Category: Politics

Should Conservatives Take the High Road When Opposing the Left?

This just over the transom from a regular reader:

Your recent, small quip about the possibility of accusing liberals of racism had me curious of something. Clearly you think that many on the left use unfair or unjust means of persuasion (Attempting to label their opponents as racists, for example.) And I've often heard it lamented that liberals tend to fight tooth and nail, using every fair and unfair advantage they can, in a political dispute (see the possibilities of the 'nuclear option' or bypassing a vote in this health care debate, etc.) while conservatives tend to be reluctant to.

So here's my question. Do you think conservatives should mimic liberals in this regard – fight tooth and nail, use every means available, including calling their opponents racists, etc,? Or do you think conservatives should (regardless of pure pragmatic effectiveness) always take the high road? Doubly so since conservatives actually believe there is a real high road to take?

High road low road I wish I had a good answer to this excellent question.  First of all, I agree to the central presupposition of the question, namely, that leftists will do and say anything to win, no matter how outrageous.  (Here is a recent example of the  widespread race-baiting and slander that even prominent leftists routinely engage in.)   They do it because they think the end justifies the means, and  because of their conviction that, as the Bard has it, "all's fair in love and war."  Leftists think of themselves as good and decent people who are battling valiantly against the dark forces of bigotry, racism, religious fanaticism, science-denial, etc.  And because they see themselves in a noble fight against people who are not just wrong, but evil, they feel entirely justified in doing whatever it takes to win. 

The essence of it is that the Left accepts and lives by what I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle: Politics is war conducted by other means.  (Von Clausewitz's famous remark was to the effect that war is politics conducted by other means.)  The party that ought to be opposing the Left, the Republicans, apparently does not believe that this is what politics is.  This puts them at a serious disadvantage. 

 David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:

In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability.  Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles.  But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.

You have only thirty seconds to make your point.  Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it.  Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life.  Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich.  Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case.  You are politically dead.

Politics is war.  Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)

It is clear how Horowitz would answer my reader's question:  Because politics is war, conservatives, if they want to win, must deploy the same tactics the lefties deploy.  Joe SixPack does not watch C-Span or read The Weekly Standard.  He won't sit still for Newt Gingrich as this former history professor calmly articulates conservative principles.  He needs to be fired up and energized.  The Left understands this.  You will remember that the race-hustling poverty pimp Jesse Jackson never missed an opportunity to refer to Gingrich's "Contract with America" as "Contract ON America."  That outrageous slander was of course calculated and was effective.  Leftists know how to fight dirty, and therefore the 'high road' is the road to political nowhere in present circumstances.

The fundamental problem, I am afraid, is that there is no longer any common ground. When people stand on common ground, they can iron out their inevitable differences in a civil manner within the context of shared assumptions.  But when there are no longer any (or many) shared assumptions,  then politics does become a form of warfare in which your opponent is no longer a fellow citizen committed to similar values, but an enemy who must be destroyed (if not physically, at least in respect of his political power) if you and your way of life are to be preserved.

As I have said before, the bigger and more intrusive the government, the more to fight over.  If we could reduce government to its legitimate constitutionally justified functions, then we could reduce the amount of fighting.  But of course the size, scope, and reach of government is precisely one of the issues most hotly debated.

Coming back to my reader's question, I incline toward the Horowitz answer, though I am not comfortable with it.  You will have to decide for yourself, taking into consideration the particulars of your situation.  Some of us are buying gold and 'lead.'  I suspect things are going to get hot in the years to to come, and I'm not talking about global warming.  Things are about to get interesting.

Primum Non Nocere

"First of all, do no harm."  Not just for medicos.  Also for the benighted politicos who would 'fix' health care.  Their approach is a bit like fixing a roof leak by tearing down the house and building a new one. 

And don't you just love the way these idiots use 'fix' and broken'?  Talk like a first-grader and you'll think like one too.  And these fools are our rulers? 

Balık baştan kokar

Balık baştan kokar is Turkish for "The fish stinks from the head."  Quite apropos of the Obama administration the corruption, incompetence, and stupidity of which boggles the mind. He's done everything wrong.  But there is hope: Obama's fiscal irresponsibility and liberty-destroying socialist malfeasance has suffered a massive rebuke in, of all places, the People's Republic of Taxachusetts. Here are the precinct-by-precinct statistics of Brown's win over Coakley in the Bay State.  (Perhaps it should be called the Pay State.)  The results for Cambridge precinct show a whopping 84% for Coakley (DEM) and a paltry 15% for Brown (GOP).  No surprise there, of course.  You know what Cambridge is home to.

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How Joan Baez Got Politicized

Dylan baez David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, 2001, p. 147:

Dylan nestled his guitar on his lap and began strumming a C chord in three-quarter time. He repeated it until the small room hushed, then he slid into the opening of "With God on Our Side." By the end of the song's nine verses, Joan Baez was no longer indifferent to Bob Dylan or irked by his crush on her sister Mimi. She was startled by the music she heard and fascinated with the fact that the enigma in the filthy jeans had created it. "When I heard him sing 'With God on Our Side,' I took him seriously," said Joan. "I was bowled over. I never thought anything so powerful could come out of that little toad. It was devastating. 'With God on Our Side' is a very mature song. It's a beautiful song. When I hear that, it changed the way I thought of Bob. I realize that he was more mature than I thought. He even looked a little better." Social consciousness as an aphrodisiac? [. . .]

