Will we have
politics-as-conversation or politics-as-war? Those are the only choices.
The arena of
contemporary American politics is a confused place.
And so-called conservatives—Republican politicians, yes,
but, particularly, those in the mainstream “conservative media” or Big
Conservatism—are especially confused.
Historically, within the West, there can be discerned
two rival ideal political types between which discourse and practice have
oscillated. On the one hand, politics has been conceived in terms of
a conversation as it is the ultimate expression of civilization.
On the other hand, however, politics also has been
viewed as an extension of war, the quintessential existential
civilizational crisis that, in encouraging the human penchant
for violence, threatens to undermine civilization in favor of barbarism.
Big Conservatism
seems to want to have it both ways.
Beating the War Drums for Cash
Those in official positions within Big Conservatism seem
to relish in patting themselves on the back for refusing to resort to the
gutter tactics regularly employed by their leftist opponents. Every time these
media celebrities slam the Left for their raucous street demonstrations,
boycotts, demonization campaigns, “doxxing,” blacklisting of their enemies, and
outright violence against conservatives while highlighting their unwillingness
to do the same in return, Big
Conservatives are saying nothing more or less than this: “We are
much more civilized than are our opponents on the Left.”
Well, OK. But at what point does this become delusional?
Big Conservatives, despite incessant assurances to their
constituents that the Left poses the greatest of existential threats to the
West, steadfastly refrain from deploying their (vast) resources in influence,
recognition, and affluence to the end of combating, to say nothing of
eliminating this threat.
Conservatives, we are repeatedly told, are radically
unlike leftists inasmuch as they are truly “tolerant” of alternative
perspectives and genuinely value “free speech.”
At the same time, however, they do indeed
characterize the Left as the greatest of existential threats to
America and the whole of Western civilization. It is, after all, precisely
because the Left has long ached to “fundamentally transform” our country, as
Barack Obama so memorably put it, that Big Conservatives have seen in leftism
an ominous design.
Big Conservatism also routinely describes the relationship
between the Left and the rest of America as being one of war—a
“cultural war,” say, or a “second civil war,” or “a war for America’s soul.”
War Games Are Not Games
Yet
politics-as-conversation (PAC) and politics-as-war (PAW) are not only mutually
distinct conceptions of politics; they are mutually antithetical. They differ
not only in degree, but in kind.
Conversation, even when it contains passages that are
dramatic and tense, is still a kind of play, a species of
discourse between interlocutors who implicitly consent to one and the same set
of rules, rules prescribing civility, mutual respect, a
willingness to listen, and in the absence of which dialogue of any
sort is impossible.
Conversation is a cooperative endeavor between persons
who, even while disagreeing, and perhaps disagreeing vehemently, are
nevertheless at least tacitly friendly with one another. At a
minimum, conversation categorically precludes violence of any form.
War, in glaring contrast, is the ultimate expression of
violence.
The difference between PAC and PAW might be understood
in light of an analogy from the world of martial arts. Although most people
(including, remarkably, many practitioners of the martial arts) appear to be
unaware of it, the fact is that between classical martial arts and combat
sports and combative self-defense there is an unbridgeable gap. As for
“Wrestlemania”-type professional wrestling and real combat, the chasm is that
much more obvious.
A genuinely combative system of the sort designed by the
men (William Fairbairn, Rex Applegate, Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, and some
others) who pioneered what are now known as “World War II close-quarter
combatives” while preparing U.S. soldiers in the 1940s for hand-to-hand combat
in the South Pacific and elsewhere is meant only for life-or-death attacks.
There is nothing competitive, aesthetically edifying, or entertaining about it.
Retired Marine Corps Lieutenant-Colonel Al Ridenhour is
a senior master instructor of the combative art known as “Guided Chaos” and the
founder of Warrior Flow. He is also my master. Not long
ago Master Al shared with me his philosophy of fighting and self-defense, a
philosophy shared by such prominent veteran teachers of mortal combat as
Professor Bradley J. Steiner, founder of American
Combato, and Grandmaster John Perkins, founder of Guided
Chaos.
“Yes, we are teaching people life and death combat,”
Master Al said. “For us, a real fight is akin to war.
You either go big or you go home. There is no in between.”
Real fighting is akin to war.
Unlike the arena, the dojo, the ring, and the octagon,
there are no rules, regulations, sportsmanship, or fair play in war. A
participant in war has two options: He either can deploy with “ruthless
intention,” as Master Al refers to the mindset necessary for victory in
battle—every resource at his disposal to crush the enemy into oblivion—or else
he must avoid war at all costs.
Defeat is not an
option. Nothing less than unqualified victory is sought by the combatant.
Anyone who lacks
this attitude—who isn’t, so to speak, in it to win it—has no business being
anywhere near a battlefield (of any kind), for this painfully conspicuous
absence of the “moral clarity” needed to destroy the bad guys is sure to
imperil the good guys.
So Which Is It?
Big Conservatives can’t have it both ways. Either there
is a war between the Left and the rest of us or there is not. If there is a
war, then leftists compose the enemy, an adversary that, not unlike any other
adversary in war, needs to be destroyed.
Half-measures, to say nothing of such emphatically un-war-like
activities as “reaching across the aisle” and dialoguing, are to be
rejected unless and only if they can end
hostilities on terms that do not contribute to the “fundamental transformation”
of our civilization.
Big Conservatives who constantly call on their audiences
to help them “fight” the Left need to decide whether they endorse PAC or PAW.
They scarcely ever fail to use the rhetoric of war, and
spend no small amount of time pointing out to their listeners, viewers, and
readers how and why it is that the Left truly is toxic to the survival of
Western civilization and America. Yet they just as rarely advocate any measures
that could reasonably be said to constitute strategies, or even tactics,
against this enemy.
Big Conservatives seldom possess the stomach to even
call the Left—which they convict of all sorts of crimes against
humanity—as the enemy of our civilization. This is why so many
of them distanced themselves from President Trump when he followed, impeccably followed,
the logic of their own narrative to its inescapable conclusion by calling out
the leftist media as “the enemy of the people.”
Of course, it’s true that the hyperbolic rhetoric that
comprises the politics-as-war template for which the Big Conservative media is
known is far more titillating—far better for circulation, ratings, and, thus,
profits—than the terminology proper to politics-as-conversation.
But as Master Al said, since real fights are war, and
nothing less than life-or-death is at stake in war, those who would become
combatants must be willing to either “go big” or “go home.”
That Big
Conservatism essentially does nothing more than wax indignant over the Left’s
“double standards,” i.e. the enemy’s partiality to—imagine this?—itself,
establishes to all with eyes to see not only that Big Conservatives are
resolutely unwilling to “go big.”
They don’t even
have the slightest clue as to what politics as war entails.
Until and unless
such time arrives that they become willing to make their walk match their talk,
they should “go home.”
