American Greatness recently ran a superb piece by Pedro Gonzalez on the sad reality that having facts and logic on the side of conservatism has done little to stop the flow of progressive ideology. He notes it has only provided poor comfort to us “as the water has risen to our necks.”
For almost 50 years, I have wondered about the same thing. How can conservatism lose when the facts overwhelmingly support conservative thinking?
Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s main lament at the end of his life was how little his ideas had been adopted and implemented in public policy. American economist Milton Friedman, a genius by most accounts, has had exactly how much influence in actual public policy?
Clearly something is wrong and the solution must be found, and found quickly as time is running short. Part of the problem is personnel. Too many feckless Republican “leaders” actually view the entire political process as something like professional wrestling. There are two opposing sides which appear to be fighting mightily to beat each other and win, but in reality it is all a show for the rubes in the audience. At the end of the day, they are both on the same team—team government—and the only true fight is over whose snouts get deepest into the trough.
The only solution to this is to rid ourselves of these imposters. A crusty old friend of mine always noted, “you can’t make chicken soup out of chicken shit.” We have been trying to do so for far too long and look what it has got us. Let’s stop.
After that, perhaps the solution is as simple as winning the argument.
Among the most important rules in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is to make your opponents live up to their own set of rules. “You will kill them with this,” Alinsky notes, as very few organizations—to say nothing of people—can actually live up to the rules they espouse.
Democrats and progressives love to scream about how they, unlike those knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing conservatives, “believe in science.” Let’s force them to live up to this claim.
Almost all liberalism falls apart when confronted with “science,” i.e., reality. Let’s start with their seemingly incessant use of the concept of race. Don’t engage and support this falsehood. There are only individuals, and they are not defined by a handful of visible physical traits or where their most recent ancestors came from. This is a physical reality, but do our Republican leaders actually believe it? Sometimes one wonders.
Before having a discussion regarding black this or white that, demand the other side first describe the common characteristics of all black or white people. Remember, we are talking science here. They can’t because there are none. When you force this issue, the circular reasoning becomes clear. Black people are black because they are black. White people are white because they are white. These classifications are just the continuation of racism from the past—nothing more, nothing less.
Think how many falsehoods hang on the idea of race. Critical race theory becomes a jumble of racist foolishness once one abandons the core concept of black and white races. If they want to talk about something “being in the blood,” demand they explain what it is before engaging any further. It will quickly become clear they are simply bigots spewing stupidity that was tossed in the dustbin of history long ago.
This false analysis is at the root of all identity politics—and it is easily destroyed via science. The Left acts as though the classification of individuals by this or that trait actually makes the classification “real” in some physical sense.
These artificial creations are just abstractions—and are thus not real in any physical sense. Examples abound. How about lesbians? The only common characteristic lesbians have is that they are lesbian. There is no other common characteristic. A much more accurate way to describe it—remember the science—would be to cite the second definition of the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry: “A woman who engages in sexual activity with other women; a woman who is sexually or romantically attracted (esp. wholly or largely) to other women; a homosexual woman.” That is all. Nothing more. Nothing less.
All group politics are based on the same faulty logic and every single slice of identity politics can be taken apart.
Then there is liberalism’s latest insanity, transgenderism. As a hard scientific reality, there are no such thing as transgendered individuals. Don’t buy into the premise from the start—simply refuse the faulty assumptions.
These are individuals who have a mental illness. That doesn’t mean they are morally deficient but neither does it make them one sex trapped inside the body of another. Is this really that difficult an argument to make? Ask the Left why gender dysphoria is the one mental issue where rather than seeking a cure, we embrace and celebrate the illness?
The same crusty old friend would often derisively note the somewhat crude observation, “they couldn’t sell pussy on a troop train.” Sadly, this describes many in the Republican Party.
Andrew Breitbart also put it succinctly, “if you can’t sell freedom and liberty, you suck.”
Think of the school choice movement—which has made only glacial progress over the past few decades as the performance of K-12 public education has steadily eroded, especially for poor children. How difficult is it to reach out to poor parents and sell them on the idea of giving them $15,000 per child each and every year, to educate their children as they see fit? How tough a sell is this?
My friend’s observation about troop trains comes to mind. Or is the school choice movement just a kabuki dance from Republicans who have no desire to fix the K-12 public education system? Do they truly believe in the wonders of the marketplace—of free people freely interacting with other free people? It’s a design that has never failed in all of history, so why be afraid of bringing its wonders to K-12? If you believe in science there is no excuse for not doing so.
And on and on it goes. Yes Pedro, the water is up to our necks and the time is short. But the solutions are really rather simple if we chose to act upon, and truly believe, reality and science.