No Substitute for Total Victory

As the Left continues to spiral out of control — foaming, spitting, frothing in rage — it’s time to state the obvious: that in the battle for the soul of America, there can be only one winner. Either we retain as much as possible of the country-as-founded, including its national character, or we watch it “fundamentally transformed” into a “social democracy” of the kind envisioned by the adherents of Critical Theory, and brought to us courtesy of the Frankfurt School‘s ideological seizure of academe. Although some might wish otherwise, there is no middle ground, no accommodation, no splitting the difference.

Our opponents on the Left understand this perfectly well. Their motto, for decades, has been “there is only the fight,” which also happens to have been the title of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s senior thesis at Wellesley. They’ve made it very clear all along that they’re in this for the long haul. Conservatives like to think that history, tradition, logic, and morality will win out in the end, and that our opponents will eventually see the error of their ways, if not the light. But as history shows, that’s simply not true. The Left won’t stop unless it is stopped. Which means that, for us, total victory in the defense of Western civilization and the American ideal is the only option.

Ascribing good motives to our friends across the aisle is a fool’s errand. Like most villains, they think of themselves as the heroes of their own twisted morality play, casting themselves as noble superheroes for truth, silver-surfing the “arc of history” as it bends toward their definition of justice. We, however, see their assault on our history, customs, and traditions as nothing of the sort; to us, they are the vandals who cannot abide something they had little or no hand in creating, and just want to see the world burn. After watching liberals hide behind the Bill of Rights for decades — because it protected them when they were weak — we can only shake our heads in wonder at the effrontery of something like this story in the house organ of Leftist Central, the New York Times:

On the final day of the Supreme Court term last week, Justice Elena Kagan sounded an alarm. The court’s five conservative members, citing the First Amendment, had just dealt public unions a devastating blow. The day before, the same majority had used the First Amendment to reject a California law requiring religiously oriented “crisis pregnancy centers” to provide women with information about abortion. Conservatives, said Justice Kagan, who is part of the court’s four-member liberal wing, were “weaponizing the First Amendment.”

But it wasn’t enough for the Times to simply quote Kagan, it then had to support her argument with its own voice (in this case, that of the writer, Adam Liptak)…

The two decisions were the latest in a stunning run of victories for a conservative agenda that has increasingly been built on the foundation of free speech. Conservative groups, borrowing and building on arguments developed by liberals, have used the First Amendment to justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals and guns.

… and then find a handy fellow traveler to endorse its editorial stance:

“The right, which had for years been hostile to and very nervous about a strong First Amendment, has rediscovered it,” said Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University.

Behold the Leftist jiu-jitsu at its baldest. I’ve been a conservative all of my adult life and have been a First Amendment absolutist from the start; this is also true of every other conservative I’ve ever met. It is a flat-out lie to say that the Right is “hostile to” the 1A. Indeed, I long believed that the common ground the Left so often speaks of was to be found in both sides’ fidelity to free speech and the associated freedoms mentioned in the amendment’s text. The Left has since disabused me of that notion.

“The libertarian position has become dominant on the right on First Amendment issues,” said Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the Cato Institute. “It simply means that we should be skeptical of government attempts to regulate speech. That used to be an uncontroversial and nonideological point. What’s now being called the libertarian position on speech was in the 1960s the liberal position on speech.”

Now, it’s the Left that has no use for free speech, even going to far as to attack free speech as “racist.” What they mean is that, having no further need for the shield of the 1A, they now want to prevent us from enjoying its protection as well.

Liberals who once championed expansive First Amendment rights are now uneasy about them. “The left was once not just on board but leading in supporting the broadest First Amendment protections,” said Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer and a supporter of broad free-speech rights. “Now the progressive community is at least skeptical and sometimes distraught at the level of First Amendment protection which is being afforded in cases brought by litigants on the right.” Many on the left have traded an absolutist commitment to free speech for one sensitive to the harms it can inflict.

This is why there can be no peace with the Left: in their zeal to destroy the pillars of the American Republic, they keep moving the goal posts, discarding positions faster than runway models can change clothes. To conservatives, this appears to be inconsistency or hypocrisy, but to “progressives” there is nothing at all contradictory about it: whatever serves the cause will be wielded as a weapon against the established order. The only consistency they have is their desire to win “by any means necessary.”

