A MUST-READ by Deion Kathawa at American Greatness, on what Kurt Schlichter calls “the new rules”:
That speaks to the deeper problem. Goldberg knows perfectly well that politics is nothing like a youth basketball game. In such a game, there are referees whose job it is to regulate the flow of play and punish those who violate the rules of the game. When someone cheats, the ref—who’s presumed by both sides to be legitimate—has the authority to sort out disputes, decide if there’s been a violation, and, if so, what the punishment should be.
But in politics, particularly American politics, who’s the referee? (…)
When one side in politics plays dirty and violates established rules and norms (which flow from our Constitution and our history as a nation), the solution is not to whine that it’s happening and then get skittish about fighting back—it’s to fight back. Make the other side pay a price for its repellent practices. Impose costs for undesired and dangerous behavior. (…)
Movement conservatism chose for years to be a pliant doormat to the relentless onslaught of the social justice-crazed, progressive Left and its ever-escalating leftward demands. It chose to rehearse an inflexible checklist ideology rather than to be guided by prudential judgments about the common good of the nation in light of natural rights reasoning of the American Founding, respectively. It chose to see politics as bean bag, rather than the inherently scrappy contest for dominance that it truly is.
They have, in short, opted to view the public square as a debating society and the nation as a playground—complete with imaginary judges and recess duty patrol. They imagine they can send up their trial balloons and tout their pet ideas in this idealized “fair” and objective world rather than in a real place inhabited by real persons…
