By Dan McLaughlin
Friday, April 12, 2024
‘Why can’t we fight the way they do?” This is the
eternal cry of the civilized man at war, the policeman walking the beat — and
the political conservative. There’s an answer, and it goes beyond the moral
injunctions that “we’re better than they are” or “we shouldn’t sink to their
level.” It is also this: We’re fighting for different things, with different
people. So of course our methods must be different. The reasons are not
only moral; they are practical. They should be considered even by those who
reject all appeals to morality in politics.
In any form of conflict, there are two basic principles
that constrain your strategy and your tactics: Your ends affect the means you
choose, and you can only select strategies and tactics that are appropriate to
the troops at your disposal.
Means and Ends
In conflict — whether it be war, litigation, politics, or
some other form of contest — you can’t answer the question “how shall we fight”
without first answering the question “what are we fighting for?”
It’s not that the ends justify the means (although the ends always inform the
justification of means); it’s that the ends you seek dictate the means that can
help you get there.
Consider: Israel fights in a different way from Hamas for
a number of reasons, but a major one is that Israel is fighting to preserve its
civilization; Hamas is happy to see everything burn. It approaches war with
different goals, and that recommends different means. In the Civil War, the
Union was restrained in some ways by its desire to end the war with the whole
nation restored, including the South; the Confederacy was restrained in other
ways by fighting to preserve slave plantations that would lose their entire
enslaved workforce if they fell even temporarily into Union hands.
The same is true in the law. Prosecutors may be more
interested in building a large case against a number of defendants, and less in
the fate of one individual defendant. That defendant’s lawyer is focused
entirely on his client, will approach the case differently, and may find ways
to exploit the prosecutor’s devotion to a broader picture. Similarly, you
handle a civil case differently if you’re looking to score a big contingency
fee, or to make social change through the courts, or to defend a corporate client’s
bottom line, or to vindicate your client’s good name, or to blacken your
adversary’s public reputation through lawfare. The goals dictate the tactics.
To answer the question “How should conservatives fight?”
therefore, we should first ask: What is it that we fight for? What
do conservatives, and the Right more broadly, want from politics?
There are a number of answers. The first-order goods that
the political Right seeks in any society are to raise and support a family, to
practice faith and raise children in that faith, to pursue a livelihood, to
keep what we earn and make for our own, and to enjoy the fruits of voluntary
civil society. To do those things, we must maintain public order and safety,
while clearing sufficient space for individual liberty and private, communal
organization to allow people to enjoy that good life free of the domination of
the state.
If what you want is family, faith, order, and commerce,
you prefer the values of civil discourse and the resolution of disputes by the
judgments of elections and written law. These are better means for the Right
than continual disruption and street theater because they are the tactics that
can coexist with the ends sought. If your aim is to allow people to live — as
much as possible — outside of politics and government, and to enjoy their
liberties with their families, their churches, and their communities — well,
that’s not consistent with demanding that they live the 24/7 politicized life.
This is why boycotts and the like are so hard to sustain on the right: because
people who are involved in politics defensively don’t want to
make every choice in their life in a political fashion; indeed, they feel that
if they are doing so, they have already lost.
We also wish to be free of arbitrary government power.
That freedom can be the product of a government of your friends, but friends
come and go in power; it is more secure when it is a government of laws, upon
which all may fall back to claim protection at need. The stability and
evenhandedness of law promote public order as well as the protection of life
and limb and property. Because the loss of those things is felt dearly on our
side, the remedy for the erosion of law is to insist upon its punctilious enforcement,
rather than to retaliate in kind.
We’re the side that believes in rules because rules are
part of the vision of a good society that we seek. As Abraham Lincoln explained in his debut Lyceum Address in 1838, the
lynching of guilty men might be no great tragedy in itself, but
when men take it in their heads to
day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the
confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang
or burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and
that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably
will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. And not only so; the
innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in
every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and
thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of
the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded . .
.
The Right tends also towards the conservative sentiment:
to preserve tradition and protect the patrimony we were given by our
forefathers. In America, this means the inheritance of the Declaration, the
Revolution, and the Constitution. There’s a reason why our history in general and Republican and conservative history in particular is
so wedded to the Founding Fathers and the American Way for which so much blood
has been spilled. Our tradition of ordered liberty is in part the rational way
of defending the things the Right wants, and in part the instinctual attachment
of our people to the ways they have always known. The American system isn’t
just a tool to an end, it’s part of what we want to preserve. This may sound to
some like stuffed-shirt think-tank rhetoric. Yet its corny, old-style
patriotism has surprising power with ordinary Americans, even and maybe
especially those who (as Lincoln noted) are bound to our past by adoption rather
than blood.
It was only a little over a decade ago that the Tea Party
movement revived Founding-era iconography on the right, and that even the
center-Left was embracing pro-Founding cultural products like Hamilton.
The current mania for iconoclasm on the left is unlikely to succeed in stamping
out that recurrent beat in American hearts. The Sixties still gave way to the
festival of old-timey patriotism of the 1976 bicentennial, and we’re only two years out from
our national 250th birthday. That represents a well of sentiment upon which the
Right can draw for sustenance.
Of course, conservatives are always on the lookout for
ways to improve the world around us, but unlike the Left, we do not aim to do
so by feats of imagination. We typically ask instead what already works and has
worked in the past, and how we can do more of that. We want more people to
enjoy the blessings we already have. We therefore act like the man who builds a
new room for his house, rather than the one who insists that a whole new house
must be constructed every time something isn’t right.
