You may be right, but there's a proviso
What does it mean to steadfastly adhere to principles when you've taken stomping those who disagree with them into the ground off the table?
I write about a rather wide spectrum of topics both here and at Late in the Day, but if there’s an overarching theme to the preponderance of my posts in either venue, it’s the accelerated momentum of our civilizational decline.
It’s good to set the table for discussions about recent developments on this front with occasional looks back at how the entire impetus toward decline got going. Carl Trueman, in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, deems it appropriate - rightly so, in my estimation - to go back to Rousseau and then up through the Romantic poets, Freud, Marx and Darwin in order to get a proper handle on how the West has lost a sense of recognizable direction. The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell starts with a more recent set of phenomena, falling under three categories, race (the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the divergence between the MLK approach and that of militant groups such as the Black Panthers), Sex (Playboy magazine, the birth control pill, the feminist movement) and War (Vietnam). I may have differences with some assertions he makes along the way about particular details, but he winds up effectively showing how we got to the point in 2016 where Donald Trump emerged as the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party.
That development signified a significant shift in two political and cultural factors that had previously been reliably fixed.
Even though the 1955 founding of National Review, Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative, and Ronald Reagan’s October 1964 “A Time For Choosing” speech endorsing Goldwater are cited as arguably the key events in the defining of modern - in the sense of coming into being within the last century - conservatism, the Republican Party had become the natural home for champions of free-market economics, fealty to tradition, Judeo-Christian morality, and a foreign policy based on a defense of such things some time earlier. In large part, this is because the Democratic Party had, from the original Progressives forward, made the Left feel welcome in its fold.
That’s not the Republican Party of 2016 to the present. Actual conservatives are sidelined while charlatans and grifters in thrall to the Very Stable Genius dominate.
The second shift is that this takeover lent legitimacy to leftist claims that Republicans had always been half-cocked loudmouths who were fine with bigotry and rank hypocrisy.
Democrats, meanwhile, have become determined in serving notice to those who would dare to deviate on any point from their ever-more-strident leftism that there’s no room for that to a degree that makes Democrat treatment of the likes of Scoop Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan look like textbook tolerance.
Thus has the tone from the power centers in each party become so raw, vulgar and hateful that our national divide seems impossible to heal. School board meetings across the country have become arenas of breakdown of basic order. Board members fear for their very safety as they face the screams of those who have made mask policy a hill to die on. People in law enforcement are leaving that career field in record numbers as city councils move to defund police departments.
It starts with the political figures on each side. Shall we name some names? Joe Biden has called the Georgia election-law update “Jim Crow on steroids.” Jeff Goodell, in a Rolling Stone piece entitled “Joe Manchin Just Cooked The Planet,” asserts that "[u]nless Manchin changes his position dramatically, he will be remembered as the man who, when the moment of decision came, chose to condemn virtually every living creature on Earth to a hellish future of suffering, hardship, and death." Donald Trump, pulling his choice of a way to lambaste Liz Cheney apparently out of his ass, called her a “warmonger and disloyal Republican.” Kurt Schlichter, in a recent Townhall column, called George W. Bush a “backstabbing creep” and “garbage.”
That last example is notable because it has to do with President Bush’s subtle conveyance of the message that the January 6 US Capitol insurgents constituted a real threat to democracy. The fact is that that’s exactly what they were. Given the takeover of the Republican Party by Trumpists, if there is an election in the next few cycles that is even somewhat close, the yay-hoos will question its legitimacy. The incident last winter went far to erode the sanctity of our Constitutional framework.
When I first embarked on opinion writing, I thought it was clever to come up with monikers for my ideological enemies. Hillary Clinton was Madame Bleachbit. Barack Obama was The Most Equal Comrade. There may have been a point at the time for using that device to drive home the image of various figures I was discussing. Still, given what has transpired since, I am more sympathetic to the argument that it was a crude and gratuitous rhetorical flourish.
It no longer reflects who I want to be.
I will confess that an annoying voice surfaces among my thoughts along the lines of “Do you lack the spine/cojones to fight this fight effectively, whatever that’s going to entail?”
At least presently, my answer is no, precisely because I don’t think snark and dismissiveness are the least bit effective.
Here’s the lay of the land at present: Each “side” - and I put that term in quotes because the sides I’m talking about have resolutely excluded anyone interested in classical liberalism or a national unity sufficient to ensure an American future anyone finds recognizable - is convinced that a future for the country worth living into involves stomping the other side into the dust.
Now, to be sure, I very much want my side to emerge victorious in whatever is happening at present. But, given the values I embrace, you don’t get there by stomping your opponents into the dust. It’s antithetical to the values I claim to uphold. I’m a Christian ( a really crummy one; follow me around for a day and you’ll see what I mean), and I consider that core to the personal definition of conservatism to which I adhere. That means that I want to see even the most scurrilous and despicable among us cross over into heaven on that day in which there is no sunset and no dawning.
If there’s a consensus about anything in post-America, it’s that our current divide is probably irreversible. Should the intentions of our hearts have some claim on possibility - that is, should the divide be reversible after all - it ain’t going to come from stomping the bad guys into the ground.
So what does a playing-out of this perspective look like?
I’d say it starts with taking one’s time, when one gets into snits, either in person at, say, uncomfortable dinner parties, or online, when someone who makes your teeth grind shows up in the comment thread of your social-media post, to grasp the perspective that the exchange is one between fallible human beings in need of divine grace. From that place, you can begin to construct a response that best reflects your deepest self.
That is, after all, what you want to defend, isn’t it? What you know to be immutable and sacred?
Take a deep breath before you begin to formulate your reply. Recognition of your status as a fallen creature is a component of the worldview you’d like to perpetuate, I hope.
Let’s all give it a try this week and see how it goes.