Dylan played a few more of his topical songs, including "The Death of Emmett Till," "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," and "Masters of War." They astounded Spoelstra, who had not kept up with his old Village cohort's development as a songwriter, and they seemed to overwhelm Baez. (In one interview, Baez recalled "The Death of Emmett Till," not "With God on Our Side," as the Dylan song that changed her view of him and prompted her to take up protest music; "I was basically a traditional folksinger," she said. "I was not 'political' at that time. When I heard 'Emmett Till' I was knocked out. It was my first political song. That song turned me into a political folksinger."

Political Action and the Principle of Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien

Attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good."

Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Obama, who has proven that he is a disaster for the country, got in in part because of conservatives who could not abide McCain.

Politics is a practical business. It is always about the lesser of evils, except when it is about the least of evils. It is not about being ideologically pure. It is about accomplishing something in a concrete situation in which holding out for the best is tantamount to acquiescing in the bad. Political choices are forced options in roughly William James' sense: he who abstains chooses willy-nilly. His not choosing the better amounts to a choice of the worse.

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Ronald Reagan’s Role in the Fall of the Wall

Twenty years today the Berlin Wall came down.  Anthony R. Dolan in Four Little Words explains the difference between a leader like Reagan and an appeaser like Obama.  Excerpt (emphasis added):

Reagan had the carefully arrived at view that criminal regimes were different, that their whole way of looking at the world was inverted, that they saw acts of conciliation as weakness, and that rather than making nice in return they felt an inner compulsion to exploit this perceived weakness by engaging in more acts of aggression. All this confirmed the criminal mind's abiding conviction in its own omniscience and sovereignty, and its right to rule and victimize others.

Accordingly, Reagan spoke formally and repeatedly of deploying against criminal regimes the one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity . . . . This was the sort of moral confrontation, as countless dissidents and resisters have noted, that makes these regimes conciliatory, precisely because it heartens those whom they fear most—their own oppressed people. Reagan's understanding that rhetorical confrontation causes geopolitical conciliation led in no small part to the wall's collapse 20 years ago today.

The current administration, most recently with overtures to Iran's rulers and the Burmese generals, has consistently demonstrated that all its impulses are the opposite of Reagan's. Critics who are worried about the costs of economic policies adopted in the last 10 months might consider as well the impact of the administration's systematic accommodation of criminal regimes and the failure to understand what "good vs. evil" rhetoric can do.

Political Discourse as Unavoidably Polemical: the Converse Clausewitz Principle

A regular reader writes:

I would urge some caution withyour recent political cartoon.  This is only because you may unjustly be treated with less seriousness than your blog deserves if someone wants to peg you in a certain way.  I'm certainly not being PC or suggesting that political satire is problematic — it's primarily a tactical point.

I couldn't agree more, of course, that liberalism (and, in particular, it's diseased and mutated zombie baby of multiculturalism) is attempting, even if unwittingly, to destroy its host body.  The cartoon is a very powerful one, indeed!

Point taken.  It's a tricky issue.  But I think it is important to let our opponents know that we will oppose them.  There is no way not to be unfairly pegged by the nimrods and numbskulls of the Left.  So conservatives shouldn't worry about it.  Janeane Garofalo's comment that the 'tea-baggers' as she derisively refers to them are racists and rednecks is, I am afraid, representative of the scum-baggery widespread on the Left.  We should stand up to them and speak the truth with courage.

Would that I could avoid this stuff.  But I cannot in good conscience retreat into my inner citadel and let my country be destroyed — the country that makes it possible for me to cultivate the garden of solitude, retreat into my inner citadel, and pursue pure theory for its own sake.

Political discourse is unavoidably polemical. The zoon politikon must needs be a zoon polemikon. ‘Polemical’ is from the Greek polemos, war, strife. According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, strife is the father of all: polemos panton men pater esti . . . (Fr. 53) I don't know about the 'all,' but strife  is certainly at the root of politics.  Politics is polemical because it is a form of warfare: the point is to defeat the opponent and remove him from power, whether or not one can rationally persuade him of what one takes to be the truth. It is practical rather than theoretical in that the aim is to implement what one takes to be the truth rather than contemplate it.  'What one takes to be the truth': that is the problem in a nutshell.  Conservatives and leftists disagree fundamentally and nonnegotiably.

Implementation of what one takes to be the truth, however, requires that one get one’s hands on the levers of power. Von Clausewitz  held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what could be called the converse-Clausewitz principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means.

A political cartoon like the one I posted surely won't convert any leftists.  How could it, when the 281 patiently argued pages of David Horowitz's Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery 2004) made no impression on them?  The Left cannot be persuaded; they must be opposed.

