First published at WND, 1/1/2024
When the romantic idealism of the golden rule meets the cold reality of lawless barbarism on the cultural battlefield – who wins?
This weekend I had an email exchange with a long-time supporter who started it by saying the conservatives should fight fire with fire in the left’s campaign of “lawfare” against Trump by going after Biden in the same way. My initial response was to err on the side of idealism, arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court is virtually certain to declare efforts to keep Trump off the ballot unconstitutional, and on matters of high principle we shouldn’t descend to the tactics of our enemies – playing “tit for tat” was the phrase I used.
After further consideration, however, I decided he was right because America’s days of counting on high idealism to prevail over corrupt special interests are largely gone now, and an increasing plurality of decision makers at every level are not guided by principle but by practical political realities (or their own rank partisanship).
In no place is that fact more disconcertingly true than the Supreme Court where Chief Justice John Roberts thwarted all efforts to expose and punish the blatant and massive Dem and RINO election fraud of 2020. The most charitable interpretation of his actions was that he played politics to de-escalate an existential social crisis – but more realistically he played goalie for the globalists to stop Trump and his conservative Christian and populist base from scoring a decisive win.
(I still believe Roberts was the one who leaked the Dobbs draft to sabotage the effort to repeal Roe v. Wade – funny how the Dobbs culprit is still “unknown.” And look what he, the justice with direct juridical oversight of the District of Columbia, continues to allow regarding the grotesque treatment of the J6 political prisoners! If Roberts had the juice to deny justice for Trump again, I think he’d use it – though I suspect he doesn’t.)
American high idealism, which had always been grounded in a strong national consensus about biblical values, peaked in the 1950s but has been steadily declining ever since. Watch virtually any movie from the ’40s and ’50s and you’ll see those ideals on display as the basic assumptions of society – assumptions such as “truth will always win out,” and “you can count on most people to simply ‘do the right thing’ if you give them the chance.” The “right thing to do” was always the Christian thing to do. Not any more. Instead we have a divided society in which the remnant of Christians and traditional conservatives fight as if our ideals still hold sway over decision makers while the left operates by the Marxist precepts that “might makes right” and “the end justifies the means.” All our cultural battles reflect this contrast, and our side is losing because the decision makers have chosen “pragmatic” over “principled” reasoning to resolve disputes.
I’m not a politician, but I ran twice for governor of Massachusetts as a missionary to the political arena of my home state – the second time (in 2018) thwarting what I believe was a Purple Uniparty strategy to use a landslide re-election of RINO Charlie Baker as a springboard to sabotage Trump from inside the 2020 GOP presidential primary field in parallel to the plan to put Pocahontas Warren in the White House. My article “The Impending Bum-Rush of ‘Joey the Scapegoat'” details those facts.
Those forays into politics taught me two liberating truths I’ve propounded ever since in my advice to issue advocates and candidates.
First let me remind everyone that the political arena is by definition and unchangeable necessity a place of compromise. A politician can take some uncompromising stands and get away with it – if they are flexible on other issues – but by and large its about trading votes like baseball cards to the extent your constituency will tolerate it. In that arena special interests are a huge factor, and the bigger their war chest and higher their passion, the more their agenda must be factored in.
Here’s the first liberating truth regarding issue politics: Politicians will always try to placate special interests, even if they don’t agree with them, by giving them something, even if its not all they demand. If our side has no true counter-demand on the table, that’s almost always a win for the special interest. Most importantly, the demand cannot just be to preserve the status quo because the politician’s impulse to compromise is almost impossible to resist. And so, the most frequent outcome in such contests is a “baby step” toward the special interest that preserves the politician’s ability to still claim victory for his constituency. But the net effect is always a shift to the left.
The only way to prevent that leftward slide as a virtual given in politics is to always meet a demand for leftward movement with a true counter-demand for rightward movement, so that the politician’s most expedient “compromise” is to preserve the status quo, while our chance for getting a baby step or more in the right direction becomes an actual possibility on every vote.
The second liberating truth regards candidate politics: Establishment political machines control the outcome of elections by controlling the field of candidates. And, as we know, the “establishment” is the Purple Uniparty whose red and blue factions often decide together well in advance who the winners will be. Often the planned outcome for the GOP is to “take a fall,” a la Bob Dole and John McCain.
Their systems for operation are essentially uniform and designed to 1) discourage all “outsiders” from running, 2) keep all “insider” candidates under the control of “campaign consultants” (handlers), and 3) use the campaign process and experience to shape the candidate into a lifelong servant of the machine (e.g Mitt Romney and Joe Biden) instead of a servant of the people.
In rejection of that slave-system of the elites, I bucked all three aspects by interjecting myself into the 2018 GOP primary, being my own campaign manager (until my great conservative Jewish friend and fellow political maverick Greg Neffinger offered to serve that role) and making opposition to the Massachusetts GOP political machine a centerpiece of my campaign. My article “How I Beat Election Fraud” details that story and introduces my ERET policy for defeating the slave system itself. ERET stands for Every Race, Every Time. It forcefully rejects the initiative-killing mantra used by the establishment that one should only ever “run to win” and the companion lie that only people with “professional” campaign advisers can win. We should have people running in every race in every election cycle if for no other reason than gaining experience and making the other side spend money and manpower it would otherwise use on more important races.
I’ll end this piece answering my opening question. The Golden Rule is to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” If I were a mentally enslaved leftist, I would want someone to free me from my self-destructive insanity. So I say we should – politically speaking – go to war like we mean it, fighting fire with fire (within well reasoned legal and ethical boundaries – e.g. no “swatting”) until they have nowhere left to turn but rationality or dormancy. And if we do THAT – with tough love and not vindictiveness – the Golden Rule WILL prevail.
