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So, Who Am I Boycotting This Week?
In the spirit of lively debate, and because what started out as a comment that went on way too long, this is a rebuttal to @cliffordbrown ‘s post, in which he calls for a boycott of Walmart over their announced policy of discontinuing sales of pistol ammunition. I personally require no convincing to not shop at Wally World. I dislike the stores for a wide variety of reasons too long to enumerate here, and I’m not about to start shopping there except in case of immediate need.
So far so good, but let’s be honest, Wally World ain’t losing any money on my account so far because they ain’t getting it in the first place. And I imagine I’m hardly alone in my lack of effect on Sam Walton’s legacy — unless you live in one of the more rural towns where Walmart is the only general-goods game around, you’re not going to be shopping there unless you either need to, unless you like Walmart. But here is where I significantly part ways with Clifford: In his words:
Any one who values the Constitution, let alone gun ownership and the right to effective self-defense, will immediately punish Walmart, shifting all purchases to: [list of alternatives]…The rule is simple: no shopping, and no allowing people who shop there to bring stuff to your dwelling, your office, your picnic, in Walmart bags or with Walmart house brands.
African-Americans won with this technique in the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott. They won by ruthlessly self-policing. It is disempowering nonsense to assert that boycotts are ineffective. They simply take real grassroots will, with a bit of organizing direction…
Effectively, immediately, intensively socially shame anyone who slacks off and goes to Walmart.
So it’s just one more store on the checklist we all now are demanded to carry in our heads of “places my politics tells me to boycott.” Seems every other week now someone is asking for a boycott of something. Skip this place because they gave to Planned Parenthood, skip this other place because they donated to Hillary, skip this third place because they banned open carry (nevermind that I never open-carried), boycott movies from this other studio because their CEO spouted nonsense after the Oscars, best to avoid this brand of socks because they used whale oil to make their elastic, and don’t walk on floor tiles from this company because they fired my great uncle Charlie in 1936 for decking a foreman, don’t go here, and don’t go there…
After a while, the grievances weigh one down and they’re competing for much-coveted memory space with “places we should feel obligated to patronize because it makes leftist heads explode.” So while I’m avoiding getting coffee from Starbucks, I’m obligated to dine at Chick-Fil-A, even though I think their chicken is overrated and I’m never able to get my food in under 20 minutes due to the crowds of other chicken obligates.
I’m supposed to shop at this bakery because the owner is a Christian, even though my waistline is screaming “put down the cake and walk away slowly (because walking quickly is unlikely).” And I simply must buy something from this other place because I’d be “supporting a good cause” (really, do I need another useless tchotchke?), and I have to buy this razor over there since they sponsor a show I like, and then buy this car because my grandmother said they hired great uncle Charlie after that unfortunate incident with the foreman…
So I have to say I object on principle to yet another boycott. We make fun of the lefties for hating the Christian ethos of Chick-Fil-A and mock their hypocrisy when they buy the chicken anyway. Maybe we should focus on something else.
All that said, there are some specific issues with the nature of the proposed boycott that are problematic in their own right. I’m going to address the second quoted point first to clear the decks. I do not see the parallel with a city-owned and city-operated bus system that an urban population depended on for their livelihoods. The bus boycott worked because it was concentrated and impossible to miss, and because the black populace of Montgomery had to make real, tangible, and visible sacrifices in the boycott. A boycott of Wally World is diffuse because there are, for most people, many, many other places to shop, and diffuse because Walmart has such a broad customer base around the country. And it’s not like it would be a particularly pointed sacrifice for most people except in more rural locations.
Further, Montgomery discriminated virulently against blacks on the basis skin color. This discrimination was impossible to ignore. The blacks who depended on those buses to get to work or to do their shopping were treated terribly from the moment they got on the bus. Does a Walmart greeter even notice me when I enter or exit their store? Am I, as a gun owner, wearing some tag that tells Walmart to treat me badly? Will I face hostility, derision, or violence while shopping, just for being a gun owner? (I know I’ll face a slow checkout regardless, but that’s another matter.) There is no parallel here, and it does us no good at all to compare our comparatively petty grievance to the African Americans living in Montgomery in the 1950s — to do so is an insult to them.
