RUSH: It is stunning what is happening to the Democrat Party! There is no Democrat Party of JFK or LBJ anymore.

There is no Democrat Party of the old warhorse Robert Strauss. The Democrat Party today is Bernie Sanders! Do you know Bernie Sanders is drawing bigger crowds than Hillary Clinton? Bernie Sanders has got more excitement in Hollywood than Hillary Clinton has ever had! Bernie Sanders is getting standing ovations in Colorado. I’m telling you, the Democrat Party is no longer what you often associate with the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party has gone full-on — call it what you want — socialist, Marxist.

The number of average, run-of-the-mill, day-to-day Democrats — the faceless, anonymous Americans that say they’re Democrats — identifying as uber-left liberals is skyrocketing. And it’s causing lots of people to ask, “How did it happen? When did it begin? What is responsible for it?”
Because there are answers to those questions. I myself am profoundly interested in those questions, because as the country… It’s stunning to me. The country’s in bad shape; the country’s trending in worse shape.

We have stories I held over from last week. Millennials don’t trust anyone. Millennials have no faith in anyone. Americans at large have no confidence in their government, no competence in their economy. Why in the world would you move in a direction that is causing this? Why in the world, in the midst of this despair, would you move in a direction that’s gonna guarantee more of it? Now, to me, the answers are psychological, and I’m not a trained psychologist or psychiatrist or any other kind of emotional or mental expert.

But nevertheless, the subject fascinates me.

Dana Milbank even writes about it in the Washington Post today.

And he’s as happy as he can be that “liberal” is no longer an epithet, that “liberal” is no longer a dirty word. It used to be, as recently as 1988. Milbank mentions this. In 1988, what did in The Loser (that would be Michael Dukakis) was the fact that he was a liberal stuck to him. Just the label “liberal” was enough to secure your defeat. This is why liberals have always sought to call themselves different things — progressives, moderates, independents — because “liberal” was the death knell at election time.

Now they’re happily calling themselves liberals, and Milbank mentions three theories why. And I don’t have his story right in front of me. Then he adds his own, I think, at the end. No it’s the third theory which he really signs on to. The third theory is that this country is moving so far to the left so fast because of the rise of the Tea Party. I read that, and I said, “Are you kidding me? The rise of the Tea Party is what you’re saying is awakening people? What in the world does the Tea Party do to scare people?”

The only thing that I can think of is the idea that you must take care of yourself.

That must scare so many people so fast… (interruption) No, don’t laugh in there, Snerdley. I know I’m a naturally funny guy. I know that when I open my mouth, the tendency is to laugh here, but I’m being dead serious. I think the idea of self-reliance scares the hell out of a lot of people, and the idea of self-responsibility? Oh, they don’t trust themselves and they don’t trust the system, and so they rather give themselves over to whatever else.

We’ve been through all this, how attractive it is, all the different… (interruption)

Well, no, no.

The Tea Party is obliterated from day to day if that fits the narrative of the day, but the Tea Party is always, even if it goes extinct, the Tea Party is always going to remain as an object lesson, just like Reagan will always be an object lesson. Oh, that’s one of the theories. One of the theories to explain why the country is going left is it always was. Reagan came along and was so sneaky and so good that he fooled a lot of people for eight years. But now that Reagan’s gone and there isn’t any legitimate heir, that people are free to return to their natural inclinations, which is big government sponsored liberalism and socialism. That Reagan was just an eight-year aberration and liberals paid their price for it, but now everything’s getting back to equilibrium.

And there’s one other theory, but nevertheless, strip it all away and what you’re left with is, I don’t think you have any doubt about it, polling data which shows Americans are despondent, depressed, confused, lack confidence, think the country’s headed on the wrong track. And yet the same polls tell us that people are moving in the direction of politics that have given us and created these circumstances in which people have lost confidence and lost faith. And we know that in some people’s the cases this is true.

You go back and look at this country seven years ago, ten years ago, I don’t care how bad you hated Bush and I don’t care how bad people hated the Iraq war, this country was nowhere near the psychological sewer that it’s in today. And yet people do not associate the leadership of the past seven years with the current set of circumstances. I know the media is obviously a factor. I don’t want to mention things that I’ve mentioned before because I don’t want to be repetitive.

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RUSH: Here are Dana Milbank’s three theories, by the way, just to get them out there. The first theory, why the country is so liberal — and I don’t think there’s any denying, there’s no question that the Democrat Party has become extreme far left. That is the mainstream. What I’ve always thought, the kook fringe insane lunatics of the Democrat Party base are its mainstream now. And you see this lunacy illustrated in op-ed pages and editorial pages of things like the Washington Post, the New York Times. Lunacy has become mainstream in the Democrat Party. There is no moderate wing of the Democrat Party at all.

Milbank’s first theory is that “more people are identifying as liberal because of huge and rapid shifts on a couple of social issues, particularly gay marriage,” and transgenderism. So many people, he theorizes — it’s not his theory. Maybe his theory, or somebody’s theory — that gay marriage and transgenderism are so, so, so popular and so, so, so identified as liberal that people are saying, “If that’s what liberalism is, I am all-in.” That’s one theory. You buy that, Mr. Snerdley? It sounds kind of cock and bull to me.

Second theory, “the nation’s moral pendulum has always been swinging through history,” from left back to right, through the center, and back to left, and it hits the extremes and then bounces back, and the theory is that liberalism, mass liberalism today represents the extreme leftward tilt of that pendulum and that it will soon start moving back toward the center and then ultimately back to the right. No time frame given for this. But this is a popular theory among political scientists.

