PrintMarch 26, 2011
Be Bold!
The political courage shown by Governor Walker and Republican legislators in Wisconsin should be an object lesson to all conservatives: Be bold! Those who oppose us, those who have infested the institutions of American life and the organs of American government, and those who live at the expense of our sweat and our pride will show us no quarter. While our war for the soul of America is peaceful in the sense that it involves no physical violence, it is still total war.
The nauseating comments by the leftists overlords of NPR about the Tea Party show how much these leftists hate and fear us. The indecent firing of Juan Williams was more evidence of the willingness of the intolerant left to fight without scruple against anyone who does not slavishly follow the party line -- even those who still sincerely believe some bits and pieces of leftist mythology. The scurrying Democrats from the Wisconsin Senate show contempt not just for Republicans, but also for the voters who elect them. The thuggish behavior of Wisconsin schoolteachers shows that we cannot assume that these hirelings are honorable.
Do we really need more evidence of just how bad the left is? The blatant appeal to hatred, the naked pursuit of power, the wholly unsavory smell of deceit -- the absence of the tiniest fig leaf of respectability -- are apparent in everything the left does these days. Its bullying can be met only two ways: with surrender or with resistance. The wise course, resistance, cannot be done halfheartedly. All those who stand in the way of leftists face the same gallows in the end. President Reagan, noting the foolishness of timidity in fighting the left, put it well: "What are they going to do? Hang us from a higher tree?" (Recall that this same great American summed up his Cold War strategy thus: "How about this? We win. They lose.")
This is the long heritage of defiant courage in the face of oppression. It is William Wallace at Stirling Bridge reminding Scots that they will die but that they need not die as slaves. It is Patrick Henry in the House of Burgesses telling his fellow Virginians that "[t]he gentlemen cry 'Peace, peace,' but there is no peace: the war has already begun." It is Churchill's pugnacity after France fell, telling Hitler and Britons that "[w]e shall never surrender." It is Solzhenitsyn, alone and threatened in the maw of Marxist tyranny, using his pen to embolden the world against the Evil Empire.
Those who lie, those who lust for power, and those with whom no honorable compromise is possible -- these enemies of liberty -- must simply be defeated. What does Rush tell his listeners every day? "My goal is to defeat liberalism." His defiance is like General Jackson in the Civil War at Manassas: fleeing Confederates stopped, looked, and turned around. One of them, famously, told us why: "There stands Jackson like a stone wall." Courage in war -- and we are very much in a war -- is contagious (and so is cowardice). There is no substitute for victory in our war. Those lions who stand up in the face of wickedness inspire others, while those mice who try to do business with the hopelessly corrupt fall within the malign spell of the left or end up, as Reagan reminds us, hung from a lower branch.
What does this mean in practice today? Republicans should push "right to work" everywhere as hard as their political muscle will let them. Labor unions, as much a dinosaur as Marxism, are the enemy of the working man, the enemy of government economy, the enemy of jobs, and the mortal enemy of every Republican. Fight also that horror called "public education," which is a slave to leftist dogma and a vast hole in every state budget: privatize the instruction of our future. Tackle entitlements not meekly with an eye to the latest poll data, but as if these interconnected Ponzi schemes -- public employee pensions, Medicare, Social Security, and the rest -- are vast frauds which will leave us all poor and afraid. The stench of corruption in ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and sibling monsters must be recorded, exposed, and pressed relentlessly.
Each apology for doing what is right is simple surrender. All vain efforts to peel off "moderate" Democrats blur those distinctions which we want to be crystal-clear. Every poll-driven statement by Republican leaders to capture the imaginary center shows that these Republicans are in fact not "leaders," but dupes. If our ends are honorable and good, then sheepishness about pursuing those ends is not just immoral, but vastly unwise. We are fighting for our country, for all the good that it is and that it can be, and for all the heroes before us who gave us this land. Like them, we must be bold.
Bruce Walker is the author of Poor Lenin's Almanac: Perverse Leftist Proverbs for Modern Life.