But what of the social shaming advocated for those who will not boycott? Given how increasingly militant we are divided as Americans, where our politicians and pundits demand that we boycott this or that, or support that other thing because “it makes leftists’ heads explode,” is the added antagonism worth it — especially over an issue this small? I’m an employer – should I really tell my employees not to bring Sam’s Choice cola to a company picnic, or tell the lady who brings in donuts some mornings to get them someplace else? Should I make my politics their issue too, where they have to consider their own political loyalties a factor in whether they feel welcome and valued as human beings at work?
I have enough political arguments too with our extended family, to the point where I will hush people at family gatherings if they cannot talk politics civilly. I even had a relative storm out of a Christmas party because I told them to can it in front of the kids. In the years since, however, the family has come to respect my rule and abide by it. It’s not that we cannot talk politics, but when talk starts to turn to swapping barbs and trying to “win” by shame or browbeating, it ends or I ask people to leave. To do as suggested would be to tell those relatives to forget everything I have tried to enforce about respect and to make my politics central. They know my politics already. They know what I stand for and why. But I will not make agreement with me a condition for whether they can come into my home. My home is welcome to all, and that I will not compromise.
But there is one more matter:
The only boycott exception, where legal, is to get in the CEO’s face with open carry. Carry politely, legally, openly. Then, expecting confrontation by employees, have a partner obviously employing a cell phone or GoPro camera to capture everything as you tell them they will either respect the American Constitution and your God-given right to self-defense or you will never spend another dime in Walmart and only show up to mock them for “just following orders” when the store closes.
How have these sorts of things gone for us before? Not well. Remember when Starbucks allowed open carry? How did that work out? So long as people did not make it an issue, it was not an issue. The hoplophobes, of course, found out and started to protest and demand Starbucks explicitly ban open carrying. What happened next was that more gun owners started open-carrying at Starbucks. If they had stuck just to discretely holstered pistols I imagine the issue would have gone away eventually. Instead (and you can image-search this easily) people showing up toting long-guns into suburban coffee shops. That was entirely unnecessary, and was little better than LARPing for the spectacle of it all — there was then, and is now no credible case for toting around an AR-15 slung on your back when you go to get a latté. Pretending otherwise for the sake of “muh rights!” is risible.
Open-carrying into Walmarts now, with a friend in tow and a gotcha camera at the ready, is also spectacle, and it will only serve to further shred credibility and perception. Walmart has every legal right as a business to conduct itself in this manner, and I have every right to not shop there. To say otherwise is to likewise say that a cake shop has to bake a gay wedding cake. We all rightly recognize that the lawsuits against Masterpiece Cakes have been borne of malice and spectacle, is that a game we should stoop too as well?
Published in Guns
That was pretty brilliant! I think I will refer to you as “The Philosopher Skippy” from now on.
Not quite.
How so? I’ll grant that my comment was something of a roll-up to numerous other things said in this thread (such as someone saying “we need new generals”), and not necessarily directed at Reticulator. But he was analogizing Republican congressional budgetary malfeasance to the series of wins and losses of the Indian wars out west, and that got me thinking: it’s not in the slightest the right comparison or analogy, and it’s another inapt military analogy among many. The American Indian political leaders weren’t themselves being made wealthy off their losses, nor were the Indians themselves getting (at that time) federal programs or money (until they lost and were confined to reservations), or having highways named after themselves, nor even putting their own in Congress to represent them. We do a real disservice to ourselves comparing things to military actions time and again… which is what led to the comment as it stands now.
If we’re going to compare this or that culture fight to wars, what is the territory? Where are the lines? What are our goals? What are the goals of the other side(s)?
Is the territory the legal realm, where advances and retreats are marked in laws and how they’re enforced? Those sorts of things are least measurable, but they don’t exist in a vacuum. What about the hearts and minds of the American people? How does one measure the situation there? How does one advance or retreat in there? That’s not so clear, and that’s where military analogies break down.
Take abortion as an example: Roe vs. Wade did not happen on its own. There was a pattern of case work for years leading up to it, with assorted test cases pushing this or that argument. The big break came with Griswold vs. Connecticut, which was about Connecticut’s prohibition on the sale of birth control. This is where the “right to privacy” was inserted into constitutional jurisprudence, eventually setting up the chief argument of Roe.