When you’re fighting to keep what was handed down to you,
rather than to begin the world anew, you don’t fight the same way. You try to
reform, rather than delegitimize or destroy, as many institutions that have
gone astray as can be saved — or at least to ensure that you can rebuild new
ones by their side before you set about the work of destruction. The
school-choice and homeschooling movements have gained momentum in recent years
partly because of legal victories and partly because of the decaying legitimacy
of public schools, but also in large part because they proved that they could
build alternative institutions for normal people looking to raise their
families. The great conservative advances in the courts have been the work of
the Federalist Society and other institutions that have battled for decades to
work within the frameworks of the legal profession and legal academia,
compelling some grudging respect.
Know Your Soldiers
The other key variable in any conflict is the allies and
troops you have available to you. Armies know this. An army of illiterate
conscripts needs simple weapons. An army of mounted nomads or backwoods hunters
will fight as it has lived. An army of settled men in their 30s will fight like
tigers on their own doorsteps but will be poorly suited for complex offensive
operations.
Who are the Right’s cadres? In any place or time, and
especially in America, you go to any gathering of Republicans, conservatives,
or any other segment of the Right, and who is overrepresented? Parents,
churchgoers, homeowners, farm owners, small-business owners, independent
tradespeople, middle-aged people, military veterans, cops, firemen, all types
of people who have a stake in the established order of things and want to
protect and improve it rather than burning it down to start over. These are not,
except in the most extraordinary cases, people who riot, or people who tie up
rush-hour traffic. They’re the people who put away the folding chairs at the
end of a meeting.
This is, in fact, what attracts people to parties of the
Right as they mature: They realize that they’d like to keep what they earn,
raise their own children as they please, and live in a nice place that isn’t a
hotbed of chronic activism. They understand that fixing things is hard work,
and destroying is always easier than building.
The shift toward more working-class engagement in
Republican politics has made a few changes to how this looks, especially at
Donald Trump’s rallies, but fewer than the press coverage might suggest.
Trump’s primary supporters skewed older and more conservative in 2024 than in 2016,
and were less heavily concentrated among non-churchgoers. It remains the case
that Republicans are disproportionately the party of the religious. The MAGA
movement tends to draw heavily on people who lack college degrees but not money
— the sorts of people who run plumbing and contracting businesses, or who show
up for boat parades. Campus radicals on the left still vastly outnumber campus
radicals on the right. Much of the rebelliousness on the right today reflects,
not radicalism against order or even hierarchy, but rather a resurgence of the
small-r republican tradition of rejecting the entrenchment of
elites.
Chaos is never our friend. It is the enemy of the things
we aim to protect and advance. Its arrival demoralizes the very people we need
on our side, and if we find ourselves feeding it, that prevents us from
offering them an alternative. As Lincoln continued:
[Criminals,] having ever regarded
Government as their deadliest bane . . . make a jubilee of the suspension of
its operations; and pray for nothing so much, as its total annihilation. While,
on the other hand, good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by
the laws, and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the
defense of their country; seeing their property destroyed; their families
insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing
in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and
disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection; and are not much
averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose . . .
Whenever this effect shall be
produced among us; whenever the vicious portion of population shall be
permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches,
ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors,
and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on
it, this Government cannot last.
All of this is as true today as it was in the 1830s. Even
when people around the world seek a strongman form of government on the right,
it’s because they want someone to give them what more democratic governments
are failing to provide: a free and ordered space in which to live adult lives
of family, work, and faith.
The fascist movements of Europe in the 1930s are, if
anything, the exception that proves the rule about what works in the politics
of the Right. Those movements were overloaded with hardened combat veterans of
the First World War in their late twenties to early forties who had returned to
find their societies conspicuously lacking in order, prosperity, faith, pride,
or any of the other things that had characterized their youthful lives before
the war. They saw hyperinflation and the Great Depression, and they saw the
Bolshevik Revolution threaten their own societies with radicalism. And so they
rejected the traditional conservatives in their countries and turned to the far
right.
Still, the fascists in most places failed even on their
own terms. They burned hot for a few years but left their nations in ruins:
disarmed, disordered, and humiliated. Germany was partitioned by its enemies;
Italy was sentenced to decades of chronic instability and low-level domestic
insurgency. They also, by virtue of their similarities with the Left,
inevitably clashed with the churches and other institutions that the Right
values. The fascists’ effort to borrow the youthful enthusiasms, street violence,
and tactical approaches of the Left proved a miserable failure. Even
longer-lasting regimes such as Franco’s Spain or Pinochet’s Chile had to bow in
the end to a more liberal order. It was the liberal democracies, not the
fascists, who ultimately defeated the communists.
By the same token, American conservatives — for all of
their defeats, which have been many — have succeeded at preserving a good deal
more of our legal, cultural, and religious heritage than have our counterparts
in places such as Britain and Canada. That owes in part to our insistence on
law, process, and structure — both because the American Way is a good in
itself, and also because its traditional frameworks are more favorable to our
ends than are the unconstrained current-majoritarian politics of parliamentary
systems. Me-too social democracy on the right may fail more slowly and
peaceably than the far-Right does, but it fails nonetheless.
It is useful for conservatives to study Saul
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and other templates for left-side
activism, because we should know the other side’s playbook, and because there
are always some lessons we can adapt to our own side. But the
two sides of our politics seek different destinations; we should not expect
them to follow the same road. If we try, we may find ourselves far from home
with no way back.
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