The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

A Dangerous Precedent

Posted on | June 24, 2015 | 155 Comments

The rush to ban display and sale of the Confederate flag in the wake of last week’s shooting in Charleston should cause concern for any person intelligent enough to understand how such precedents, once established, are often used to justify further aggression by Cultural Marxists.

They often argue by analogy, saying This Offensive Thing is exactly like That Historic Atrocity in order to justify the suppression of anything that can be deemed “offensive.” In confrontations with the Cultural Marxist, therefore, we are never arguing merely about the point in controversy — e.g., gay marriage or the Confederate flag — but we are always aware that ceding the immediate point will embolden them to some further demand because, after all, Progress must always march forward.

Whatever it is the Left is arguing against will predictably be compared to the Holocaust — or slavery, or “McCarthyism” — and disagreeing with the Left thereby makes you a Nazi Who Wants to Kill Six Million Jews.

We have to beware of ceding ground to this kind of sophistic argument, because progressives always find in each victory some “principle” that they will then leverage in arguing for their next demand. The Confederate flag is offensive and therefore must be banned and, once we acquiesce to that demand, what will be demanded next? Will feminists demand that Gone With the Wind be censored because of Rhett Butler’s “marital rape” of Scarlett? Certainly the same people who demand that the Confederate flag be prohibited as contraband will not prevent the suppression of Gone With the Wind. And exactly how much of American culture could be similarly banned? Where is the ultimate limit of this censorship? What about the pin-up girls painted on the side of World War II bombers? What about depictions of homosexuals in movies and literature? Will LGBT activists censor The Silence of the Lambs because of the negative portrayal of the transvestite killer “Buffalo Bill”?

“Oh, Stacy, you’re just being alarmist,” you may say.

Dismiss my concerns as the special-pleading of a Southerner, and tell me that I’m making a silly “slippery slope” argument. Disregard the reality that there is a slope in our culture, and that we do seem to be sliding down it at an accelerating pace. Go back 20 or 30 years, and try to think how few people in 1985 or 1995 imagined the point in the Culture War at which we find ourselves now. Certainly two or three decades ago I did not foresee, inter alia, ObamaCare or same-sex marriage, nor could I have imagined then the state of U.S. foreign policy now.

Really: Suppose that in 1990, someone had told you two years into the presidency of George H.W. Bush that the governor of Arkansas would defeat him in the next election, eventually being impeached for having sex with a White House intern, and yet survive that scandal. Imagine, in 1990, if anyone had told you that the Arkansas governor’s wife would someday be elected senator from New York — ?!?!? — then be appointed as Secretary of State by the man who had defeated her for the Democratic nomination to be president in 2008. What would you have said if someone had told you all that in June 1990?

You’re crazy! That could never happen!

And no one then would have imagined that Wal-Mart in 2015 would be prohibiting the sale of the Confederate flag, either.

Well, I doubt I’ll be alive in 2040, but I shudder to think what kind of America my children and grandchildren will be living in, 25 years from now, if things keep going in the direction they’re going now, at an ever-accelerating speed. Conservatives must either pick a fight we can win, or else make up our minds that the next time progressive pick a fight — no matter what it is about — we’re going defeat them at all hazards. Every time progressives win, they become stronger and America becomes weaker. Unless we can find some way to counterattack and force the Left to fight on the defensive, there will be no stopping this cultural and political avalanche short of tyranny or anarchy.

 

Category: Culture

Comments

155 Responses to “A Dangerous Precedent”

  1. texlovera
    June 24th, 2015 @ 1:17 pm

    …such precedents, once established, are often used to justify further aggression by Cultural Marxists.

    BINGO.

  2. RosalindJ
    June 24th, 2015 @ 1:18 pm

    It will be the third time I’ve left this comment in the last 24 hours. Cultural cleansing is quite popular with certain movements.

  3. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    June 24th, 2015 @ 1:31 pm

    Try Roll Tide next time #HypocriteHillary
    https://twitter.com/MsEBL/status/613497940640817152

  4. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    June 24th, 2015 @ 1:33 pm

    They banned the Dukes of Hazzard…the world weeps.

    https://cmgajcradiotvtalk.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/dukes-of-hazzard-general-lee.jpg

  5. Hypocrite Hillary Clinton Confederate Campaign Material from 2008 | Batshit Crazy News
    June 24th, 2015 @ 1:36 pm

    […] Oh My (via Brietbart): Maybe this is why 2008 Democrat Candidate Barack Obama won South Carolina over Neo-Confederate Hillary Clinton!   Instapundit and Donald Douglas: Hillary Clinton Confederate Flag Merchandise from 2008!   EBL: Maybe the Media Could Ask Hillary About This Campaign Imagery? Instapundit: That flag is just a symbol of human bondage and slavery (what does Hillary say) TOM: A Dangerous Precedence […]

  6. Art Deco
    June 24th, 2015 @ 2:12 pm

    Do you suppose that in an alternate universe Robert Stacy McCain and Smitty are the Dukes and some payola sucking Capitol Hill fixture is Boss Hogg?

