Politics & Power Quote by Rush Limbaugh

Limbaugh wraps a blunt political program in the velvet language of the Founding, and that contrast is the engine of the line. By invoking "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness", he borrows America’s most sanctified moral vocabulary, then repurposes it as a membership test: if you "believe" in those ideals (as he defines them), you’re on the side of virtue and deserve success. It’s a populist blessing with an asterisk.

The repetition - "any force, any person, any element" - isn’t ornamental. It creates a feeling of encirclement, as if individual striving is perpetually under siege. "Big Government" becomes less a policy critique than a villain with agency, a looming organism that "would stop your success". That framing is key: it shifts political disagreement from competing visions of the common good into a morality play of aspiration versus sabotage. If you’re struggling, the culprit isn’t the market, your employer, or bad luck; it’s an "overarching" system with its hand on your throat.

There’s also a tactical tenderness here. "I want you to succeed" is intimate talk-radio intimacy, the host positioning himself as ally, protector, and translator of grievance. The subtext is transactional: trust me, and I will name your enemy. In the broader context of Limbaugh’s era - post-Reagan conservatism hardened into culture-war media - this is less persuasion than consolidation, turning libertarian language into a rallying chant against not just bureaucracy, but the legitimacy of governance that restrains winners.