I’ve been on the fringes of a bar fight only once in my life. It was during my grad school days at a pub on Saddler Street in Durham then known as the “Buffalo Head”. It had a reputation of being a pub for locals but once I found myself there toward closing time having a pint. A couple of yobs got into it and within three seconds the pint glasses were flying at about chest level. I made my way to the door on my hands and knees and as I went out, several bobbies went in, sticks in hand. Not a pleasant scene, to be sure, and most people are like me – get down on the floor and crawl to safety.
I mention bar fights as an analogy to leftist politics. Leftists are good bar-fighters and I daresay they relish it, primarily because they know that civilized people will go to great lengths to avoid such altercations. Nasty aggression therefore becomes a tool of choice. Conservatives also tend to shy away from such fights because conservatism upholds the ideals of the civil society – and nasty aggression is not part of our lexicon. Leftism scorns the civil society, of course, and denounces it merely as another manifestation of bourgeois thinking that must be swept away before the demands of the new order.
But as in the larger world, unanswered political and cultural aggression tends to beget more aggression. And finally, even civilized people are forced to fight – often on ground not of their choosing. I’ve always said that I would support the Republican Party when it showed it knew how to win a bar fight. I don’t think the Republicans have learned their lesson, but the new generation of conservative activists understand, I think, that to prevail in the culture war, they must go on offense. And that means aggression – not only winning fights but picking them.
Mark Steyn recently quoted this assessment of the difference between right and left:
Whenever the centre-right wins an election, the centre-left allows that its opponents have the office, but denies they have the mandate. They can govern for a term, yes, but only by consensus, not according to their own lights… The amazing thing isn’t that the centre-left makes this declaration — why shouldn’t it? — but that the centre-right often believes it, or acts as if it did. Majority or minority, Tories tend to govern apologetically, as if they were caretaker governments, probationary constables, relief politicians holding the fort until the real politicians catch their breath and return for the next spell of legitimate centre-left governance.
Simply put, the centre-left feels entitled to govern; the centre-right doesn’t. It was instructive, and scary, to watch America’s President open a new chapter of regulatory statism in his Wall Street ululation this week. Obama was cooking, laying down the law with entitlement oozing from every pore, in a dazzling, born-to-govern performance.
There are distinct philosophical differences at work here, but it’s heartening to see a new generation of conservatives coming of age who know instinctively that their ideas are superior and who are not shy about bar-fighting with the left. Like John at Powerline, I’m encouraged by Andrew Breitbart and Pajamas Media and the spontaneous tea party movement. I do think we have superior ideas and asserting them confidently and aggressively is the only way to prevail.
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