And the third theory, which Dana Milbank says he finds compelling, which means this is what he chooses, “is that the rise in liberalism is a backlash against the over-the-top conservatism displayed by the Tea Party movement.” See, in that case it would mean this is permanent. He doesn’t like this theory. It’s just a momentary point in time where that pendulum is at the far left before it starts swinging back to the middle. His theory, if all this liberalism is a result of the Tea Party, then it’s permanent.

This is asinine. It’s an asinine theory. According to that theory then the four years after Ronald Reagan should have seen exactly what we’re seeing now, because the Tea Party is what it is, but Reagan was a 49-state landslide winner twice.

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RUSH: Let me give you another theory as to why it is said that the country is moving so far to the left. Now, I’m not sure I buy the extent to which this is happening precisely because of the 2010 to ’14 midterm elections. I don’t deny that the Democrat Party is moving toward communism at all. But the country isn’t. But now let’s say that the polls are on to something and let’s say there is a shift. Let’s take a look at the Millennials — 18 to 34-year-olds, it is said.

Can you honestly recall a conservative candidate any of them have ever heard, much less had a chance to vote for? Not Republican. Conservative. In other words, somebody name for me, say, a candidate in the last 25 years who’s a genuine conservative. And I cite Reagan only because he won two landslides. Cite for me a legitimate Reaganite or conservative candidate in that vein who has been able to espouse it, campaign on it, offer a series of policies based in it.

My point is that people moving to the left have no idea what the alternative is. It’s never been presented to them. In fact not only that, what they imagine it to be is attacked mercilessly every day in the media and not defended. When you have Republicans coming along agreeing that the era of Reagan is over, what that does is further the idea that Reagan was just an aberration, that Reagan was just eight years of, “Wow, this country really got off track for a while,” to people that didn’t live then and have not been able to read an accurate history of it.

Well, you can’t really blame them. They don’t know. And some of you might be saying, “But, Rush, there’s been your show!” Yes but the show is not politics, folks. This show is not out campaigning. We’re not trying to get votes, not running for office here. We don’t have the power to implement any policy. At the same time, hosts of successful conservative media have also been targets for destruction by the American left. That can be dealt with if there…

Now, this current crop of Republicans running, there are a couple of, maybe two or three, that get into the debates, who might electrify voters. I mean, ’cause I’m serious when I tell you that there are a lot of Americans… And I know for a fact that Millennials have never even had the chance to vote for a conservative, and maybe even people into their forties! They have never had it presented to them — by a candidate, by a party — in a positive, uplifting, explanatory way.

You couple that with the fact that what conservative is said to be by the media and by the Democrat Party is constantly under assault, then it may well be that people think this is all there is. And when they look around the world, they see the same thing. They don’t see any alternative around the world. In fact, we live in an era where the current president is doing his best to denigrate America’s greatness in the past and claim that it is not real or that it wasn’t legitimate.

I mean, the point is there could be substantive reasons, not just psychological, to explain all of this. And then if you add some hard, cold realities about how successful the left has been in creating as many dependent people who are now living on the safety net — and add to that then the drumbeat, I’m telling you, of apocalyptic news story after news story after news story — I’m telling you: I don’t think it takes too much of that to create a perpetual doom in people’s minds.

If you doubt me, remember it wasn’t all that long ago — and may still be the case today — that you can go into a poor black neighborhood where there was wanton violence and you asked them why they’re doing it and you hear them say, “I don’t expect to be alive much past age 21 or 22,” and that was a real thing. That’s what many young blacks actually thought. They may still think, in fact. I mean, that was their experience.

So what does it matter? It was a real experience. I mean, it was a real life expectation based on their living conditions, circumstances, and so forth. My point is that doom, gloom, negativism, pessimism is easy. We can all do it without any training. We’re all naturally inclined this way. Thinking positively? That takes effort every day. Sometimes it’s hard. As I’ve always said, you do not need to go to the library to find books on how to fail. We all know how.

But people who write books on how to think positively and how to succeed are millionaires, ’cause apparently it doesn’t come naturally. Whenever you encounter somebody who’s optimistic and upbeat, don’t you think they’re a little weird? “Wow, what’s with that guy?” is a natural reaction that a lot of people have.

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RUSH: You got F. Chuck Todd in the Washington Post today saying one of the reasons why the country’s moving left, he happily thinks, is because the country so overwhelming approves of gay marriage and transgenderism and when people find out that those things are articles of faith in liberalism and that’s what liberalism is, then that’s me, count me in. Except there’s a slight problem.

The only evidence that gay marriage is all this supported and so wonderfully accepted is polling data. Gay marriage has not been voted on, just like abortion. It’s taken out of the public’s hands and imposed on the country by the Supreme Court. Likewise, it is the courts who are imposing gay marriage on the nation. The public hasn’t voted on it. The left has taken gay marriage out of the Democrat process.

So you got all this talk about how America supports gay marriage, isn’t it wonderful, yay yay yay. The left must not think so because they will not put it up to a vote. The left is resorting to nondemocratic means to impose gay marriage and after the fact say, “Look, oh, man, everybody supports it.” Just like they tried to say everybody supports abortion after Roe v. Wade, and this kind of stuff is what roils a society. You know, in Great Britain abortion is never argued about, it’s not nearly like it is here ’cause they voted on it there. It wasn’t imposed on ’em.