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If They Try Harder, Do We Roll Over?
There are many of us who encourage people to keep fighting those on the Left with all our might. And there are those who simply are living their lives quietly and not paying a whole lot of attention to current events. And finally, there are those who say fighting back, at this point, is a hopeless effort. So here’s the elephant in the room:
Should we just give up?
I have no problem with people who think fighting back is going to be extremely difficult and it could literally take years to take our country back. And there’s not much I can do with those people who make-believe that everything is fine and refuse to engage because it’s just so hard. But I ask those of you who write as if there is no chance of our defeating the Left eventually—what are we supposed to do?
I guess I just refuse to resign myself to a gloomy and tyrannical future. Maybe I am Sisyphus, pushing the rock every day, chained to a dismal struggle.
But I am asking a most sincere question of those of you who think it’s too late or impossible to take our country back.
Are you literally giving up? Do you think everyone should stop trying to restore our democratic republic?
Published in Culture
Despite being accused of giving up for my dire predictions, I have not. I have kids.
It depends on how you define “giving up”.
Take, for example, the folk who have given up on reforming Washington D.C. and are instead focusing on state politics and state sovereignty. (e.g. The Free State Project.) Have those folk “given up”?
We can win the war against the left if we define the enemy and what victory looks like. There are two battles. One is the political one at play with the modern left. However, there is another battle, an eternal one, the battle between good and evil. Don’t confuse the two. The former is just one campaign of the latter.
It is not quite over yet, but honestly, I felt that the 2012 election was the inflection point. In fairness, I saw one candidate as overseeing a resurgence followed by a more rapid decline in the US and the other a slower, steadier decline. The slower decline won but it hasn’t been that slow, and we didn’t get the resurgence that I had hoped for.
It’s sort of like a massive ship headed for a shoal. We see the shoal that will rip the bottom out of the ship and sink us. But, we keep neglecting to actually start turning the ship and altering speed. If anything we are speeding up the ship. The closer we get to that shoal, the less likely it is that we can not hit it…are we past that point? Well, technically, every empire falls eventually, is it our time? There are a lot of similarities between the decline of the British Empire which, prior to WWII spent the vast majority of its budget on its Navy, but after the formation of the NHS, military spending plummeted as a share of the budget.
I think Jimmy V. sums it up best:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFY9xSJNx_U
The history of mankind is a battle between good and evil. Sometimes we win, sometimes evil wins.
No, Mis, they have clarified their priorities, and I’m glad. We can do much more at the local level and do it more quickly, too.
Excellent clarification to make. They are different, but they become intertwined; when that happens, poor decisions might be made. I agree with knowing who the enemy is, but I don’t think we really know what victory, or victory in increments, looks like. That might be a problem.
@dbroussa, your metaphor is a powerful one. I think many are trying to ignore that there is a shoal at all. But it’s there, and it’s just as dangerous as it ever was. Will we turn the ship in time? I just don’t know, but hope we will. Thanks.
Thanks, Stan.
Never give up. Talk to a kid, especially if they’re not one of yours. Ask him what he’s learning in school and see if it makes sense. If not, say something he’ll think about. Then stand back and let it happen.
I think we forget how we can have a significant impact in our everyday encounters, Doug–with adults and kids, both. Never miss the opportunity to make that connection.
You’re welcome, Susanna.
Oh gosh, memories! You reminded me of an elderly dear friend whom I lost touch with many years ago. She was a Leftie, but we did our best to share our ideas with each other. She had a lovely way of speaking, and began one day to call me Susanna. It was lovely.
The Bible is full of stories of ships hitting shoals, so to speak, as lessons to be heeded. In the growing secular world, fewer are learning from the Bible’s lesson. There is a reason the “unholy left” attacks our religion…to reduce those who will learn the lesson. Of course, the other reason is they want to replace God and become the all powerful giver of laws and the ones to mold mankind into the image they prefer.
Let me die on my feet rather than live on my knees.
I admit there are days when I think Whittaker Chambers was right when he said, on leaving the Communists and joining Buckley, et. al., “I’m leaving the winning side to join the losing side.”
But then I remember that, like Bryan, I have kids. And like Rodin, I won’t die on my knees. But the fight won’t be easy, and I do wonder if it will become “kinetic” at some point.
The corruption is so deep or the cowardice so prevalent that it has metastasized within the entire Federal government, from the lowest levels to the highest including the courts, every agency (the FBI in particular), and both political parties.
It is too late to reform those from within. The communists own elections, judges, and federal law enforcement. They own the press, the academic establishment, and governing bodies. Those who think winning the next election for the GOP will solve that are deluded.
So on the federal level the answer is yes, IMO.
But the federal government is not our country, not even remotely. It can dictate all it wants but it’s powerless to enforce its will on the citizens of a state unwilling to submit in large numbers. They may threaten and coerce all they want but in the end it’s private citizens standing on their God given unalienable rights who hold all the cards so long as we keep fighting and stick together. A good leader willing to tell the feds to p*** off will find himself with an army (real and metaphorical) in less than a day. Americans are hungry for liberty minded leadership.
Find out who the cowards are in your state legislature, local government, and community and call them out. Find out who the patriots are and offer to help them clean house.
We take our country back the way we did in the first place, by punching the bully in nose.
I also remember that the USSR didn’t bury us. It collapsed.
On the main question in the OP, I don’t know if it’s correct to say that I’m giving up. As I explained in a post a few months back, the death of a couple of good friends led me to question the utility of my political engagement, which was mostly limited to posting and commenting here at Ricochet.
