A Couple Of Calls For More Fighting Spirit From Conservatives

In this age of wokeness and cancel culture, an aggressive minority wields the weapons of demonization and stigmatization to trample all opposition. Undoubtedly you have seen many reports of dissenting conservatives and libertarians self-censoring to avoid everything from loss of friends to politically-driven college admissions or grades to getting fired from a job.

So today I want to highlight two conservatives of notable courage who can’t be silenced, and who are calling on others to join them in a more assertive push back against the forces of authoritarian wokism. The two are Mollie Hemingway and Tom Klingenstein.

Mollie Hemingway writes mostly at The Federalist, where she is a Senior Editor, and is known for covering stories on third-rail issues like the suppression of the Hunter Biden scandal and the sordid process by which fake sex abuse allegations were generated against Brett Kavanaugh to try to derail his Supreme Court nomination. Hemingway then wrote a book on the Kavanaugh confirmation drama; and now she has a new book about to come out dealing with the manipulation of the 2020 election. A few days ago she won a prize from the Bradley Foundation for being what they call a “Champion of Freedom.” At the ceremony she delivered an acceptance speech that is well worth a read. A few excerpts:

Today, everyday Americans are being bullied by a hard-left minority that unfortunately has taken over and controls most of the agenda-setting institutions in our country. As someone who works in the media space, I know what it is like to be a lonely voice taking on many of these powerful people. . . . The conservative establishment, its politicians, and its media, don’t lack ideas or people. But too many of its leaders do lack determination and endurance and fearlessness. . . . The conservative movement in D.C. has too often been engaged in insincere opposition to progressivism’s march through America’s institutions, both public and private. It has seemed mostly interested in negotiating terms of surrender or managing defeat than preserving the republic. . . . All of a sudden, the conservative project is not a conservative one, so much as a counter-revolutionary one.

Overall it’s a call to action. It’s similar for Klingenstein.

You may be less familiar with Klingenstein’s name. He is a New York financial guy and conservative-oriented philanthropist. His big philanthropic gig is as Chairman of the Claremont Institute. Claremont supports conservative scholars and publishes the quarterly Claremont Review of Books, which is an excellent source of thoughtful conservative writing. (If you don’t subscribe, you should.). Klingenstein has published an occasional piece there, but has not been a particularly prolific writer.

But now Klingenstein has just put together a speech which he titles “Winning the Cold Civil War.” The speech is seeking a broad circulation. You can watch Tom deliver the speech at this website, or alternatively you can read a transcript here. Like Hemingway’s Bradley Prize speech, this is another call to action. The basic theme is that the ongoing contest between progressive and conservative thought has escalated beyond mere polite discussion and into what he calls the “cold civil war.” The forces of progressivism are no longer content (if they ever were) to present their arguments and expect them to prevail by the soft forces of persuasion and reason; instead, they have now adopted the tactics of totalitarianism to seek the suppression of all opposition. He adopts the moniker “woke Communists,” or “woke comms,” to label the adversaries. Excerpt:

Education, corporate media, entertainment, big business, especially big tech, are to varying degrees aligned with the Democratic Party, which is now controlled by the woke comms. These institutions together with the government function as a totalitarian regime, crafting narratives that advance their agenda and suppressing those that do not. Instead of violence, there is canceling. This may not look like a totalitarian regime, but it acts like one. Last summer's riots are a case in point.

So what is the counter-strategy?

What should we do about all this? The essential thing, as I've tried to stress, is for Republicans to understand we are in a war and then act accordingly. War is not a time for too much civility, compromise, or for imputing good motives to the enemy. Our generals must fight as if the choice were between liberty and death. This is no time for sunshine patriots.

And then this, with which I could not agree more:

We simply cannot teach our citizens, current and future, that their country is no good and expect to have a country for very long. No country can survive on a diet of endless self-loathing. We need to teach our citizens to love and cherish their country. And we need to stop wallowing in our sins of racism. We are talking ourselves into ruin. As far as I can tell, all this talk about racism has brought us nothing but hardship for blacks, division, and race hustlers. Let's instead talk about what we Americans have in common, and let's start judging Americans by the content of their character.

For concrete next steps, Klingenstein calls for Republican candidates with a fighting spirit who push back hard against Critical Race Theory and the allegations that America is racist. That leads to this about Trump:

Of the talked about possible presidential candidates, Donald Trump understands better than the others that we are in a war. And we know he has the courage to lead the charge. 2024 is a long way off. But if the Republican primary were held next month, Trump would be my candidate.

I have little doubt that the Republican primary voters and 2016 and again in 2020 selected Trump based very much on the same perception that Klingenstein has: he is a fighter. And the voters were and are fed up with non-fighters like Bush, McCain and Romney, who would give only half-hearted pushback to the left, and often couldn’t even articulate clearly the ways in which the woke comm agenda is destructive to our way of life. That said, I think in the three-plus years to the 2024 election it is imperative for the Republicans to come up with a candidate who can match (or nearly match) Trump’s fighting spirit without many of his other flaws. And don’t forget that Trump will turn 78 in 2024.

I have one other significant disagreement with Klingenstein’s presentation, which relates to this line:

This is a war not over the size of government or taxes, but over the American way of life.

The size of government and level of taxes are, in my view, very much key to the left’s battle against the American way of life, and as important in the attack on our way of life as are Critical Race Theory and the accusations of systemic racism. As illustrated by the current effort to effect a sudden $3.5 trillion (or is it $5 trillion or $10 trillion?) expansion in the size and scope of government, the idea is to implement a vast increase in dependency and to fund millions of new cadres of the left with government money.

Anyway, I just hope that here at Manhattan Contrarian we are doing our small part to keep our voices loud and our criticisms trenchant.