Yes, it’s all terrible case law – even Ginsburg has publicly stated that Roe is bad law. But here’s the thing: Roe would neither have stuck then, nor be still about our necks now if a clear majority of American people themselves would have wanted it gone. The abortion rates alone for the 20 years after Roe show that a huge number of Americans wanted it, and took advantage of the law’s change. And to that in itself points to something we hate to consider: the pro-life argument was already lost a lot of ground in the hearts and minds of Americans before Roe.
It took some time for our side to figure that out as they made vain attempts at outright reversals of Roe. When they did recognize the real situation, though, you started to see pro-lifers change tactics. You saw the emergence of Crisis Pregnancy Centers, you saw pro-life advertising, and you started to see new legislation that began working at the worst and most extreme examples of abortion (Partial Birth, in particular). All of this was to try to persuade everyday Americans to oppose abortion, a little here, a little there. As the public mindset began to change, that’s when you started to see the legal ground also shift. It’s still in flux today, but will only shift as the culture itself also shifts.
The abortion fight was, in essence, lost before Roe. If Roe is going to ever become the dead letter it needs to be, then the work on the ground needs to continue, persuading people of its awfulness. But it’s not an organized war except on the legal side, it’s millions of everyday Americans pushing and nudging and persuading, and when they have enough cultural support then persuading state legislators to act (few still stick their necks out otherwise). And even then, the next generations have to be taught anew or they’ll rebel, just like the people who got us to Roe in the first place.
Remember Buckley said that in opposition to Marx’s claim that “history” was scientific, and “Science!” proved that socialism was inevitable. In that regard he was being more pithy than saying “we’re stopping socialism”.
Buckley was being clever, but there’s nothing inevitable about socialism, regardless of what its fanbois think. We don’t need to be yelling “stop”, we need to be working to steer things where we want them to go.
How do you deal with spiritual war?
I think there’s some armor or something we’re supposed to put on or something.
Oh, yeah. We got breastplates, belts, helmets, shields … the whole battle-rattle.
Indeed.
But if you need physical armor, I think Percival here could loan you some. And a mace.
I can agree with most of Skip’s points without conceding much. The war is between good and evil; always has been, always will be, until the Last Day. The Left (the ideology) is a force for chaos in a God-ordered universe. IOW, evil. I was unfriended by my nephew for saying this about Obama’s opposition to the BAIPA. But if killing babies after they’ve survived a late-term abortion isn’t evil…
And, I agree we won’t convince many people with the war analogy, but I thought convincing wasn’t necessary when we (right-wingers) were talking to each other.
The condition for victory is retaining our individual sovereignty and the rule of (rightly ordered) law. That is, they leave us free to do the right thing. Either there is objective truth (the waterfall is beautiful — a C.S. Lewis reference) or there isn’t. The battle for distinctions is perpetual.
It’s not about convincing per se, it’s about how we think about the culture, our nation, and the never-ending political fights.
I cannot consider my neighbor my enemy, no matter what I think of his politics (one of my neighbors is a Bernie Sanders fan and is honestly terrified of Trump). I cannot think of him as an enemy because our kids play together, we loan each other tools, we help each other out with repairs (he rebuilt an entire bicycle when I just asked for help with a brake – he didn’t have to do that), I jump-started his wife’s car one morning, and so on. When he moved in, he was keen to get a couple of guns because he’s ex-Navy (multi generation too) and enjoys shooting and hunting, but his wife was adamantly opposed. I helped with the education there.
Now we may never see eye to eye on the rest of politics, but he’s no enemy, and thus a war analogy is (in my opinion) the wrong way to frame things. On some things (guns, for instance) he’s as solid an ally as one could wish. Presidential politics? We’ll put that one aside. Local politics? He wants to see taxes go up to fund more public parks, to see better trail maintenance and more enforcement of anti-littering, anti-poaching, and general anti-jackwagon rules (which means hiring more staff) – I’d rather fund that another way. On the rest? We’ll yack over some beers. And really, that’s how it is for lots of others too – we have too much in common with our neighbors to think of them as enemies (though I’ll be the first to admit that the guy a few streets over who has blanketed his house and yard with solar cells, drives Prius, and always has lefty political signs in his yard is definitely a virtue signaling snob).
