The Attack on the Right Continues!
Is it possible that we, the right, simply want to be free to build better lives for ourselves and our families?
If Left versus Right is a conflict (and we believe that it is) then who started it? Who is causing the ongoing conflict? Are we even allowed to ask that out loud? In the age of moral equivalence and whataboutism, it may seem somehow, wrong... Wrong to blame the leftists. But if the blame really is theirs, shouldn’t we give it to them?
Yes, we should.
(If you doubt that this is important, jump to the “Conclusion: Why This is Important!”)
The policy of the Right is: Live and let live.
The policy of the left is: Increase the power of the government, and use government to control the rest of us. All their talk about ‘social justice’ and so on? It’s a front. Their goal is control. And it has been since Marx, and long before that, in fact.
Is it possible that we the right simply want to be free to build better lives for ourselves and our families?
While they the left are never satisfied with that situation? The left always want to force upon us more regulations, bigger government, higher taxes, more ‘social programs’ that always seem to get bigger, cost more, require us to give up more of our freedoms, but which never achieve their stated goals. But which always require more government.
It’s true. The left-right conflict exists only because the leftists are attacking the right. In some conflicts, one side really is to blame.
It’s like what Golda Mier said long ago of the Arab-Israeli wars, “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel." If the Israeli government (as opposed to the Israeli people) is wrong today, it is because the Israeli government has become the attacker.
If a certain group attacks another certain group, then we are told that no one is to blame for the conflict, as long as the attackers are leftists.
If the left stopped making demand and inventing issues that require more government and move the culture and the country left, then there would be no left-versus-right conflict, because the right would just give a sigh of relief and go back to minding our own business.
We, the right, just want to live, to do our work and live in our homes, free from excessive government control and constant antagonism and attacks by the leftists.
As we discuss in Are You a C________? (i.e. Conservative), conservatives are conservatives because we are forced to try to protect society from the constant stream of bad ideas that flows from the left.
Conservatives tend to be complacent. Live and let live is a conservative idea.
David Horowitz, interviewed by Ben Shapiro (2021)
The sins of the left are many; the sin of the right seems to be complacency.
The Issues that Divide Us
Leftists invent and/or exploit “emergencies”. Like COVID. A virus (the creation of which was apparently funded by U.S. government regulators) was used as an excuse to destructively lockdown the economy, close schools, force mask mandates and vaccinations, and allow our rulers to trample what remain of our Constitutional rights.
Leftists invent issues that, they say, require government action. Gender issues; white supremacism; man-made global warming; Christian nationalism and rightwing conspiracies; voter disenfranchisement; too much freedom (in a 2023 Real Clear poll, 38% of Democrats said that Americans had “too much freedom”)... Then leftists demand that more government is needed to fix the “issues”. And the left demand that the federal debt be expanded to pay for the “fixes”. And then the debt itself threatens economic apocalypse.
As the book OverRegulated recounts, the leftists invented an “Era of Deregulation” lie. No such thing as an Era of Deregulation happened in the U.S. in the last hundred years. In reality relentless overregulation happened instead. But the leftists claimed that the so-called Era of Deregulation, that never really happened, resulted in too much freedom, and they used that excessive freedom as an excuse to demand more regulation. Regulation and government control to get rid of that excessive freedom caused by an Era of Deregulation that never happened.
The leftists don’t always even try to hide it. In April 2024, in his Substack, David Poe quoted leftist Rachel Maddow saying, "The way to move or expand that [Overton] window is to advocate super extreme positions which change the realm of what`s politically possible because after something super nuts has been floated, thereafter, slightly less nuts positions will start to look acceptable and moderate by comparison."
Where do almost all of the societal issues that separate the left and right come from? The leftists. They invent the issues to exploit them for political gain and to attack the right. How many such societal “issues” would evaporate if there were no such thing as leftists?
Democrats “want the government to run everything and they think the government can fix everything.” Republicans “want people to be personally responsible for their own lives.” ...One party is battling for an ideology; the other is battling for groups of people.
Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, "Republicans and Democrats Can’t Even Agree About How They Disagree" Washington Post (2016)
Grossmann and Hopkins aren’t rightists, if anything, they are left-of-center sociologists. They were being interviewed for their book when they said that. Their book makes the case for the theory that “The Republican Party is the vehicle of an ideological movement while the Democratic Party is a coalition of social groups.” And it’s true. But in that Washington Post article about their book, they unintentionally tip the hand of the leftists: Leftists aren’t people with a real ideology. Leftists are people who want government to intervene in every part of our lives. That’s not an issue; that’s an attack. We rightists just want the leftists to leave us alone. The leftists are the constant aggressors, and their relentless intent is to take away our freedom and use government to control us.
So it isn't real societal issues that divide the left and right. Their issues aren’t real issues; they are attacks. What divides us is not real issues but the attacks. It is the attack by the leftists that creates the left-right divide.
Conclusion: Why This Is Important!
The leftists’ issues are the ammunition in their attacks. But that ammunition would be useless if they didn’t have a gun to shoot the bullets. Their gun is the mass media, including social media and entertainment. Their new issues emerge from the lower levels of the mass media system (we discuss how that works in the book LSoUP: the Leftist System for Untruth Production).
And the leftists use their control of the media to put and keep the “issues” in the forefront of the public mind, by telling stories where the fake issues are real. To win, we must counter that somehow.
We cannot keep the freedoms that we still have only by defending them. It won’t be enough. As Pericles of Athens learned in the Peloponnesian War against the Spartans, and other leaders have learned since, the logical outcome of defense is surrender. If we want to take back our country and our freedoms, we must go on the offensive. We need to find and create our own issues and put them in the forefront of the public mind, and move the Overton Window right. We would win. Because the leftists’ issues are lies based on lies. Our issues can be real, and we can tell the truth about them.
Will we do this?
A fundamental problem we have is a Republican establishment who still act like it is 1980, who think empire is about supporting corporations, billionaires and an industrial military complex. They are as much the problem as the leftists, basically in cahoots with the DNC to sell out the middle and working class.
A caution I would have about the more freedom vs more government rhetoric explaining the left-right divide; is that the left also wants freedom... freedom from responsibility. While many of us on the right like classical liberty, the left is the faction of licentiousness. Accountability sometimes has to be enforced... by force. Whereas most rightists want to use force when it is genuinely necessary, the left wants to use force when it is not necessary.