Tag: John O’Sullivan

The Most Precious Right

What do you think is the most important right that we have? Is it freedom of speech, worship, press, and assembly? Perhaps the right to bear arms? Maybe our inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I think that there is one right that is more important than any of the ones I have mentioned. In fact, the right that I am thinking of contains and presupposes all of these other rights. I am thinking of the right to be left alone, to live our lives as we see fit without a lot of busy bodies telling us what we should eat, drink, do or think. Once the right to be left alone is granted, all of the others follow. If a nanny-state zealot like Mayor Bloomberg asserts he has the right to keep you from drinking big gulps for your own good, all of your other rights are in danger.

What prompted these reflections is Jonah Goldberg‘s latest Goldberg File. He says what I would like to say better than I can, so I would like to quote a long section in the middle.

Alas, this is where I then segued, more or less, into a long discussion about the us-versus-them mentality of liberalism that liberals routinely project onto conservatives. I tied it in to the IRS scandal as proof that O’Sullivan’s law is alive and well and simply a manifestation of the liberalGleichschaltung. I’m not going to recreate all of that here for the same reason I am not going to eat an entire five-pound brick of government cheese — because I can’t, don’t want to, and even trying will make me sick.

That said, for those of you who don’t know what I mean by the liberal Gleichschaltung, here’s a quick explainer from Liberal Fascism:

The Nazis had a word for this process: Gleichschaltung. A political word borrowed — like so many others — from the realm of engineering, it meant “coordination.” The idea was simple: all institutions needed to work together as if they were part of the same machine. Those that did so willingly were given wide latitude by the state. “Islands of separateness” — be they businesses, churches, or people — were worn down over time. There could be no rocks in the river of progress. In effect, the entire society agreed to the fascist bargain, in which they bought economic, moral, and political security in exchange for absolute loyalty to the ideals of the Reich. Of course, this was a false security; the fascist bargain is a Faustian bargain. But that is what people thought they were getting.

As for O’Sullivan’s Law (named for its author, former NR editor John O’Sullivan) it’s simply this: Any institution that is not explicitly right-wing becomes left-wing over time.

Now let me be clear: I hate O’Sullivan’s law (I am rather fond of John, however). I hate it for the same reason that I hate the argument that I cannot command an army of cape-wearing super-intelligent flying basset hounds with laser vision: because it’s true.

But let’s be honest about why it is true. Because liberals are the aggressors in the culture war. This Lois Lerner woman, it seems increasingly clear, is a perfect example of a midlevel enforcer of O’Sullivan’s Law, a water-carrier for the Gleichschaltung, a junior officer in Matthews’s “war.” But it’s important to recognize that Matthews’s “war” isn’t about freedom qua freedom or rights qua rights, it’s a war over how freedom is defined. And in the minds of progressives you are free to live anyway you want so long as it’s progressive. You have the right to have me pay for things you want, solely because you want them and progressives say you need them.

Any institution that agrees with progressivism is free to stay clear of the State if it wants to (but, being “progressive,” few such institutions want to be free of the State). Any institution that desires to go a different way must be ground down and forced to conform. It is this act of resistance and not any explicit ideological commitment that renders dissident institutions “right wing.” Indeed “right wing” is often just a liberal word for “non-compliant.”

Jonah Angry. Jonah Want Smash

And since I’m already in rant mode, let me add that it really pisses me off. I resent utterly and totally the politicization of everything. I hate it to my core. It is arguably the single most right-wing thing about me. The idea that people can refer to a left-wing clothing line or a right-wing pizza company strikes me as grotesquely ludicrous and ludicrously grotesque. It’s like referring to a “Presbyterian fastball” or a “Fabian cloud.”

The Catholic Church in America is becoming more “right wing” not because it has changed its dogma, but because under Obamacare the imperium of domestic liberalism is expanding once again. An army of Lois Lerners are spilling over the defensive walls of the Church and demanding yet more compliance.

And, yet, when the Church or a craft store or a fast-food chicken joint resists, they are labeled the aggressors in the culture war. It’s like when the Roman legions would invade Germania. The barbarians would fight back and the Romans would respond “we cannot let this assault on Rome stand!”

I am a conservative because I think politics should infect as little of life as possible. And because I am a conservative I resent to the core of my being the fact that everything must either bend to the winds of the Left or be broken by them. The third choice is to become “right wing” which in itself is a kind of surrender because it accedes to the demand that everything become political. But it’s the best choice we’ve got.

In a sane world, the President of Chick-Fil-A should not have to fear boycotts for stating his private opinion about same sex marriage. The Catholic Church should not have to fight a government that wishes it to act against its own teachings. Celebrities wouldn’t feel it was necessary to express their opinions on political matters they are entirely ignorant of, or if they must, take care to make only liberal politically correct statements to safeguard their careers. I shouldn’t have to fear that the businesses I buy from are spending my money to promote policies and values I detest, in order to keep the activists at bay. In other words, this would be a a better and less divisive country if we didn’t politicize nearly everything and turn everything into a culture war to fundamentally transform the country.

Liberals fear the Religious Right is plotting to turn America into a theocracy. What they either ignore or fail to recall is that Conservative Christian Evangelicals were quite content to mind their own business until they became aware that they were the targets of a culture war. They found their values being mocked by the entertainment industry and popular culture. Their children were being indoctrinated in the public schools. Their government was passing laws to promote an agenda hateful to them. Groups like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition have all been essentially defensive in nature. They were formed by a people under attack. Much the same could be said of the Tea Party movement and the two movements do overlap to some extent. In both cases these are people who feel, with good reason, that they are being made the enemy in their own country.

The most hateful thing about all of this is that no one has the option of minding their own business any more. In the culture war, you are either for everything that is good and progressive or you are a hateful bigot. If you just want to be left alone, you are a hateful bigot. It is not even enough to just passively go with the flow. Consider that infamous “no pressure” video that British environmentalist produced a couple of years ago.

If you can stand to watch it all the way through, notice exactly who gets blown up. The people who are killed are not people who are actively opposing the global warming agenda. They simply don’t want to get involved in the campaign. They want to be left alone.

Well, if is a culture war they want, I guess we have no choice but to fight it. President Obama can declare the War on Terror over, even though he might want to ask the people out there who want to kill us, but unless we want our country to be fundamentally transformed in ways we do not want, we will have to keep fighting for our freedoms.

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