Our Sure Victory

While millions of us watch with dread the daily mischief of the enemies of freedom, and while this concern is proper and wise, we ought to recall also that these enemies are transcendent nebbishes: they know nothing; they believe nothing; they trust nothing. They flinch like savages from those of us who care about truth.

The almost total infestation of our institutions by leftists simply means that, over time, these institutions become cemeteries marked with unkempt graves. Whole sections of America have become festering scabs, as Victor Davis Hanson has described so well about the beautiful and luxuriant orchids, vineyards, and fields of his California homeland.

We are obliged to mourn all lost souls, but we are not bound to see in their despair and decline our own futures. The only real danger we face is the tantalizing but phony benefit of making peace with the left.Why will we win, as long as we do not give up first? There are several interlocking reasons.

We believe in truth and in human relations, which means we believe in honesty. We recoil in disgust as the corruption of academic physical sciences, where groupthink has led to the purging of all politically incorrect propositions and, even worse, of all inconvenient data. The left does not care what is true and does not even believe in truth itself. Its notorious bad scientific predictions show that its science is not science anymore at all, but simply propaganda.

How does this square with the legions of academicians who rest on their professional degrees and their formal offices in the scientific community -- those who ought to be able to marshal the power of scientific analysis to defeat us? In science, indifference to truth is fatal, no matter how large the legions of professors and researchers who parrot what the left want. The Soviet Union routinely turned out many more scientists and engineers than America during the Cold War, yet America, not Russia, won virtually every significant competition in the areas of science and technology.

We believe in values which come from belief in a transcendent God. This means we do not fight wickedness alone. It means, in fact, that when we feel most alone, we really are not alone at all. In the drab, dirty, and dull universe of leftism, we have the unbreakable power of this goodness on our side. That matters. We fight for a reason.

Finally, we believe in freedom. This means that we recognize that one thousand volunteers can trump ten thousand conscript slaves. In our Revolutionary War, the number of patriots willing to pledge their lives, honor, and fortunes upon independence was never a majority. Most estimates place these patriots at about one third of the population, about equal to the number of Tories, and the rest of our countrymen were indifferent. So why did we win that war?

Victory in this battle against the British Empire, the world's first superpower, which was aided by a large reservoir of Tory support within the colonies, was even more remarkable because the Revolutionary War was not some existential conflict between good and evil. The grand idea of liberty, however, was the pivot point of the war. Subjects of the Crown were relatively free already, but this was because of the accretions over centuries of British history of nuances and nudges towards the rule of law and the limitations of government. No one fought against our Revolution for the explicit idea of human freedom, but rather for the same sort of practical arguments and often selfish reasons which lead leftists today.

Being part of the British Empire offered distinct material advantages, at least theoretically, and our Revolutionary War, which was just as properly our first civil war, was costly in devastation and carnage. This was one reason why the bulk of world opinion imagined that our new nation would fail miserably. The world then, like the universe of leftism today, was wrong.

The odds against us often seem daunting, and yet we survive. Those who stand for good things without flinching do prevail over time. America survived 1776 just as Britain survived 1940. Jews, against all odds, have survived, and Christianity, against all reason, has converted savage empires and lived through persecution which is still very much alive today. The often lonely followers of honesty, virtue, and faith in time prevail. That is our sure victory.

By Bruce Walker