Hence their current over-the-top rage, which began the night of Hillary’s defeat and has only intensified since, as the president has reeled off a string of successes, and their transparently phony “Russian collusion” charges designed as a rearguard action to bring Trump down have utterly failed. Instead, they have been reduced to pining for Barack Hussein Obama — still in their minds the “real” president:

How did the most ubiquitous man in America for eight years virtually disappear? Over the course of his presidency, Obama cast himself as the country’s secular minister as much as its commander-in-chief, someone who understood the moral core of the nation and felt compelled to insist that we live up to it. What explains his near absence from the political stage, where he might argue publicly against the reversals of his policy accomplishments, and also from American life more broadly? What is keeping him from speaking more frequently about the need to protect democratic norms and the rule of law, to be decent people? Where is the man who cried after Sandy Hook and sang in Charleston, who after each mass shooting tried to soothe an outraged nation, who spoke of American values in his travels across the globe? And, tactically, what is behind the relative silence of one of the most popular figures alive just as American politics appears to so many to be on the brink of breaking?

As it turns out, that, too, is a piece of prize disinformation. Obama hasn’t gone anywhere — he didn’t even have the decency to leave Washington when his second term was up and, in fact, has been working behind the scenes to coordinate the “resistance,” as Paul Sperry notes:

Obama is doing far more to shape the political landscape than is visible. In fact, for an ex-prez, he’s taking an unusually active role in politics, including helping radical protest groups fight Trump and his policies and devising a scheme to flip the GOP majority in the House and permanently turn red seats blue.

From his sprawling DC office not far from the White House, where he oversees a full-time staff of 20, Obama has held regular meetings with Democratic lawmakers, as well as DNC chief Tom Perez, whom he personally helped install to run the Democratic Party. Obama has also met with his attorney general, Eric Holder, to craft a strategy to redraw congressional district maps in Democrats’ favor, according to Politico. Holder now runs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which Obama helped his old friend launch.

Obama, who maintains a home in Chicago, originally said he only planned to stay in Washington temporarily, until his youngest daughter, Sasha, now 17, finished high school there. But the family is clearly putting down deeper roots. They recently bought their DC rental home and erected a massive security wall around the property, which includes offices, and are installing a swimming pool.

While it may be true Obama does not want to engage directly in Washington politics, including personally protesting Trump’s policies, he is using a political-organizing group he founded to do that for him. That nonprofit — Organizing for Action — is not exactly a household name. But it is no less than the organizing and training hub of the anti-Trump resistance.

That the Democrats sorely miss Obama — a prize con man all his life — is no surprise. Their superannuated party is visibly falling apart, and the fact that the Democrat-Media Complex instantaneously made a star out of a young woman nobody had ever heard of before Tuesday’s New York primaries tell you all you need to know about how desperate they are.

The Democrats, however, should be directing their anger not at Trump and the Republicans, but at themselves. Had they let Hillary have her turn in 2008, instead of roundheeling for Barry, she very well might have won against either McCain or Romney and then passed the baton to Obama who, with four to eight years’ more seasoning, would have been perfectly positioned to finish the “progressive” demolition of America.

As usual, however, they let their passions control their heads and just couldn’t wait to “make history” (like all true Marxists, they’re obsessed with history) by nominating the first plausible black (or, more accurately, mixed-race) candidate for president, and so got ahead of themselves when they should have been taking the long view. By the time Mrs. Clinton’s turn finally came around — and only after rigging the primaries in order to be able to defeat the aging communist Bernie Sanders — who wasn’t even a registered Democrat — she was flyblown and shopworn. A more mature Obama would have been a very dangerous individual indeed, but the still-youthful Barry of 2008-16 was, luckily for us, too indolent and obsessed with golf and hip-hop parties to do as much damage as he might have.

And neither the Clintons nor the Obamas would even have been possible were it not for the Bushes, pere et fils, who gave us both of them. We owe it to ourselves never to let that happen again.

Because Trump was not an ideological figure entering the White House, he’s had to adopt his conservatism on the fly, and not from the “movement conservatives” (a collection of small children, impotent narcissists, and crashing bores) who make up the decreasing ranks of the Nevertrumpumpkins, but from bitter experience. The more he’s attacked by the Left, the more determined he is to become their worst nightmare. And if you want to know when that idea first entered his head, you need look no farther than here:

In retrospect, this may well have been the moment when the Left assured its own destruction. Because Trump’s never been an accommodationist, because he does not accept the movement-conservatives’ notion that some wars cannot be won and therefore must go on forever, and because he’s not afraid of total victory, Trump has a chance to defeat the cultural Marxists once and for all, dealing them a blow just as final as that which finished the economic Marxists when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Don’t look for a re-run of the surrender at Appomattox, though — the modern Left lacks even an ounce of Robert E. Lee’s grace and class. On the other hand, Trump won’t need to demonstrate Ulysses S. Grant’s magnaminity to his defeated enemies. He just has to crush them.