What I hear you saying… ;-) is people who use the war analogy are being facile — neglecting the complexities that have you peaceably living with your neighbors. I don’t think that’s true. I bet Bryan gets along fine with people with disparate views, too, and he’s using a shorthand that allows us to read between the lines.
I like to make the distinction between the Left — the ideology — and leftists (the people who hold the Left’s worldview). Your neighbor sounds like a liberal (because gun rights) — the sort of ill-informed, frightened-by-freedom, missing-the-dangers-of-empowering-government, superficially political person many of us started out as — including me. Leftists, while not wholly evil, and often meaning well, really do have a toxic, proctologist’s view of America and Americans like us. We are the obstacles to their Utopian dreams and, if they get enough power, it will not end well for us. That’s why we must fight in the culture war.
I have these same kinds of relationships with neighbors and immediate family members (not my wife, thank goodness!). Abraham Lincoln had the same attitude toward Southerners even though they had fought an actual bloody war.
That’s what I’m thinking.
In many ways, the culture war is a proxy for the spiritual war.
If you have issues with the analogy in one instance, do you have issues with both analogies?
As to analogizing the conquest of Native Americans by European with the leftist takeover of conservative America, I’ve been studying that analogy since 1996 when I was first struck by the similarities between Black Hawk (Makataimeshekiakiak) and Newt Gingrich, and by the conflicts they were involved in. I keep coming up with more instructive similarities. A person could also talk about other analogies with other historical displacements of one culture by another, but that’s the one I’m most familiar with.
It shouldn’t be surprising that there are similarities. After all, it all involves humans.
The military aspect of the conquest of Native Americans was not really the basis of the conflict and the conquest. It was cultural and economic, and it was recognized as such by the Native prophets and by the conquerors.
So I would recommend not getting hung up on the fact that some victories involved military action more than others. Clausewitz said, “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” which is an even truer statement when you think of politics in a broad sense that includes cultural and economic conflict.
The analogies are not perfect. If they were, they would not be analogies. But the situations are close enough for us to learn from them.
This is I think still framing things wrong. My neighbor is not all “frightened by freedom”, but he does define freedom differently, and considers Trump an impingement to that freedom, while he thinks Bernie’s policies would make him freer than he is now. His opposition to Trump stems exactly from the conviction that we have an over-empowered government – but over-empowered in different ways than you or I would agree with. Ultimately it’s an argument over where the government should have power, and where it should not.
I’m not at all saying we should not fight and use the tools at our disposal, but that we should use the right tools for the right areas, and be dealing with the right people. The Utopians? Yeah, they’re out and out dangerous – there are few people more inherently so than the True Believers, the modern Jacobins. Best way, I think, is to just keep working to expose them for the radical revolutionaries they are – and they are starting to overplay their hands right now.
Well, yes, FDR fought against freedom by defining freedom as the security that is always in tense conflict with freedom.
True.
But there are differences too – Newt, for instance, was a lot more personally compromised than we knew at the time. In some key respects, he was hamstrung right out of the gate by his own infidelities. It would be analogous to Black Hawk prophets and leaders having already agreed in advance to lose on some key battles.
There were many treaty meetings where the native negotiators went in having agreed in advance to lose some key battles.
But yes, there were differences. Back in 1996 I told myself (and a couple of other people) that I would like to write a book based on the similarity between the two conflicts. But then I realized that there were certain places where I’d have to distort the history to force it to fit the analogy I had in mind. My scientific background helped make me aware that I didn’t want to do that kind of history.
Its a divide between conservatives who believe things are more or less as they’ve always been, and those who believe the modern American Left (specifically, the dominant norms, beliefs and goals that motivate or influence them) is a categorically different beast from yesteryear. To be blunt, the fact that Bernie Sanders, an open Socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, is considered relatively mainstream is indicative of that difference.
Marxism (cultural or otherwise) is altogether different from left-liberalism, and it dominates the institutions of cultural transmission, permeating the lives of younger generations. As its influence grows, the tolerance shown by people like your friend become more and more the exception, its simply the way this type of ideology affects people and societies.
That goes to two questions: 1. How did the Marxists get there, and how can we get back there? and 2. How do we counter them on the ground?
