Believe me, I understand that this is a war; I just want a victory that we're actually going to find worthwhile

Megan Fox at PJ Media has a piece up today that is spurring a thought process I have to do something with. The basic thrust is one you may have already come in contact somewhere else today, and it's one I certainly agree with: Samantha Bee ought to have to lose her show just like Rosanne Barr did.

One important point in this, as Fox points out, is the media's hypocrisy:

The people who didn't raise an eyebrow when a white cartoonist depicted Condoleezza Rice as a house slave betraying her people for being a Republican are NOT offended by Roseanne's tweet. ABC is not offended by vulgarity or they wouldn't air Jimmy Kimmel, who once donned blackface, or Grey's Anatomy, which is just an excuse to show doctors screwing each other and switching partners every few episodes. You couldn't offend the Left with vulgarity if you tried. 

The Left is indeed using weapons that they think we'll declare off-limits for ourselves.

And the rise of Trumpism injected a pretty confusing layer of significance in all this. Leftists are ignorant about what actual conservatism is. They think its all about greed and protecting the interests of one or a few demographic groups and keeping all others oppressed. Trump has an  utter lack of ideological moorings, but he is quite wealthy, he's white and male, and he's acted like an absolute boor towards women, so the fact that he was a registered Democrat for most of his adult life is outweighed by other ways of classifying him. But now that he has won the most prized political brass ring of them all as a Republican, Leftists conflate him with us.

It all gets somewhat more confusing due to the fact that he has accomplished several things that please conservatives a great deal.

So the Leftists howl all the more loudly with each accomplishment, and we walk the fine line to defend the accomplishments without signing on to slavish fandom.

Not only do the Leftists howl, but use violence to try to stop us.


Where I get a little concerned about the way Fox bolsters her argument is enlisting Kurt Schlichter.

Look, Schlichter's very most basic point is inarguable. It's LITD's most basic point. Leftists hate the fact that we exist. And Schlichter, for all his bombast (you should check out the way he conducts himself on Twitter), does, in the course of his columns, try to defend his bona fides as a conservative, saying he supported Cruz up until the moment in May 2016 when Cruz was clearly not a factor in the twilight struggle for the presidency anymore. He also frequently qualifies his declaration that it's time to play by the "New Rules" (the tactics the Left brought to our current so-far-merely-cultural-and-poltical civil war) by saying things along the lines of, "Believe me, I'd so much rather be playing by the Old Rules."

But there's an unmistakable playground-bully vibe that comes through his post-spring-2016 writing that requires me to keep my distance from him. He disingenuously lumps useless squishes like John Kasish and David Frum in with undeniably conservative people and institutions such as The Weekly Standard and its editorial staff. (He loves to make fun of that magazine's cruises.) But the idea that opinion-magazine cruises and retreats and think-tank conferences per se are ineffectual and populated by beta-male dweebs is a sweeping generalization too far. There is, for one thing, the matter of generations coming up after us, and where are they to get their grounding in the foundations of this worldview we call conservatism? I myself, upon my conversion experience in my 30s, became a conference junkie, and subscribed to every conservative magazine I heard about. But Schlichter seems to get a kick out of metaphorically bending Bill Kristol's knuckes backwards just to watch him drop to his knees.

Which is just a particularly counterproductive aspect of the whole "New Rules" notion. Only slightly less counterproductive is the business about "getting down in the gutter with the Left."

This is objectionable not because we are effete little dweebs, but because a core value of the conservative worldview is dignity - comporting oneself with a respect-worthy bearing. We have the better argument when it comes to principles and policy, and we ought to act like it.

Also, there's the ground-level engagement with those who, yes, are the enemy. This gets tricky, because doing so with comity and whatever courtesy can be mustered - until it can't be mustered anymore - is necessary. We live work, and participate in community life with these people.

I recommend a piece at The College Fix on how Susan Rice's son - yes, that Susan Rice - is the head of the campus Republican organization at Stanford University. He became a conservative in high school and is deeply immersed in it now. His conversations with his Leftist parents are challenging, but they are conducted with mutual respect.

Look, I realize that I am here walking a fine line, because my point seems to skirt the edges of squishiness - what here at LITD we call Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome. But as I say, we live down the block - maybe next door  - to the people we'd rather convert than - well, you know.

And it goes beyond mere comity and a hope that goodwill can prevail. I realize that there are atheist conservatives, but they are the outliers.  At the core of the body of principles that inform who we are - and the honest atheists admit this (S.E. Cupp, one such righty, even wrote a book called Losing Our Religion, the theme of which was that, whether the Christian faith is true or not, it's essential to the preservation of Western civilization.) - is the Truth revealed in Holy Scripture.

And the culmination of said Scripture's message - what happened on Calvary that thunderously mystical Friday afternoon - is pretty much the opposite of mud-wrestling one's enemy so one can gratuitously watch him expire.