A regular reader writes:
I would urge some caution withyour recent political cartoon. This is only because you may unjustly be treated with less seriousness than your blog deserves if someone wants to peg you in a certain way. I'm certainly not being PC or suggesting that political satire is problematic -- it's primarily a tactical point.
I couldn't agree more, of course, that liberalism (and, in particular, it's diseased and mutated zombie baby of multiculturalism) is attempting, even if unwittingly, to destroy its host body. The cartoon is a very powerful one, indeed!
Point taken. It's a tricky issue. But I think it is important to let our opponents know that we will oppose them. There is no way not to be unfairly pegged by the nimrods and numbskulls of the Left. So conservatives shouldn't worry about it. Janeane Garofalo's comment that the 'tea-baggers' as she derisively refers to them are racists and rednecks is, I am afraid, representative of the scum-baggery widespread on the Left. We should stand up to them and speak the truth with courage.
Would that I could avoid this stuff. But I cannot in good conscience retreat into my inner citadel and let my country be destroyed -- the country that makes it possible for me to cultivate the garden of solitude, retreat into my inner citadel, and pursue pure theory for its own sake.
Political discourse is unavoidably polemical. The zoon politikon must needs be a zoon polemikon. ‘Polemical’ is from the Greek polemos, war, strife. According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, strife is the father of all: polemos panton men pater esti . . . (Fr. 53) I don't know about the 'all,' but strife is certainly at the root of politics. Politics is polemical because it is a form of warfare: the point is to defeat the opponent and remove him from power, whether or not one can rationally persuade him of what one takes to be the truth. It is practical rather than theoretical in that the aim is to implement what one takes to be the truth rather than contemplate it. 'What one takes to be the truth': that is the problem in a nutshell. Conservatives and leftists disagree fundamentally and nonnegotiably.
Implementation of what one takes to be the truth, however, requires that one get one’s hands on the levers of power. Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what could be called the converse-Clausewitz principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means.
A political cartoon like the one I posted surely won't convert any leftists. How could it, when the 281 patiently argued pages of David Horowitz's Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery 2004) made no impression on them? The Left cannot be persuaded; they must be opposed.
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