Dennis Miller: Capitalist Hero

Dennis Miller started out on the political left and, as he matured (helped along considerably by the shock of 9/11), he migrated to the political right.

In this wayward sojourn, he is in fine intellectual company: To name but a few, David Horowitz (former campus radical), Irving Kristol (one time Trotskyite), and Ronald Reagan (early FDR-New Dealer). And as is usually the case with someone who has viewed the world through both left and right prisms, Miller possesses exceptional insight into the relative strengths and weaknesses of both ideologies.

On a recent broadcast of his syndicated West Wood One radio show, taped live at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California (to commemorate the imminent release of the unabridged Reagan Diaries), Miller reflected on the terrible spiritual toll taken by socialism’s attempt to take the fight out of life. Noting that comfortable social democracies like Sweden nonetheless have high suicide rates, Miller professes not to be surprised:

“I like fighting….I don’t know about you, when your cat heels are hanging over the abyss, isn’t that when the game is on? Isn’t that part of being a human being? I mean, if somebody comes in behind you and stuccos the abyss over and you can’t fall anywhere, I think that eats into your head somewhere down the road. It’s about the challenge….”

Somehow in this wonderful, seemingly off-the-cuff remark to a live audience, Miller crystallizes the best arguments of Ayn Rand, Alexis de Tocquevile, and Thomas Sowell–and gets a laugh doing it.

But he wasn’t through. Only a few minutes later he mock-accepts the coming Obama socialist revolution. He won’t leave the country, he informs his listeners, as so may conservatives have threatened. Instead:

“You know, you get to a point if they’re [the government] taking too much money, I’d quit working. Wouldn’t you? There’s two lines: Here’s the line where you get your money for working, and here’s the line where you get it for not working. If this line…the stacks about as big as this line, I’m jumping lines.”

Here Miller distills the issue outside of ideology and into the realm of nuts and bolts practicality–socialism does not work, because sooner or later, everyone is on the public doll, with predicable and horrifying consequences for the spiritual and economic productivity of society. A brutal analogy which, again, got a laugh.

Dennis Miller’s radio program is often a great listen–politicos, comedians, and authors all rub elbows with equal ease in his gentile and eminently courteous broadcast. And Miller himself has lost none of his devastatingly precise comedic chops.

But occasionally, and here is where Miller often stands heads and shoulders over his talk radio peers, he provides something more–sober, sane assessment, and (shock) a little perspective.

Thank God he’s–finally–on our side.

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in the Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, Town Hall, and Pajamas Media. He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story. His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.