Tired of ‘Winning’ Yet?
By KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
May 31, 2020 6:30 AM
Republicans should stop making excuses for the president's lies, threats, and abuses — or stop wrapping themselves in the mantle of patriotism.I’ve never really thought of Mark Steyn as a Palestinian suicide bomber before.
You’ll want some context.
Steyn, a wonderful writer and former National Review colleague, was filling in for Rush Limbaugh a few weeks ago, and he made the case for using antitrust law to bully technology platforms such as YouTube (a Google subsidiary) into giving Republicans a fairer shake. Steyn conceded that the idea might not have much legal merit but insisted that it was necessary on political grounds. The Left, he said, is “serious about power,” and therefore the Right has to be equally “serious” — even if that means, as it plainly would mean here, abusing federal antitrust powers in the service of partisan political ends.
Steyn was leaning on a classic political trope, in effect: “The other side is a bunch of rat bastards, and therefore it not only is morally acceptable for us to be rat bastards, but we have a moral obligation to be rat bastards — if you aren’t a rat bastard, you aren’t a patriot.” Those are my words; Steyn’s would be cleverer, and possibly sung.
That is a pretty common line of thought, if you want to call it that, on the right right now — and on the left, too. Our lefty friends moan that the Right has all the money on its side and all the corporations (except Google, PepsiCo, AT&T, NBCUniversal, Facebook, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Deloitte . . .), and the Left is therefore justified in engaging in political violence, slander, lies, acts of suppression from the petty to the grand, blacklisting, etc.
These are obvious post facto rationalizations of bad behavior. It’s the same reason our Democratic friends have insisted that every Republican president of the modern era was the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler — they want to behave badly, they do not have sufficient moral cultivation to control themselves, they are looking for a moral permission slip, and there is no ethical get-out-of-jail-free card like the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
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