How Much Ruthlessness Is Enough - Road to the Middle Class

“We will be quick, ruthless, and diligent. We won’t show mercy, because we haven’t gotten any. We will play their game, and play it better. And we will prevail.”

He was talking about the grand plan of the Angry Left to stop the GOP nuclear option dead in its tracks. When the GOP triggers the nuclear option on the nomination of Priscilla Owen to the U.S. Court of Appeals, they will text-message all their friends and swamp the Senate switchboard with calls.

It makes sense that Kos and his lefty friends should believe in ruthlessness. It’s been a feature of the anti-capitalist movement ever since Marx and Engels spent their days ruthlessly purging and repurging the nascent socialist movement back in the nineteenth century. The revolutionary tradition worships the ruthless strike, the one savage coup that will transform the world. Lenin conceded nothing in the ruthlessness department, and his best-known epigone was recently featured in the movie Downfall lecturing his pretty blonde secretaries about the importance of ruthlessness—just hours before his whole revolutionary project collapsed in ruins. He seemed to think that his only fault was that he had been too soft.

When Kos & Co. justify their ruthlessness by insisting that they must play the game that the Republicans are playing, but “play it better,” they misunderstand the nature of the conservative project. Republicans know better than to be ruthless. First of all, Republican ruthlessness never plays well in the mainstream media. And secondly, Republicans actually believe all that silly stuff about playing by the rules. That is why they are called the stupid party.

If there is a defining characteristic of conservatives and Republicans it is not ruthlessness. Instead, they are relentless. If you look at the great conservative heroes, their great virtue was their relentless commitment to the conservative project, day in, day out, year in, year out.

They said that Ronald Reagan was a lightweight, an amiable dunce. But it turns out that he was fooling us. Reagan worked relentlessly—on his ideas, on his speeches, on his weekly radio addresses, and endlessly answering letters from the American people. But he projected an deceptive image of amiable ease, and his political adversaries bought the deception.

Some Democrats have started to wake up to the relentless nature of the conservative movement. They want to block the conservative message machine with a magic bullet, a message machine of their own, as if they were not already fielding a vast army of think tanks, universities, media, the left-wing activist community, and now the on-line fever swamp of MoveOn.org and DailyKos.com.

But mostly all they can think up is ruthlessness. In opposing the president’s foreign policy they have done a fine job ruthlessly exposing every mistake and abuse that the U.S. armed forces have committed in Iraq and Afghanistan and have trumpeted each one to the hills. They spent three months fearlessly exposing and re-exposing the Abu Ghraib scandal and now are ruthlessly digging up two-year-old dirt in Afghanistan. Next, we are all meant to be shocked at the Pentagon’s perfidy in allowing photos of Saddam in his skivvies to be published on the front page of The Sun and The New York Post.

The message of the abuse scandals may be rather different than the left supposes. Here and there, people may be noticing that in the American imperium abuses get investigated and grievances get redressed. The soldiers of Abu Ghraib got court-martialed; the abusers of Bagram Air Force Base eventually were charged with crimes. And Saddam can sue—from his jail cell—for suffering the humiliation of being featured not The Sun’s world famous Page 3 but on Page One.

No doubt the vaunted Arab Street is outraged at the perfidy of the hated Americans that piled prisoners in a heap, flushed Korans down the toilet, and published embarrassing photos of the deposed Saddam. And they should be. But they may be even more impressed as they witness the United States investigate, triy, and convict the perpetrators of these abuses. They are more familiar with the kind of justice that used to be available to the fathers of the many nubile young Iraqi maidens defiled by Saddam’s late sons.

Kos and his chums should think about where all their ruthlessness and diligence and mercilessness will lead them. How ruthless will they have to get to prevail against President Bush and his relentless policies of putting conservative judges on the bench in the United States and planting democracy in the Middle East? The record of history and the verdict of superhero comics suggest that there is not much to ruthless people—except ruthlessness.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

mysql close