Palin Derangement Syndrome: Another Case

(Written 5 October 2008)

Here is how Richard Cohen begins a recent column:

Thank God for Sarah Palin. Without her jibes, her sarcasm, her exaggerations, her smug provincialism, her hypocrisy about family and government, her exploitation of mommyhood and her personal attacks on Barack Obama, the Democratic base might never be consolidated. This much is certain: Obama could never do it.

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Pessimistic Thoughts on Political Discourse in America

Mark Crispin Miller The following piece was written on 12 April 2006.  I repost it, slightly emended, because events since then have led me to believe that the grounds for pessimism are even stronger now than they were before.  It is becoming increasingly clear that conservatives and liberals/leftists live on 'different planets.'  And it is becoming increasingly clear which planet bears the name 'Reality.'  A return to federalism may help mitigate tensions, as I suggest here.  But that is not likely to happen.

………………………….

A few nights ago on C-Span I listened to a talk by Mark Crispin Miller given at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). His theme was that of a book he had authored alleging that the 2004 election was stolen by the Republicans and how democracy is dead in the USA. Not having read Crispin's book, I cannot comment on it. But I will offer a few remarks on his talk.

Miller, a tenured professor at New York University, is obviously intelligent and highly articulate and entertaining to listen to, his mannerisms and delivery reminiscent of Woody Allen. He takes himself to be a defender of the values of the Enlightenment. But then so do I. So here is the beginning of a 'disconnect.' From my point of view, Miller is an extremist motivated by the standard Leftist fear of, and hostility toward, religion. (Miller's NYU colleague, Thomas Nagel, owns up to his fear of religion, as I document here.) Miller's hostility was betrayed a dozen or so times during his speech by mocking turns of phrase. But of course he doesn't see himself as an extremist but as a sober defender of values he feels are threatened by Christian Reconstructionism, also know as  Dominion Theology.

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How Sartre Saw the USA

Jean-Paul Sartre's "Americans and Their Myths" appeared in The Nation in the issue of 18 October, 1947. The article concludes:

The anguish of the American confronted with Americanism is an ambivalent anguish; as if he were asking, "Am I American enough?" and at the same time, "How can I escape from Americanism?" In America a man's simultaneous answers to these two questions make him what he is, and each man must find his own answers.

It sounds like projection to me. Anguish? Ambivalence? Had I been able to drag Jean-Paul's sorrily citified Parisian ass away from his cafes, Gauloises, and Stalinist comrades and through the Superstition Mountains in June — well, perhaps the univocity of rock and sun and the reality of a world that is not man-made but also not a featureless surd-like en soi would have cured his anguished ambiguity.

The Bigger the Government, the More to Fight Over

Taking a page from Prager, I've already noted that big government makes for small citizens.  Let us also note that government expansion exacerbates political divisions and sets citizen against citizen. 

Suppose we get to the point where Washington bureaucrats  dictate what types of cars and trucks will be manufactured.  Then you can be sure that there will be more lobbying, more corruption and the buying of votes, more fighting.    Or suppose the czars of Obamacare begin dictating how many cardiologists we need, how many gastroenterologists, etc.  Do you think medical students, physicians, and their patients will take that lying down?  Hell no, they will organize and fight and protest and lobby.  They will be justified in doing so because of the constitutionally protected right to a redress of grievances.

Do you like contention and division?  Then support bigger government.  We are coming apart as a nation as Patrick J. Buchanan documents here.   The rifts are deep and nasty.  Polarization and demonization of the opponent are the order of the day.  Do you want more of this?  Then give government more say in your life.  Do you want less?  Then support limited government and federalism.

Federalism, roughly, is (i) a form of political organization in which governmental power is divided among a central government and various constituent governing entities such as states, counties, and cities; (ii) subject to the proviso that the central and constituent governments retain their separate identities and assigned duties. A government that is not a federation would allow for the central government to create and reorganize constituent governments at will and meddle in their affairs.  Federalism is implied by the Tenth Amendment tothe U.S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." 

Federalism would make for less contention, because people who love high taxes and liberal schemes could head for the People's Republic of Taxachusetts or the Left coast state of Californication,  while the  conservatively inclined who support gun rights and capital punishment could gravitate toward states like Texas.

The fact of the matter is that we do not agree on a large number of divisive, passion-inspiring issues (abortion, gun rights, capital punishment, wealth redistribution . . .) and we will never agree on them.  These are not merely 'academic' issues since they directly affect the lives and livelihoods and liberties of people.  And they are not easily resolved because they are rooted deep in fundamental worldview differences.  When you violate a man's liberty, or mock his moral sense, or threaten to destroy his way of life, you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it. 

Recognizing these facts, we must ask ourselves: How can we keep from tearing each other apart literally or figuratively?  I am floating the suggestion that federalism and severe limitations on the reach of the central government are what we need.  Example:  Suppose Roe v. Wade is overturned and the question of the legality of abortion is returned to the states.  Some states will make it legal, others illegal.  This would be a modest step in the direction of mitigating the tensions between the warring camps.  If abortion is a question for the states, then no federal monies could be allocated to the support of abortion.  People who want to live in abortion states can move there; people who don't can move to states in which abortion is illegal.