Feel the rage

Yesterday, I wrote about incrementalism.  My point was that it took conservatives decades to get into this mess and that we have to expect it to take decades to get out of the mess.  Reversing ObamaCare was never going to be the magic moment that reversed a trend that started with Roosevelt, and that got two big boosts, one under Johnson and the other under Obama.  We have to fight myriad small battles, starting with the upcoming election.

Actually, the upcoming election is the easy one.  We’re feeling the rage.  We’re pushing and moving.  It’s the next election, and the next one, and the next one, not to mention tracking what’s going on in our local schools, encouraging our young ones to speak up in school, to storm the newspapers, to set up alternative media, etc.

One of the things that’s both irritating and effective about the Left is that it’s always enraged.  It’s always out there pushing and fighting and urging and co-opting and doing whatever else the heck it needs.  (I know there’s not a single “it” out there.  There is, instead, a collective of humans, but these humans are remarkably for their endless energy.)  Conservatives tend to be complacent or, perhaps, we simply conserve our energy for the big fight.

Of course, it’s that innate conservativism, that passivity, that allowed us — meaning the American nation — to get into this semi-socialized mess in the first place.  The past 70 years have shown that we’ll periodically rouse ourselves for some big battles, but we ignore the continuous lesser battles that the Left wages.  If we win in November, my bet is on us doing precisely the same:  we’ll celebrate our victory, and then lapse back into our usual torpor.  At that point, of course, the Left moves, and it moves fast, hard, and relentlessly.

Here’s the deal:  If we’re programmed by our conservative nature to sit inert until the big fights come along, we’re going to lose the cultural and political war.  We just will.  We’re trying to swing a big hammer periodically, even as we’re getting eaten from the ground up by small bugs.  We have to overcome our inertia and fight continuously.  We cannot relax, nor is it sufficient for us to fight a defensive battle.  This political and social war requires constant, active, aggression — not physical violence, but aggression in the world of the mind.

If we don’t fight, if we don’t feel the rage, we will lose, and we’ll deserve to lose.