Opinion

Conservatives: Stop whining

Mark Judge Journalist and filmmaker
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I’m sorry. I just can’t listen to them anymore.

Mark Levin. Or Rush Limbaugh. Or Laura Ingraham, who, thankfully, is off the air for a while. Conservatives are right to be concerned about the leftward tilt America has taken in the last eight years. But their pathetic whining and trembling hissy fits have often made them like liberals — immune to reason. Keep it up and Republicans will lose the House.

Let me give you a very concrete personal example. It involves Obamacare. In 2008 I was diagnosed with a form of cancer, one that is serious but treatable. I had insurance, partly because I’m a conservative. I’m a journalist, book author and filmmaker, the kind of career that can bring in a sudden pile of money even as you later have something not work out and watch it disappear. But through it all I made sure I had insurance. This sometimes meant doing odd jobs or forgoing a new lens for my camera. For 48 years, including decades and decades of good health, I made sure that if, God forbid, something happened, I would not be a papoose on the back of the state.

Well, something happened. And now that it has, I have watched as my insurance company keeps raising my premiums to the point where I can barely afford them. They recently sent me a letter informing me that when I reach 50 they can “reevaluate” the entire policy and raise my rate as damned much as they please. In short, they have made it their mission, now that I actually got sick, to make sure that I cannot afford my insurance.

I don’t want health insurance for free, or any other “free stuff.” If Obamacare prevents someone like me from going bankrupt, that doesn’t make me a free rider. In fact, it may ensure that I can at long last make my documentary about conservative giant Whittaker Chambers. (And I would argue that such a project can win our side more converts than 10,000 hours of talk radio.)

I understand that liberals love to use personal anecdotes to elicit sympathy for questionable causes, but I think I represent a lot of people in this country. Of course there are those who want socialism and free stuff (and it is a dangerously high number). But there may be a lot more who just want simple fairness. This is why, to most people, Mark Levin or Rush Limbaugh sound like tools when they scream about socialism and health care. As the cliché goes, I work hard and play by the rules. Many insurance companies do not.

What makes this all doubly tragic is that in Mitt Romney we had a man who had not only true empathy for those in need — though he didn’t announce it at every stop like Bill Clinton — but an actual plan and desire to help them help themselves. Liberals treat everyone as a victim, but Romney understands the dignity of helping yourself. At the same time, Romney seems to get that, as U2 once sang, sometimes you can’t make it on your own. This doesn’t mean lifelong handouts. It means that not everyone is born with the talent to be a top 10 talk show host with a multimillion-dollar contract, and sometimes these people need a little help.

Conservatives are right to be afraid of liberalism. It’s a dangerous philosophy that has no limiting principle: If you can tax the rich 50 percent, why not 75? One complicated pregnancy means that there should be abortion on demand up to and indeed past the ninth month. People in San Francisco should be able to walk around naked, whether there are children around or not. And Obamacare supporters are not happy until the Catholic Church is paying for contraception. Any philosophy that has no limiting principle, nothing that says this far, no further, usually ends in catastrophe.

Worst of all, liberals do nothing but whine, kvetch and complain as they build their utopia. If you gave Obama everything he wanted tonight, Ed Schultz would be on TV tomorrow crying about why we can’t control the weather. Many years ago I became a conservative for several reasons — Christopher Lasch’s book “The Culture of Narcissism,” the mind of Irving Kristol, the reality of what abortion is, G.K. Chesterton, Richard John Neuhaus and watching taxes take more and more of my money. But I also liked right-wingers because they weren’t whiners. In college I had been an intern at the socialist weekly The Nation and written for The Progressive, In These Times and The Washington Post. But when I went to the dark side, I noticed that conservatives were a lot happier. Sure, they were offended by liberals, but it didn’t consume them the way it does now. There was too much good stuff going on in life — family, friends, a great country, homemade beer, culture. By contrast, liberals just seemed angry and resentful about, well, everything.

The other day I listened to a conservative radio host as he launched into a truly epic bawlfest about how Obama’s re-election signals The End of America. His caterwauling — to call it a rant dignifies it with a maturity it lacked — lasted about three hours. It was hysterical, desperate and pathetic. Earlier that day, Mark Steyn, filling in for Rush, had gone on a similar tirade. Raising taxes on the wealthy by four percent equals socialism, Americans have become a decadent people who only want free stuff, the media, schools and Hollywood have brainwashed the people, etc. Steyn announced that the right needs to start making movies, as that’s the only way to change the culture. (Uh, Mark? Shut up and write me a check. I’ve only been trying to do that very thing for five years as one conservative “think tank” after another has turned me down.)

Guys, we lost. Get over it. Of course, nothing is worth compromising first principles. And conservatism should never lose its ballsy ability to tell the truth. Not to mention the fact that the country, illiterate and gorged with Hollywood garbage, may actually be going down the tubes. But to call America “a nation of freeloaders” is to become the irrational anti-American liberals you claim to oppose.

Mark Judge is the author of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.