    Smitty: What do you suppose Boss Rove has up his sleeve?

    RSM: An arm, with an outstretched hand at the end of it.

  7. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    June 24th, 2015 @ 2:17 pm

    Who is playing Daisy Duke in your thought experiment?

  8. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    June 24th, 2015 @ 2:19 pm

    Doesn’t it depend on context?http://blog.al.com/bn/2007/12/medium_sweetcover.jpg

  9. Quartermaster
    June 24th, 2015 @ 2:27 pm

    They salivate over such concessions and people wonder why they’re never satisfied. When you feed a starving bear, the bear usually stays around. Kinda like Dane Geld, donchaknow.

  10. CPAguy
    June 24th, 2015 @ 2:53 pm

    I am not a fan of the Confederate Flag.

    However, I hoped it would disappear due to the embarrassment it conveys to anyone associated with it, not due to the hand wringing of leftists.

    This is a victory, albeit a hollow one…that may lead to future dangers as RSM alluded to.

  11. TheOtherAndrewB
    June 24th, 2015 @ 3:03 pm

    Here’s a compromise everyone can live with–You want to eliminate the symbol of the hatred in this little punk’s heart? Good, let us all agree that the Rhodesian flag shall not fly over any public building in America. Problem solved.

  12. robertstacymccain
    June 24th, 2015 @ 3:10 pm

    Too many conservatives think, “Well, this is not my issue, so who cares if the Left wins?” And because conservatives think this way, the Left keeps winning by isolating points of attack and concentrating their forces, while conservatives are forced onto the strategic defensive and constantly retreat before the Left’s aggression. They know damned well that all they have to do is to yell “RAAAAACISM!” and conservatives will start apologizing and running for cover. Are we therefore surprised to find that the Left scours the nation’s news to find any incident — however otherwise obscure — to use as “proof” of pervasive racism and generate a National Conversation?

    Really? We’re going to let CNN’s producers decide which of the 14,000 homicides annually in America are worth a National Conversation?

    Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

    Call them out. Call them fucking out.

  13. gothamette
    June 24th, 2015 @ 3:17 pm

    The black twitterverse is now going crazy about the fact that Hillary misspoke at a black church. She said “all lives matter.” This phrase is in their crazy minds associated with pushing back against the “black lives matter” meme, so she’s now an Officially Bad Person. She’ll have to do a lot of backpedaling to cover up her boo boo now.

  14. Art Deco
    June 24th, 2015 @ 3:20 pm

    Not sure. If John Boehner is Sheriff Roscoe Coltrane, John Hoge is Uncle Jesse…

  15. Art Deco
    June 24th, 2015 @ 3:23 pm

    However, I hoped it would disappear due to the embarrassment it conveys to anyone associated with it,

    The problem in your apprehension of this is the notion that it should convey embarrassment to someone.

    It’s an assertion of Southernness, nothing more, nothing less. If there is content to it, it is to say we are not embarrassed.

    Take a line from Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”.

  16. Art Deco
    June 24th, 2015 @ 3:26 pm

    The problem is men without chests. What’s curious is that in mundane human relations, you see craven behavior among men who have proven their mettle in battle and in business. (See the elder George Bush for an example). The glaringly discordant behavior from one venue to the next is most perplexing.

  17. Art Deco
    June 24th, 2015 @ 3:31 pm

    And a National Conversation that is utter humbug. The instances of homicide wherein there are more than three victims account for 0.15% of the total set. The share of homicides accounted for by police officers on duty amount to 2 or 3% and the number which are dubious is much smaller. The National Conversationalists merely use these incidents as a wedge. They are not interested in prevalent social problems.

  18. theBuckWheat
    June 24th, 2015 @ 3:45 pm

    Time to hold a Draw the Confederate Battle Flag contest?

  19. Daniel Freeman
    June 24th, 2015 @ 4:04 pm

    I never thought that the day would come that I would defend the Confederate battle flag. Although Oregon was not involved, as a Northerner, I always saw it as saying “I’M COMIN’ TO KIIIILL YOU!!!”

    However, I have ancestors on both sides of the war, and I am reflexively against whatever the SJWs want. Now that they want to ban that flag, I want to keep it, so I will create a reason for that.

    A good reason is that it stands for the states’ rights that were originally intended for our union, as the federal gov was only supposed to handle interstate and international affairs. That it has become conflated with a defense of the institution of slavery is both an unfortunate twist of history, and one that has been promoted by powermongers with an agenda.

