The reason the Bigs are annoying is because they are jumping on minutia and mercilessly pounding it into the ground. Game Change had some inaccuracies, but is it worth 500 articles calling Tom Hanks everything from a truth rapist to the last American communist? Tom Hanks also appears in a video with someone in blackface. Is that worth pounding away? Bill Maher says much worse things than Rush ever said, but do we need to hear about it 10,000 times? Etc. All of this seems petty and it’s somewhat hypocritical in the sense that the Bigs are judging these people under politically correct standards which conservatives don’t accept. And frankly, I don’t personally like it. I don’t find this interesting and I would rather they were more constructive.
So it’s bad, right? Well. . . no.
Here’s the thing. For at least two decades now, the left has worked to isolate conservatives from the culture and make them pariahs. Every time a conservative spoke their mind, the left attacked them using some faked-sleight invented by the left. They would feign offense at some non-offensive word or act and then smear the conservative as racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. It didn’t matter that leftists routinely said the same things, they still attacked. In fact, they would hound these conservatives until the conservatives either left the public sphere or surrendered to the mercy of their persecutors. In this way, they made it impossible for conservatives to have their voices heard because every time a conservative got noticed, they were destroyed personally and professionally. The idea literally was to make sure conservatives were afraid to speak.
And how did conservatives respond? Most cringed and did nothing. And when they saw leftists saying or doing the exact same things the left had attacked conservatives for doing, they remained silent. Why? Because they decided to take the high road. They reasoned that if it wasn’t fair to attack conservatives because of X, then it wouldn’t be fair to attack liberals for X either, so they refused to attack. This was stupid.
For twenty-plus years now, conservatives have let the left destroy conservative after conservative with hypocritical attacks without a peep of challenge except to whine about the hypocrisy. Public life became intolerable for conservatives (look at what they did to Palin for example), while liberals got to skate through saying and doing anything they wanted, secure in the knowledge that conservatives were unwilling to attack them.
No more. The Bigs have declared war. They have taken the same pathetic, petty attacks the left has used to smear conservatives for years and they are now applying those same attacks to leftists. They are fighting fire with fire, because that's the only way to stop what the left is doing. When someone has a weapon they can use with impunity, they will. But when they suddenly realize that others will use it against them, they will stop. Think of it as the cultural version of Mutually Assured Destruction: if you want to try to destroy a conservative as racist/sexist for using a particular word, then we will destroy every liberal who uses that word. This may not make for a pleasant world in the short term, but it is the only way to put an end to these attacks.
Indeed, fighting fire with fire is the only technique which works against the left because they win through incremental progress. In other words, they can win by getting a little bit at a time each time they come to power unless conservatives roll back their gains. For example, for decades, the left concentrated power in the executive branch and the courts. They used that power to force leftist ideas onto businesses, schools, state governments, charities, churches and individuals. When conservatives came to power, they would stupidly declare that they would take the high ground and not use the powers created by the left. The left laughed. And once the conservatives lost power again, the left picked right up where they were before and kept right on pushing -- secure in the knowledge that conservatives lacked the will to use these instruments of power against them.
All of that changed under Bush, particularly in education where Bush used the levers of power liberals created to push liberalism onto schools as a means to impose conservatism instead. Suddenly, the left started howling about state’s rights and attacks on personal freedom and they did their best to strip away the powers they had created. Ditto in the courts, where the left now squeals about legal principles like stare decisis, binding precedent and judicial restraint. . . things they ignored for fifty years while the courts were pushing the country to the left.
It’s the same thing here. Taking the high ground equals surrendering. Conservatives must learn to make the left pay for creating these weapons. This means using the government to bring lawsuits against liberal businesses that violate the laws, sending the IRS after liberal churches, unions and charities which engage in politics, going after race hustler groups and black racist organizations under the civil rights laws, targeting Obama-crony companies like GE with the environmental laws they demanded. . . and making life hell for liberal celebrities who step into the traps liberals have set for conservatives.
That’s what the Bigs are doing. And while I don’t personally enjoy it, I absolutely recognize the value of what they are doing. They are firing back the same nuclear weapons the left has been lobbing at us, and they’ve been rather successful at it. And when the left starts to realize that they are living under an unfair microscope of their own making, they will surrender. . . just as they have every other time conservatives have fought back.
No comments:
Post a Comment