George Rebane
SecDef Mattis was interviewed yesterday by FN’s Bret Baier at the Reagan National Defense Forum. This is an annual get together of the country’s important people to talk about, well, national defense. I’m a fan of Gen Mattis (even though he is a gyrene) and think he’s done a good job at the DoD. But when the interview turned to how poorly Americans get along with each other today, and the Right/Left polarization, Mattis’ response left me slack-jawed. I had to rewind the DVR and listen to his quote a couple more times to be sure I heard it right.
The general’s response was a version of Rodney King’s ‘Why can’t we just all get along?’ He didn’t think that there lay any real barriers for the country reuniting into a functional form again because, after all, we are still all Americans, and as a country “we probably don’t have big differences about where we want to go ultimately.” What??!!
That is precisely the reason we have pulled apart – the ‘ultimate’ directions for the country, as seen by our Left and Right, are diametric and could not be more different. SecDef Mattis is a very connected man in the Washington nomenklatura. He talks to all the big shakers and movers within the beltway and the think tanks that circle the capital. Is that his takeaway from his many conversations, that 21st century Americans are pretty much united in “where we want to go ultimately”? Is it not clear to those within the DC bubble that the Left seeks a weakened America – culturally fractured with an unassimilated population – that is more than ready to join a post-national global union? And is it not equally clear to them that the Right wants to preserve the Westphalian world order of sovereign-nation states in which America remains an economically strong hegemon, an order in which less developed nations can continue the post-war progress to improve their citizens’ quality of life? Apparently not.
To me it appears that these high and mighty elites (especially the Republicans) should get out into the hustings more often. There they would see the spread of rot from the already socialist soiled urban centers into the country’s heartland smaller communities. There they would witness the polarization first hand as progressives take over formerly pristine towns and counties, and immediately harbinger the new world order in those invaded microcosms. They should read the local papers and blogs where the stark divisions in values, traditions, mores, and the delivery of government clash daily.
I believe the country’s Left is well aware of its penetration of these conservative redoubts, but our national Right doesn’t seem to have a clue about who and what they are up against by spouting well-meaning yet ignorant pabulum from national pulpits.
A litmus test of all this is the attack on the First Amendment (and the Second which makes the First possible) by the local lefties. Free speech has always been the first target of the proto-autocrats. And on the local level this assault is most visible. Today’s progressives do not hesitate to attack and work to silence every viewpoint which is counter to their carefully forged narrative. They use to great advantage the Right’s open presentation of its ideological tenets, skewing them (a la Alinsky) to be the current expressions of historically hateful regimes. But the main thrust is always to silence those remaining voices that explain the current state of affairs and sound the alarm to those who still believe in continuing the exceptionalism of a constitutional America.
(As a close-to-home illustration of all this I invite your attention to the debate in our local left-leaning newspaper along with the blogs and FB pages of our leftwing trumpets. For example, we conservetarians have no problem in detailing our ideological tenets – I offer the example of RR – but try as you may, you will not get anyone from the Left to reciprocate with more substance than shibboleths such as promoting ‘social justice’, the definition of which no one can give. Along with that practice is the profuse labeling of the Left’s enemies as ‘racist’, ‘hard right’, ‘alt-right’, ‘Nazis’, along with '-phobics' of all hues, again without being able to connect the so-labeled individual to any evidence that justifies the label. Their perpetual repeating of such accusations has successfully convinced their lightly-read constituencies, those who seek ever more abundant handouts and wealth redistribution from an all-enveloping government. I challenge readers to find where and how the Right attempts to silence the voices of the Left.)
[4dec18 update] An important and welcome contribution to the comment stream that counters my above commentary comes from RR reader and commenter Steven Frisch, a leading local voice of the Left. I respond to his 821am below with my 1015am which I have decided to addend to this post. Mr Frisch begins with, “I sincerely conten(d) that the entire "Great Divide" frame is a myth, designed by reactionary media actors and political movement leaders to polarize people of seemingly different political philosophies, …”
re Steven Frisch 821am – A much appreciated comment indeed Mr Frisch. I welcome it as another of these periodic exemplars from the Left that confirms what some very sober political scientists, historians, sociologists, and behavioral economists have been observing for the last few decades – BTW, all of them vigorously disavowed by the Left to a degree that in recent years some have even been prevented from speaking on college campuses by hyper-progressive (aka 'snowflake') students and administrations.
What's most remarkable is how the Left adamantly ignores all of these recognized observers and students of the human condition. If an argument doesn't fit the Left's narrative (eg. viz Mr Frisch), it doesn't exist or have a legitimate voice in the debate.
Among the many ignored are the works of Allan Bloom (1987), Robert Bork (1996), Charles Murray (2012), and most recently Jonah Goldberg (2018). And the stark differences that today divide us are raisons d'etre of established organizations such as La Raza and MALDEF, with now much more virulent leftwing organizations coming out of the muck in response to organize the migrant invasion from the south.
In a more formal sense, publications such as 'The Libertarian Mind', 'The Conservatarian Manifesto', and 'The Progressive Manifesto' delineate and highlight our diametrically distant ideological desiderata. And just out, 'The Diversity Delusion' (2018) by Heather MacDonald details how the seams of our common culture are ripping at an ever-greater rate. The shared values that Mr Frisch references come in two overwhelmingly distinct flavors, and are by no means shared nationwide. What little intersection that today remains in our values (and none in our worldview) has negligible adhesive power.
An endowed fellow of the Manhattan Institute, with degrees from Yale, Cambridge, and Stanford, Ms MacDonald predicts a high likelihood of armed conflict in America within five years. Other than that, everything is hunky-dory.
As a coda to my response I draw your attention to the glaring specifics of Mr Frisch’s “things that bind humans together”; these are nothing but generalized attributes used, not to foster the present world order of sovereign nation-states (e.g. a sovereign and strong America), but to promote globalism in its final form. Going into the detailed expansion of each attribute – “cognition, communication, self preservation, emotion, procreation, myth, spiritualism, rationalism, universalism, the desire to create order and structure, the creation of family and peer groups, the desire to create society for mutual benefit” – would instantly reveal the chasm between the global collectivist (e.g. Steven Frisch) and the proponent of a capitalist Westphalian world order (e.g. George Rebane).
And true to the Left’s ever-present Alinsky algorithm for argumentation (accuse the other of what you do), Mr Frisch mischaracterizes the Great Divide, as presented in these pages and by the cited authors, as one “that separates us from other human actors,, or from each other within our own society by age, gender or class, is in reality a strategy to separate people and create a power center or power dynamic that creates advantage.” In short, Mr Frisch claims that it is the Right that fosters these characteristic parameters of identity politics with which the Left's media outlets and education industry now bathe the country, and for which there is no evidence of division along such lines coming from the Right – Alinsky par excellence.
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