I didn’t feel that I was giving up, but rather that I was recognizing that these matters are in the hands of God, and that there is little or nothing that I can do.
I do notice that I don’t appear to be very successful at convincing people here at Ricochet about my point of view, on a wide variety of issues. We seem to differ greatly in our diagnosis of the source, or sources, of the problems in our country.
I mean, for a conservative guy like me, Ricochet should be “the choir,” shouldn’t it? If my preaching isn’t even getting through to the choir, might I be wiser to find another use for my time?
Great article, and good comments as well. What we can’t know is whether they can steal the next election and if so, is it over? Will they reverse their economic policies that are destroying us? Will they continue to placate China if they can steal the next election? Will insane economic policies remain in place for 3 then at least 4 years after that? Hoping to win the next election and raising a little hell isn’t enough. We need to organize by state and sane ones need to have a known credible fall back should radicals steal the next election. It’s not an easy alternative, but the country we had for 200 years isn’t coming back unless we make it and the top can’t run an economy as large and complex as the US. It’s simply impossible.
Jerry, I’d like to say a few things. First, we often disagree, but the beauty of the Conservatives is that unlike the Democrats, we really do have a big tent. I think there are many different views expressed on Ricochet, and if you’re anything like me, you might notice how you differ from others rather than notice what you have in common with them.
Also, I’ve noticed your tone has changed a great deal. You seem less abrasive and more open to input, and that is a huge adjustment for anyone to make. But it can take time to integrate those changes for yourself, and also time for others to get used to them. Keep trying. Be patient. I had lots of people chastise me on a recent post (in a nice way, of course) for being taken in by the Leftist media, and they were right. I learned a lot. So all their pinging on me was worth it!
Hang in there.
I like your passion, @iwalton! It is disconcerting and even frightening to think about all the things that could go wrong over the next three years, but we have to remain resolute. It is impossible to predict what the Left will do; so far, they seem to be digging themselves a hole, but we can’t count on their doing that forever. But you’re right: we have to do everything we can to make sure, as much as possible, that the next election is fair. It will interesting to see what happens in the mid-terms. Thanks for your kind words, too.
Sounds like our human condition, SQ. (Them Greeks is clever.)
This nation’s grand American Experiment will, sadly, end someday, like all civilizations end. But it is worth the fight to keep it going as long as possible, wherever possible. But here’s what we are stuck with: Tyranny is the default arrangement of human affairs in this fallen world, and human societies have always decayed back into it. The good news is that this American Experiment happened. That means it can happen again. And it need not be here. Like a dying Giant Sequoia, we can still take cuttings from it and grow a new one somewhere else.
The general term of conservative no longer applies. It’s no longer abstract. We now have specific examples of how much government we will condone over our lives. We need to begin understanding one another in those terms because we believe very different things.
Do you have thoughts on how that might play out, Ray? Must we re-establish ourselves in another part of the world? On another planet? Since there’s never been a country like ours, couldn’t we break the “derange arrangement of human affairs” and survive?
It is important to remember that, back in the 1930s, common opinion was that the United States *had* to go either Fascist or Communist. Totalitarianism was accepted as a given.
That is fáscinating and encouraging, David. Thank you.
The American Experiment can still live on here, but I think it will have to be on a much smaller scale. My takeaway from the last 100 years is that this American Experiment is not as scalable as we thought. It is hard enough to make it work on a continental scale. But it is impossible for it to work on a continental scale with a post-Judeo-Christian population such as ours, which is so philosophically fractured. Too many tribes. And tribes fight.
If the American Experiment is going to survive on this continent, I think it is going to have to scale down to a smaller geography (Midwest and Gulf states?) populated with a pre-post-Judeo-Christian people.
In December of 1940, the French writer Georges Bernanos was living in exile in Brazil. Nazi Germany had defeated the French army. Britain was forced to withdraw its troops at Durkirk–losing virtually all their heavy equipment. Few would have been willing to bet on Britain’s survival…after quickly devastating the (then highly-regarded) French army and demonstrating highly-effective use of airpower, Nazi Germany seemed unstoppable.
Here’s something Bernanos wrote at the time:
No one knows better than I do that, in the course of centuries, all the great stories of the world end by becoming children’s tales. But this particular one (the story of England’s resistance) has started its life as such, has become a children’s tale on the very threshold of its existence. It mean that we can at once recognize in it the threefold visible sign of its nature. it has deceived the anticipations of the wise, it has humiliated the weak-hearted, it has staggered the fools. Last June all these folk from one end of the world to the other, no matter what the color of their skins, were shaking their heads. Never had they been so old, never had they been so proud of being old. All the figures that they had swallowed in the course of their miserable lives as a safeguard against the highly improbable activity of their emotions had choked the channels of circulation..They were ready to prove that with the Armistice of Rethondes the continuance of the war had become a mathematical impossibility…Some chuckled with satisfaction at the thought, but they were not the most dangerous…Others threatened us with the infection of pity…”Alone against the world,” they said. “Why, what is that but a tale for children?” And that is precisely what it was–a tale for children. Hurrah for the children of England!
Men of England, at this very moment you are writing what public speakers like to describe in their jargon as one of the “greatest pages of history”….At this moment you English are writing one of the greatest pages of history, but I am quite sure that when you started, you meant it as a fairy tale for children. “Once upon a time there was a little island, and in that island there was a people in arms against the world…” Faced with such an opening as that, what old cunning fox of politics or business would not have shrugged his shoulders and closed the book?