Winning vs Playing Nice

Sometimes politics *is* a bloodsport

A few months ago, I lauded the virtue of keeping open lines of communication with people on all sides of the political spectrum. Today I want to present a corollary, one that might seem contradictory, but I believe it is part of the same paradigm: The purpose of politics is to win, and if you’re not winning, you’re losing.

If that sounds crass, go back and read my piece a few weeks ago about the politics of power. It’s pretty simple logic, actually. What is the purpose of politics? To enact policies that protect our life, liberty, and property. How do we do that? By achieving power. How is power achieved in the United States? By winning elections.

Everything else is window dressing.

Many older Republicans look back wistfully at the halcyon days when politics were not so divisive. Sure, at the time our political disagreements seemed severe, but at the end of the day Republicans and Democrats agreed on more than they disagreed.

Consider that at the time of their famous debate in 1960, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon disagreed on taxes, regulations, and welfare, but they agreed that America was great, that Christianity was our moral foundation, and Soviet communism must be stopped. Beyond that, they definitely agreed that men are men, women are women, there is no in between, and children should be protected.

Today’s disagreements are fundamental and irreconcilable. KCRCC chair Brent Regan put it frankly in his nominating speech for Dorothy Moon at the 2022 convention: “Oh, how I pine for the days of Tip O’Neil and Ronald Reagan when we could disagree without being disagreeable. But sadly, those days are gone. They have brought the fight to us and fight we must!”

The problem is that a lot of Republicans still think we can bring those days back. Perhaps if we moderate our tone, or if we pull our punches, then the left might reciprocate. If you think it’s still 1960, 1984, or even 2014, you might think that turning the other cheek is the noble way to conduct yourself in the political arena. Yet unilateral surrender only further emboldens our political enemies.

All of this was in mind recently due to a short discussion on Twitter with Daniel Silver, 1st vice chair of the Idaho GOP. It actually started when Rep. Steve Berch, a Democrat from LD15 on the border of Boise and Meridian, was acting as concern troll regarding the conservative leadership of the Idaho GOP. I made a drive-by tweet facetiously suggesting that of course a Democratic legislator has the best interests of Idaho Republicans at heart. Berch responded with Silver’s editorial, suggesting that if I won’t listen to him, perhaps I should listen to the 1st vice chair of the Idaho GOP.

After lamenting that Silver and Berch were on the same page, Silver responded. The whole exchange is below:

Around the same time, in response to another tweet, Silver disavowed association with Berch:

The point of this post is not to go after Silver again - I have already done that sufficiently. The point is to illustrate how disagreements over tactics often leads to defeat, which leaves you powerless to implement your agenda. John McCain might have felt all gooey inside for the honor of losing to the first black president, but eight years of Obama was awful for our nation. Winning is always better than losing.

Have you ever seen the left disavow one of their own? Has a Democratic politician ever gone to the pages of corporate media to denounce their own radicals? I struggle to think of an instance. Steve Berch is happy to denounce conservative Republicans, and Daniel Silver’s editorial gave him more ammunition with which to do it. When was the last time Berch denounced the communists, antifa, BLM rioters, and radical gender activists on his own side?

Maybe he has - if so, let me know.

The left doesn’t denounce their radicals because they want to win, and those radicals do a good job of pushing the Overton Window and driving the narrative. The right trips over themselves denouncing anyone they perceive as racist or bigoted or who uses the wrong tactics. There’s almost a thirst on the right to find someone on their own side to denounce. The question is who are you aiming to please? Whose approval are you seeking? Democrats are happy to give Republicans a pat on the head when they dutifully attack people to their right, as Berch did to Silver. We had a term in the Cold War for that: useful idiots.

A lot of Republicans don’t like conflict. They close their eyes and wish as hard as they can to be back in the days of Reagan and O’Neil or Kennedy and Nixon. But like a shell-shocked soldier in the trenches wishing he was back home, there is no escaping reality. We are at a moment in history where the Democratic Party supports abortion on demand up until birth (and even after), taking children away from their parents to give them transgender drugs and surgery, abolition of all self-defense laws, confiscatory taxation, endless foreign wars, and a government that monitors you in such a way as to make the Chinese Communist Party jealous. Now is not the time for compromise, for putting aside disagreements after we clock out. No, now is the time to do whatever is necessary within our system to win.

I have to wonder what scares Republicans like Silver, Tom Luna, or Sen. Chuck Winder more: that the new conservative leadership of the Idaho GOP will lose, or that it will win. There is a sense that the former establishment is desperately hoping that Dorothy Moon and her team will fail, to prove that their tactics are wrong and their focus on ideology is self-defeating. The worst thing to happen to the old establishment would be for Moon to succeed beyond our wildest dreams, because that would be the nail in the coffin for the old GOP. It would prove once and for all that fighting fire with fire wins electoral victories, and that promoting a strong conservative vision is superior to abdicating the culture war and settling for minor haggling over marginal tax rates.

Nobody likes getting fired and seeing their replacements succeed, but if you truly believe in conservative principles, then stop fighting your hardest against the people trying hardest to win. Imposing some sort of weird chivalric code of honor on yourself that prevents you from doing what is necessary to win is not noble, it is just dumb.

When I was 12, I started a new season of recreational soccer. After two years of extremely casual play, we got a new coach who asked us on day one what we wanted to get out of the season. Being properly socialized in public schools, we answered “have fun”. He didn’t accept that. He asked what fun meant. “Win,” we answered. So he taught us how to win by becoming the best versions of ourselves we could be, and the result was an undefeated season.

I don’t know about you, but I am not engaging in politics to smile and laugh at the end of the day despite losing. It’s not about trying your best within a self-imposed system of artificial honor and decency. “Losers always whine about their best,” to paraphrase a Sean Connery character. “Winners go to the Capitol and make policy.”

Winning the future requires presenting an alternative to the insanity of the left. It also requires activists who are willing and ready to fight, happy warriors who are not afraid of conflict and disagreement. Let’s go win.