Their influence is formidable, and I do not at all disagree that what we are facing today is incredibly different than in prior generations, but what will work against them? The Left is not monolithic, and it has some deep faultlines and massive inconsistencies within itself. It is also, I would wager, overplaying its intersectionality nonsense – parents are beginning to get fed up woke-ism and its ilk.
I don’t have any confidant answers, the important thing is to know what we’re facing, and realize we can’t avoid the ‘culture war’ without it eventually coming for us (and our families), after our allies (and their families) are weakened or broken. I suspect the effectiveness of any particular countermeasures will always be in flux, and therefore no strict guidelines (such as ‘shaming’ regular Republicans) would be viable. I think that’s also the main point of ‘war’ rhetoric, it conveys the point that a struggle will be long and difficult but necessary, with unclear outcomes against unfavorable odds, and severe consequences for losing, but with that grim message alleviated by the notion of a mission backed up by dependable allies, and the pride that comes from being willing to fight back. That’s the subtext I believe most people get from war metaphors, its something universal that is difficult, if not impossible, to succinctly convey any other way. I agree that the difference between ‘war by other means’ and actual physical wars are important to keep in mind, however, and that different strategies would apply, for practical as well as other reasons.
Right. Like I said, I’m not sure there’s a better metaphor than “culture war”, but we have to understand its usefulness and be wary of not over-applying it.
I’ve been mulling this one all day. “Spiritual warfare” is a term we’ve inherited. But we recognize its limits because we know we’re not actually donning physical armor.
Cultural warfare is not a term I’m out and out rejecting by any means, but I want us to be very careful as to where and how it applies.
Just because I don’t participate in them doesn’t mean that I’m ignorant. I might cop to being apathetic about it. Here’s why:
Who said that? I did. Old Majestyk hasn’t been sneaking into the rectory and sprinkling dust contaminated with leftist or atheist brain-worms into the sacramental wine for people to unknowingly consume which slowly turns them into pod people.
If I didn’t know better it sounds to me like the source of your discontent is more frequently to be found among your co-religionists than it is among people like me, who prize the luxury of “being left in peace and quiet” much more than we care about internecine squabbles among people arguing about increasingly arcane points of theology. Incredibly,* such people have interpretations of the scriptures that are peculiar to them yet may disagree with your interpretation of them. Perhaps you need to either develop better means of persuading them of the rightness of your cause — or — perhaps you could lead by example and attempt to lead a fulfilling and Christ-centered life to the best of your abilities within a community of fellow believers?
The notion that outsiders are somehow to blame for the parlous condition of the Mainline Protestant and Catholic Churches is laughable (to put it mildly) when you consider the vast corruption and evils these organizations have foisted upon themselves and their congregants. (Christianity has much to atone for in Joel Osteen only without mentioning Jerry Falwell, Jr. or Jimmy Swaggart)
*It actually isn’t incredible in the slightest; there are a couple thousand separate Protestant denominations in the US alone each with a particular interpretation of scripture and (probably) salvation. It would be nice if there were some clarity to be found in these documents, but alas, this tower of babel is what we have to work with if you’ll pardon my lifting of a Biblical Allegory.
Amen.
Psychic bullets and astral bombardments mostly.
I wonder if there is a ratio for emnity and distance.
Because I kinda want to nuke your prius guy.
I think this is a really important point. Leftism is a pastiche of many different “sects” that don’t always agree with each other and are doomed to eventually fight each other because of their overarching lust for ultimate control. It happened during the Spanish Civil War when several of the leftist factions fighting against the Spanish Government began fighting actual bloody battles between themselves. George Orwell, who had signed up with one of these factions, had a death warrant put out on him by another faction. I think that is where he started to form his more conservative ideas.
I am seeing some of the beginnings of this clash between our leftist groups in America. Gays and feminists are starting to rebel against the trans-gender people who are claiming higher civil-rights status than good old fashioned homosexuals, and allowing men to compete against women in athletic events. A big one brewing is the eventual clash between leftists who defend Muslims, and Muslims themselves, who absolutely despise anything the left stands for.
Those aren’t mutually exclusive options. The latter might even be a big part of the former.
Whence the claim that there is no clarity to be found in these documents? From your own observations? From the fact that people disagree about them? Or something else?