    Authoritarians will always want to take our powers away from us and reserve them for themselves. They will use any excuse, but it always comes down to “Someone somewhere used this power inappropriately once, so we should take it away from everyone everywhere for all time.”

    That is what the censuring of the Confederate battle flag now means to me: a despite of our rights, which are a form of a power, and a lust to take that power so that it can be used against us.

  20. Stogie Chomper
    June 24th, 2015 @ 4:05 pm

    I thought for sure that our national racial hypersensitivity must be getting weaker by now. Surely, the public must be tiring of it from overuse. The latest flag flap shows how wrong I was: racial hypersensitivity is worse than ever, and getting more extreme and hysterical as time goes on. Now they are talking about taking down statues, changing the names of U.S. forts, removing Dukes of Hazzards, stopping the sales of Confederate flags. Are blacks going to turn into stone at the sight of a flag, like viewing Medusa? Why do we keep feeding their paranoia and prejudices? I am fed up.

  21. Art Deco
    June 24th, 2015 @ 4:06 pm

    I have a strong suspicion a great deal of this is Sorosphere rent-a-crowd, with very little popular base (but a lot of interest in our doltish media).

  22. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    June 24th, 2015 @ 4:08 pm

    Absolutely. Or a minimum, concentrate our forces on embarrassing them over real racists they embrace such as Margaret Sanger. I know the media will not play along, but if we were unified in fighting back, it would work. Which is why I am so disgusted with John Boehner’s come along get along policy with the Democrat leadership.
    http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wUdQFzTiuq0/VYrym4V2EnI/AAAAAAAAwQ8/MEiGWrfVaNg/s1600/Obama%2Band%2BBoehner.PNG

  23. Art Deco
    June 24th, 2015 @ 4:18 pm

    No need to endow it with political symbolism. Read Florence King on what she found appealing about Southernness from the outside (“Identity, eccentricity..”) and read Charley Reese on what he found appealing from the inside (“Good Life Means SOUTH“). Look at the “Sh%t Southern Women Say” videos (I think it’s really “Sh% South Carolina Women Say”). The accents, the manners, the food, the religious idiom, the music, the emotional geography, the intellectual life. It’s all a work of art that one can appreciate even if one is not a part of it (as I cannot be a part of it, born and bred in New York).

  24. Art Deco
    June 24th, 2015 @ 4:21 pm

    Oh, Flannery O’Connor as well. Very much a loyal Southerner (though she found segregation something to be dispensed with). All of her fiction has Georgia or Tennessee backdrops and all of it is challenging. (O’Connor on why she wrote about protestants: “They have much more interesting fanatics…”).

  25. Daniel Freeman
    June 24th, 2015 @ 4:21 pm

    That is an excellent point, sir. The Confederate battle flag has a great cultural significance to those that fly it — and if outsiders can’t see what it means to them, our spiritual poverty is not their fault.

  26. Matt_SE
    June 24th, 2015 @ 4:24 pm

    A lot of things that sound paranoid are true where Soros is concerned. Seriously, he’s like a billionaire KGB agent.

  27. Matt_SE
    June 24th, 2015 @ 4:30 pm

    Then this serves a dual purpose of weeding out the weaklings on our side. Very useful, that.

  28. Daniel Freeman
    June 24th, 2015 @ 4:36 pm

    I haven’t read her, but I did read a William Falkner novel once. Can’t remember the title, but I will always remember some of his amazing word portraits, such as a carriage wandering as the amorous couple inside left the horses to their own devices, or the antagonist who had reinvented herself and slimmed down after ending her gig as an enthusiastic [spoiler].

  29. Daniel Freeman
    June 24th, 2015 @ 4:40 pm

    I was frankly shocked by some of the names I’ve seen jumping on that bandwagon, when they should’ve been standing in its way. It’s not like it was a tank and they were in Tiananmen Square. Effing cowards.

  30. Daniel Freeman
    June 24th, 2015 @ 4:43 pm

    .

  31. Call The Real Criminals And Racists Out | Batshit Crazy News
    June 24th, 2015 @ 5:15 pm

    […] Truth about Che Guevara TOM: A Dangerous Precedent, in response to this comment I posted these memes. Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger […]

  32. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    June 24th, 2015 @ 5:16 pm

    http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Sr8H2nB35Pw/VYskNTAG0wI/AAAAAAAAwSg/hqOHtoj-prc/s1600/che.PNG

  33. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    June 24th, 2015 @ 5:16 pm

    http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GHHFqKJ_oiA/VYskxzLUpoI/AAAAAAAAwSo/9VboJKU7_fI/s1600/margaret-sanger-jewslatinos-human-weeds.jpg

  34. robertstacymccain
    June 24th, 2015 @ 5:42 pm

    “Although Oregon was not involved …”

    Heh. My great-grandfather’s brigader, J.J. Archer, was serving at a U.S. Army post in the Pacific Northwest — I’m not sure if it was in what is now Oregon or Washington state — when the war broke out. As a native Marylander who believed in state’s rights, Archer resigned his commission and made his way to Richmond, where he was a commissioned in the Confederate army. He was captured at Gettysburg (along with my great-grandfather, a private and about 100 members of the brigade) on July 1, 1863, when they were outflanked by the Union Army’s famed Iron Brigade.

