Attacks And Defenses

     First, a brief citation from another blogger that expresses the sentiments of many on the Right today:

     I am exhausted of having to campaign or every red c**t hair’s breadth of my civil rights.

     I am so ready to stack bodies of black bloc and the pussyhat #Resistance on the National Mall like firewood, grab microphone and shout into the night:

     “I am tired of these radicals setting the tone of the national debate. I am tired of having to fight constantly to preserve even the basic semblances of the rights guaranteed to me in the Constitution. Go argue over tax rates and spending cuts and those kinds of things that normal Americans care about. Stop being beholden to the insane Radicals. If you do not understand that, I’ll stack up another 10,000 in black masks and pink hats until you do get the message that we don’t want Socialism and we don’t want to give up our civil rights. It’s the economy you stupid fucks, fix that and leave the Bill of Rights fucking alone.”

     Have you been feeling like that, Gentle Reader?

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     The period between the invasion of Poland in September of 1939 and the blitzkrieg against the Low Countries and France in May of 1940 is often called “the Phony War.” It didn’t look like there was a war in progress. There were no maneuvering armies, no shooting, and no casualties being reported among the major combatants. Things were happening at sea, but they seemed largely irrelevant to the people of Britain and Western Europe. Nazi Germany had invaded Denmark and Norway, and the Soviets had attacked Finland, but those contests, like the sea engagements, were largely ignored by the citizens of the Allied Powers.

     Yet a war was in progress. It would prove to be the largest war ever fought on Earth. Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would host its battles. Many millions would die. The geopolitics of the world would be completely rewritten.

     America is currently in a “phony” phase of its domestic war: i.e., the war over who (and what ideas) shall dominate our nation’s governments. There’s a lot of angry rhetoric, but very little actual violence. Indeed, much of the fighting is explicitly over the meanings of words:

     One of the key lessons of the 2018 elections is that the Left is waging – and winning – a linguistic war. The Left claims and occupies more and more linguistic ground with each new fight.

• Defense of the Founding Fathers becomes defense of white, racist, slaveowners.
• Defense of American identity becomes an act of white male domination.

     ....Wanting to obey the law in counting votes becomes an effort to suppress votes and disenfranchise poor people, minorities, and immigrants.

     The presumption of Democrats winning is so great that Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown said, “[I]f Stacey Abrams doesn't win in Georgia, they stole it, it's clear.”

     Every day, we are watching Democrats break and stretch the law for the sole purpose of winning, while they attack Republicans for wanting an honest count of legal voters.

     Democrats and their liberal media allies know that if they repeat something often enough it begins to be accepted as truth.

     Newt Gingrich’s column goes on to argue that these verbal attacks on the Right are a kind of battlespace preparation: the creation of conditions in which mob violence against conservatives, whether public servants or private citizens, seems morally justified. He could well be right.

     There a war on, and it’s no phony.

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     I’ve wanted to believe that the electorate would come home to traditional American values: individual freedom, the free market, Constitutionally limited government, and national sovereignty. At various points over the previous three decades it looked as if we might be making progress. At other points we appeared to be backsliding toward socialism, globalism, and authoritarian government. All the while, the Left strove to change the meanings of words essential to political discourse.

     How long has it been since you first heard the ominous phrase our truth? I recall seeing it in print more than twenty years ago, during the height of the Sturm und Drang over government funding for AIDS research. The implication that truth itself could be “privatized,” such that what’s true for Smith might not be true for Jones, is terrifying. If we don’t face a common reality with objectively perceptible facts, how could we manage to communicate or cooperate to any worthwhile end?

     The answer isn’t hard to find; it’s just hard to face. Yet the Left has assailed the concept of objective truth – an accurate statement of fact independent of anyone’s feelings or opinions – for decades, promoting in its place a quasi-solipsistic notion that “my truth” need not have any relation to “your truth.” That’s the entering wedge for the replacement of evidence and reason by propaganda.

     The only defense is infinite stubbornness about the meanings of words: an absolute refusal to grant an iota of respect to persons who misuse them. Such persons might think they’re on the side of the angels. Indeed, the Left rhetorical machinations are designed to get them to think so. But they aren’t – and under no circumstances should we accord them the presumption of integrity, for they have enlisted in the effort to make communication and cooperation impossible.

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     Columnist Maggie Gallagher once observed that if there is no such thing as objective truth, our communications amount to nothing more than attempts to manipulate one another, a constant struggle to use and not be used. The battle over the reliability of words we use and the statements we construct from them will only remain nonviolent for a little while. After that, our ability to trust one another will be gone, perhaps forever. Then the lead will start to fly.

     I wish I could end this on a hopeful note. I can’t.