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After the Battle: Don't Raise Taxes A Very American Hero

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How Much Ruthlessness is Enough?

by Christopher Chantrill
May 24, 2005 at 10:58 am

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A COUPLE of weeks ago the left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos told us what the Angry Left is all about.

“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 americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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”

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

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

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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