Slow And Steady Wins The Race: A Manifesto

I was minded to write about abortion today, specifically why the right to do as you please with your body does include poisoning yourself with drugs but doesn't extend to murdering an infant developing in your womb. However, this post at Cold Fury has reoriented me for the nonce.

Mike Hendrix has long been one of the clearest and most stalwart defenders of freedom in the DextroSphere. Indeed, he's many cuts above quite a large fraction of the salaried commentators of the Right, for two overriding reasons:

• He sees clearly;
• He's consistent over time.

This morning, he cites the value of those virtues...to the other side:

The Left, as always, is playing a long game, while we sit back and tell ourselves it couldn’t possibly be happening, and then are shocked–SHOCKED!–when each new piece of the puzzle slips softly but firmly into place.

Update! Prime example, via Glenn:

As annoying at Toomey is, we should remember that this is like 2% of what the libs sought. They’re grabbing crumbs and calling them a cake.

Uh huh. Why, we’re WINNING!, gang! And the Left continues hacking merrily away at our rights, while we deceive ourselves so as to avoid facing the facts and fighting back against them. And thus the frog eventually boils. Sorry, Kurt, losing a little more slowly is NOT winning. A slave who is granted one day a week of partial freedom to remove his chains and do more or less as he wishes before stepping back into harness for the other six is still a slave.

What Mike calls "the long game" has been in progress for centuries. Indeed, it will never end. It consists in one and only one thing: persistence in pursuit of a clearly envisioned goal.

Of course, there are prerequisites to that sort of persistence:

• You must see your goal clearly;
• You must never, ever accept any setback as final.

The Left has these things corporately if not individually, because from era to era it has possessed a vanguard of aspiring slavemasters: persons whose lust for power is all-consuming and ineradicable. The Right, whose allegiants would love more than anything else in the world to be able to say, "we did it; it's over; we're finally free," and thus be able to ignore politics and government in favor of commerce, family, and the pleasures of civil society, is predisposed in a diametrically opposite direction. Which is why, as "Cato" said in one of the Federalist Papers, the natural course of things is for Tyranny to swell and Liberty to cede ground.

In a "game" that stretches unendingly over the centuries, the Left's clarity and persistence is a winning combination. No logical argument, no moral consensus, and no amount of pleading to be left alone can match it.

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It becomes ever clearer that the Right must equal or exceed the Left's clarity and persistence if freedom is to be preserved for our posterity. There might be a "right" to ignore the State, though I doubt it; after all, you can't have a right that requires the cooperation of unnamed others. What there is, and what always will be given the nature of Man, is political combat: the forces of freedom against the forces of slavery.

Clarity requires comprehension, most importantly comprehension of fundamentals. The critical fundamental here is, of course, the nature of freedom:

Freedom is exactly and only the right to do as you damned well please with what is rightfully yours, bounded only by the equal freedom of all others.

All the "freedoms" vulgarly spoken of -- freedom of expression; freedom of religion; freedom of association; freedom from interference in one's private affairs; freedom from unwarranted search and seizure; and so forth -- are special cases. Infringing on any one of them weakens freedom in general, and thus all the other "freedoms" as well. There is no room for compromise with the Left -- on anything.

Deserving special mention in this connection is the right to keep and bear arms. One cannot claim a right that doesn't imply the right to defend that right. After all, if your "right" can be plucked from your unresisting hands (or your dead body) by armed agents of the State, how real could it be? Which is why the right to keep and bear arms must be defended absolutely, and to the death.

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Because persistence in orientation and effort is married to consistency of thought and expression, I exhort all freedom-lovers to adopt the following terminology and stick rigidly to it:

A man who is subject to being told what he must, may, and may not do with his life and property, on pain of punishment, is a slave.

That the "teller" is the State changes nothing but who will receive the profits from his enslavement. That the Left prefers enslavement to and by the State changes nothing but the tools preferred by its aspiring slavemasters. In this connection, it's important to remember, and to emphasize at every opportunity, that every Leftist imagines himself as a future commissar: a high member of an American nomenklatura privileged to ignore the constraints laid upon the rest of us. Characterize them as such, fearlessly -- and do so without qualification.

They won't like it. They'll scream like raped apes. Don't be daunted; don't concede to considerations of "civility." Their screams are the music for our victory parades.

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Part of the reason I'm back here at Liberty's Torch is that I came to understand that I have a responsibility. Few persons on the Right are clear and consistent about the points above, or capable of articulating them properly. I have those gifts. Think what you like about my supposed arrogance; my motto is "if you can do what you've said you can do, it ain't braggin'." Libertarians are as bad as anyone else; the majority of them continue to demand open borders, "abortion rights," State-recognized same-sex marriage, and a handful of other things inconsistent with the notion of a free people in a freedom-respecting polity. The great majority of "conservative" pundits and spokesmen aren't worth the powder to blow them to Hell.

Freedom needs a new cadre.
Its vanguard must overmatch that of the Left.
Its members must be clear and consistent about their aims.
They must use strong words and uniform rhetoric.
And I want you to be among them.

Let's get to work.