laid down a posi­tion, he stuck to it.

Those days are gone.  Con­fronted by the Trump behe­moth, Cruz has adopted Trump’s posi­tions, even as he crit­i­cizes them.  The lat­est whop­per is a “tax” on imports, which is noth­ing more than the tar­iff that Cruz claims will wreck the econ­omy.  Last debate, between the Al Gore-inspired sighs, Cruz sounded like an ade­noidal Trump robot with the com­edy left out.  It was not pretty.

Even worse, the for­mer scourge of the estab­lish­ment is now openly col­lab­o­rat­ing with that estab­lish­ment to slay the Trumpian beast.  Cruz avoids crit­i­ciz­ing Rubio, while shak­ing hands with him on stage after a suc­cess­ful coor­di­nated attack.  He meets with Jeb Bush and hires his peo­ple.  He demo­nizes Trump’s sup­port­ers as dopes, morons, and incip­i­ent Fas­cists.  Now, as icing on the cake, he is blam­ing the can­di­date for the fact that a bunch of com­mu­nist and anar­chist thugs man­aged to shut down a Trump rally in Chicago:

“But in any cam­paign, respon­si­bil­ity starts at the top,” Mr. Cruz con­tin­ued. “And when you have a cam­paign that dis­re­spects the vot­ers, when you have a cam­paign that affir­ma­tively encour­ages vio­lence, when you have a cam­paign that is fac­ing alle­ga­tions of phys­i­cal vio­lence against mem­bers of the press, you cre­ate an envi­ron­ment that only encour­ages this sort of nasty dis­course.”

…“When the can­di­date urges sup­port­ers to engage in phys­i­cal vio­lence, to punch peo­ple in the face, the pre­dictable con­se­quence of that is that it esca­lates,” Mr. Cruz said. “And today is unlikely to be the last such instance.”

This is the end.  What has con­ser­vatism come to, when its lead­ing advo­cate on the cam­paign trail, after decades of cor­ro­sive lib­er­al­ism, and seven years of a malev­o­lent, America-hating nihilist in the White House, blames a can­di­date from his own party and, worse, that candidate’s sup­port­ers, for the sorry state of the Repub­lic and the vicious­ness of its polit­i­cal dis­course?  Barack Obama and the Demo­c­rat Party have done every­thing in their power to set per­son against per­son, group against group, and party against party, exploit­ing divi­sions, and inflam­ing con­flict, until that con­flict and hatred has become insti­tu­tion­al­ized as a means of gov­er­nance, and Ted Cruz can only blame those that oppose the degra­da­tion, and the man who rep­re­sents them.  I can’t think of any­thing more opposed to the spirit of con­ser­vatism than that.

The dif­fer­ence between Ted Cruz and Don­ald Trump is that Ted Cruz looks out at a crowd and sees him­self, while Trump looks into a mir­ror and sees the crowd.  Trump may be crude, inar­tic­u­late, and occa­sion­ally boor­ish, but he looks back to an older, bet­ter Amer­ica, the essence of which is its peo­ple, its cit­i­zens, them­selves crude, inar­tic­u­late, and occa­sion­ally boor­ish; but who, like Trump, are ani­mated by a vig­or­ous spirit that, once unleashed, will make Amer­ica great again.  Trump is the means; the vot­ers are the end.

For Cruz, the vot­ers are the means, and he is the end.  When he sur­veys a crowd his eyes are full of cold cal­cu­la­tion.  His con­ser­vatism is an exoskele­ton designed to get him over the bar­ri­cades.  The rig is impres­sive, but can­not finally hide the pale, pasty, flabby milk­sop under­neath.  In this case, the clothes do not make the man.

A film critic once wrote that Alfred Hitchcock’s great film “North by North­west”, was not about what hap­pens to Cary Grant, but about what hap­pens to Cary Grant’s suit.  Told by a fan that he wished he were Cary Grant, Grant responded “So do I.”  Grant was being overly dra­matic.  In his case, the clothes did make the man; the Cock­ney Archie Leach finally was Cary Grant.

Not so for Rafael Edward Cruz.  It did not have to end this badly.  Had Cruz real­ized that con­ser­vatism is not a clearly artic­u­lated set of prin­ci­ples that must be imposed on a recal­ci­trant mass, but is instead the sys­tem­atized expres­sion of the yearn­ing of indi­vid­u­als and peo­ples, as flawed and imper­fect as they are, he might have been born aloft by the wave that is now car­ry­ing Don­ald Trump to the White House. Instead, blinded by ide­ol­ogy and self-regard, Cruz missed the wave, and is being left behind.

Rush was cor­rect — con­ser­vatism, prop­erly artic­u­lated, will win every time.  But con­ser­vatism is more than a set of bul­let points.  It is ulti­mately a form of trust, in peo­ple, and that, if left alone, they can man­age to get things right.  Trump may not have all of the bul­let points in line, but the trust is there.  Trust is the ulti­mate gift — if a can­di­date shows that he trusts the peo­ple, the peo­ple will trust him in return.  Cruz finally could not trust, could not give, and so receives noth­ing back.  And so he grasps at the only hand being held out to him, the cold, dead hand of the estab­lish­ment, that destroys every­thing it touches.

[Jim Robinson]

Notice:

Not supporting our leading pro-America candidate emerging from the convention when our nation is facing the grave risk of another America-hating, constitution-hating, capitalism-hating, God-hating Marxist/fascist/socialist/communist following Obama will be considered tantamount to treason.

[bray]

Of course he thinks a Constitutional Lawyer would make the perfect President. Most Americans think we have had enough lawyers in gummit.

Pray America wakes

[Electric Graffiti]

Levin is a globalist.

He's such a staunch supporter of the Constitution that he's staking his reputation and career on a ineligible 1st term senator from Canada.

I realize now, he is fully GOPe and uniparty. He said nothing about Obama’s ineligibility for 8 years and stifled any mention of it on his radio program. FUML

[lexington minuteman 1775]

I used to listen to The Great One and Rush...now... let’s just say no...
this election certainly has given me more time to find to reading sources...
Freegards
LEX

[EveningStar]

Well, Trump is a crony capitalist after all.

[Trumpinator]

Levin = neocon scum

[CA Conservative]

That is the definition of populist, being popular.

Not even close. A populist is a politician that latches onto whatever issue is the most prevalent in the public mind, then crafts his position to take the greatest advantage of it. He has no real principles of his own, and as such is comfortable changing positions on a dime if the public sentiment changes. He is equally as comfortable relying on conservative positions as he is liberal positions, because the positions are not based on core beliefs, but are a means to an end - gaining power. That is a good description of Trump.

Reagan was popular - people like who he was and had respect for his as a person - but his positions were based on conservative principles. He didn't change his positions just go along with the public mood, but sought to bring the public mood around to the principles he espoused.

[EveningStar]

I will never support Hillary, Bernie, or anyone else the Democratic Party offers up. I have never supported the Democratic Party candidate.