How Do We Push Back Against the Twitter Mob?
Over at American Greatness Alaina Toledo tells conservatives to get out on the front lines of Twitter and let ‘em have it.
[U]ntil the Right can be bothered to match the Left in its passion, we will continue to lose ground in the culture war and on the electoral map. And as they pick off our best and brightest -- those few who will stand on the front lines and take all the fire without fear of being viewed as “undignified” or “offensive” -- we will grow weaker and weaker. And when we have no champions left?
She’s right.
But there’s a problem. Our lefty friends believe in politics like a religion, so when they barrel into some conservative on social media they know they are doing the Lord’s work, and damning all racist sexist homophobic sinners to Earthly Hell and back again. But we sinners don’t believe in politics as a religion; we think that politics is a necessary evil. As far as we are concerned, you need politics to defend against enemies, foreign and domestic, and then you can go home, because the rest of human life is social and voluntary and cooperative.
So how do you mount a counterattack against the lefty Holy Warriors?
After Ryszard Legutko was deplatformed by the safe-spacers at Middlebury College I thought the least I could do was buy his book, The Demon in Democracy. He argues that communism and liberal democracy are similar in their faith in inevitable progress -- in communism towards the socialist state, in liberal democracy towards the day when there are no more victims and the last white supremacist has been razed flat. And in some ways liberal democracy is worse than communism, because its victim hunt doesn’t stop with the workers. Worst of all, for Legutko, is the EU, larding layer after layer of administration and regulation on the people, and cunningly set up so the voters can’t throw the rascals out.
At some point, you would think that even educated women and the liberal wives of billionaires would get the point, that their husbands could be next to lose reputation and livelihood. Why, the little darlings might even swallow their fashionable Trump revulsion once they understand that.
But how do you oppose the ideologues and the administrators?
Legutko is not optimistic:
The real change will come only when the current view of man spends itself and is considered inadequate. Only then will new stories develop or be revived… allowing a different look at human fate and the dreams through which individuals and communities express their aspirations.
I take a slightly different view. The real change will come when lefties can’t get elected or appointed on their belief in socialism and identity politics and administrative statism.
Perhaps the Trump election was telling the lefties exactly that.
But our Democratic friends and their willing accomplices in the media don’t want to hear that. Thus Trump Russia collusion. Even though there was no collusion. I think that people in the liberal bubble call it Denial.
How do you get crazed Democratic ideologues to get the message? Answer: you have another election. And if that doesn’t do the trick you have yet another election.
The point about elections is not so that the sacred people can select their representatives. It is so that the people can cry: Enough!
That is why Winston Churchill declared Democracy to be the worst form of government, except for all the others. Democracy stumbles around, makes every mistake in the book, but at least the people have the power, through elections, to throw the rascals out and select new rulers to stumble around.
Schumpeter wrote that democracy is not the rule of the people, because the people cannot rule. Democracy permits the people to select their rulers. Only that isn’t really true either.
For me, democracy means that the people can throw the rascals out.
That’s it. We fight back against the Twitter mob by voting them out. This year, next year, and the year after that. We must show them that we regard their simplistic faith in political power as evil, and their naive faith in rational expertise as obscurantism. By voting them out. Until they get the message.
What comes next? What kind of a world will appear when our current rulers have been reduced to public servants? That need not worry us. In those days, as Marx prophesied, we will “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon” -- and figure up new ways to humiliate the ruling class in the evening.
Then, perhaps our rulers will submit to being our public servants rather than our proud masters.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.