The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

A Dangerous Precedent

Posted on | June 24, 2015 | 155 Comments

The rush to ban display and sale of the Confederate flag in the wake of last week’s shooting in Charleston should cause concern for any person intelligent enough to understand how such precedents, once established, are often used to justify further aggression by Cultural Marxists.

They often argue by analogy, saying This Offensive Thing is exactly like That Historic Atrocity in order to justify the suppression of anything that can be deemed “offensive.” In confrontations with the Cultural Marxist, therefore, we are never arguing merely about the point in controversy — e.g., gay marriage or the Confederate flag — but we are always aware that ceding the immediate point will embolden them to some further demand because, after all, Progress must always march forward.

Whatever it is the Left is arguing against will predictably be compared to the Holocaust — or slavery, or “McCarthyism” — and disagreeing with the Left thereby makes you a Nazi Who Wants to Kill Six Million Jews.

We have to beware of ceding ground to this kind of sophistic argument, because progressives always find in each victory some “principle” that they will then leverage in arguing for their next demand. The Confederate flag is offensive and therefore must be banned and, once we acquiesce to that demand, what will be demanded next? Will feminists demand that Gone With the Wind be censored because of Rhett Butler’s “marital rape” of Scarlett? Certainly the same people who demand that the Confederate flag be prohibited as contraband will not prevent the suppression of Gone With the Wind. And exactly how much of American culture could be similarly banned? Where is the ultimate limit of this censorship? What about the pin-up girls painted on the side of World War II bombers? What about depictions of homosexuals in movies and literature? Will LGBT activists censor The Silence of the Lambs because of the negative portrayal of the transvestite killer “Buffalo Bill”?

“Oh, Stacy, you’re just being alarmist,” you may say.

Dismiss my concerns as the special-pleading of a Southerner, and tell me that I’m making a silly “slippery slope” argument. Disregard the reality that there is a slope in our culture, and that we do seem to be sliding down it at an accelerating pace. Go back 20 or 30 years, and try to think how few people in 1985 or 1995 imagined the point in the Culture War at which we find ourselves now. Certainly two or three decades ago I did not foresee, inter alia, ObamaCare or same-sex marriage, nor could I have imagined then the state of U.S. foreign policy now.

Really: Suppose that in 1990, someone had told you two years into the presidency of George H.W. Bush that the governor of Arkansas would defeat him in the next election, eventually being impeached for having sex with a White House intern, and yet survive that scandal. Imagine, in 1990, if anyone had told you that the Arkansas governor’s wife would someday be elected senator from New York — ?!?!? — then be appointed as Secretary of State by the man who had defeated her for the Democratic nomination to be president in 2008. What would you have said if someone had told you all that in June 1990?

You’re crazy! That could never happen!

And no one then would have imagined that Wal-Mart in 2015 would be prohibiting the sale of the Confederate flag, either.

Well, I doubt I’ll be alive in 2040, but I shudder to think what kind of America my children and grandchildren will be living in, 25 years from now, if things keep going in the direction they’re going now, at an ever-accelerating speed. Conservatives must either pick a fight we can win, or else make up our minds that the next time progressive pick a fight — no matter what it is about — we’re going defeat them at all hazards. Every time progressives win, they become stronger and America becomes weaker. Unless we can find some way to counterattack and force the Left to fight on the defensive, there will be no stopping this cultural and political avalanche short of tyranny or anarchy.

 

Category: Culture

Comments

155 Responses to “A Dangerous Precedent”

  1. Quartermaster
    June 28th, 2015 @ 8:53 pm

    The rest of my email is: mrgcoengr@

  2. DeadMessenger
    June 28th, 2015 @ 9:40 pm

    Ok, I sent that.

  3. Daniel Freeman
    June 28th, 2015 @ 11:14 pm

    Oh, if you think that a sl**e would be racist… just imagine if it were a sl**t. 😉

  4. Da Tech Guy Blog » Blog Archive » Stacy McCain Nails it
    June 29th, 2015 @ 7:00 pm

    […] I can’t do bet­ter than this: […]

  5. Reminder: Crazy People Are Dangerous : The Other McCain
    July 1st, 2015 @ 6:53 am

    […] “sad” death of this young man with such a “promising life.” If only he had posed with a Confederate flag . . . Well, that would be a different story. Meanwhile, in the real world, where the New York Times […]