    So it may be that Oregon had no direct role in the Civil War, but indirectly, certainly so. As for the present-day American Southwest, it is important to remember how many Southern soldiers — including both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, as well as my great-grandfather’s regimental colonel, Birkett Davenport Fry — served in the U.S. forces that won the Mexican War. Ah, but so much history is now forgotten, why bother to mention this?

  35. robertstacymccain
    June 24th, 2015 @ 5:43 pm

    “Southern” is a culture.

    “Northern” is just a direction.

  36. Fail Burton
    June 24th, 2015 @ 5:52 pm

    Liberals are such transparent liars in these situations. They will not accept a white on black crime as simply that. It’s always a manifestation of a “system” that must be smeared onto all whites. Conversely, it is taboo to see any black on white crime like that and blacks must never be smeared. In typical fashion, liberals had nothing but an anomalous crime and so went after the nearest thing they could find to a “system,” a stupid flag. Always smear/never smear is a con game.

  37. Fail Burton
    June 24th, 2015 @ 5:54 pm

    Why would it weaken when it is continually rewarded? There’s victories here and there but feminists got a Nobel scientist tossed for an off-color joke at an event. Meanwhile Brianna Wu is telling all whites to shut up and listen. If I told all blacks to shut up and listen I’d have the SPLC on me in an instant.

  38. Fail Burton
    June 24th, 2015 @ 5:55 pm

    Only Sansa Stark matters.

  39. concern00
    June 24th, 2015 @ 5:56 pm

    For just a moment there I’d thought you had written “A Dangerous President.”

  40. RosalindJ
    June 24th, 2015 @ 6:00 pm

    I’ve become a bit militant as I age.
    A First Things directive is appeasement doesn’t work. Never has, never will.

  41. Libtardharvestor
    June 24th, 2015 @ 6:19 pm

    OUTSTANDING! Absolutely perfectly said! Thank you!

  42. Mike G.
    June 24th, 2015 @ 6:25 pm

    Actually it’s ” go along to get along”, but I get your point. 😉

  43. Mike G.
    June 24th, 2015 @ 6:26 pm

    Works for me.

  44. Mike G.
    June 24th, 2015 @ 6:28 pm

    Dude!! Well said!

  45. Mike G.
    June 24th, 2015 @ 6:40 pm

    Y’all know what’s f+cked up about this whole flag situation? None of the so called “civil rights” leaders such as the Rev(sic) Al Sharpton, Rev(sic) Jesse Jackson, etal., could do a damn thing to get the Confederate Battle Flag taken off of Southern State Houses. It took a crazy White dude shooting up a Black church to cause this sh!T storm over a FU@KING INANIMATE OBJECT! Just like liberals/progressives do when ever a gun is involved in a crime…instead of blaming the perpetrator, they jump right in and blame an INANIMATE OBJECT!.

    Hey liberals…grow the hell up!!

  46. The Daley Gator | A dangerous precedent indeed!
    June 24th, 2015 @ 7:12 pm

    […] Stacy McCain lays out what the campaign against the Confederate flag boils down to […]

  47. Jockey
    June 24th, 2015 @ 7:16 pm

    I really don’t understand why so many conservatives are tying themselves and knots, and making a big deal over a group of Southern states removing the flag of Southern Democrat traitors who divided the country in order to own other human beings, and later killed our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln? Second of all, the flag didn’t fly on the South Carolina state house until 1962 at the behest of segregationist Strom Thurmond as a big middle finger to the federal government’s Civil Rights Act, and push for desegregation. What would Abe Lincoln, or Thaddeus Steven’s think of the South still flying Confederate battle flags 150 years later? If Steven’s had gotten his way every flag would have been burnt to ash.

  48. Jockey
    June 24th, 2015 @ 7:17 pm

    *in knots

  49. Jockey
    June 24th, 2015 @ 7:20 pm

    Yes, a flag is an inanimate object, but this particular flag is also symbolic of America’s dark slave owning past, the KKK, and Jim Crow. For it to continue to fly on the top of public buildings is not only offensive to many, but also intimidating to some. If people want to fly the flag on the back of their pick-up, or at Nascar races, then go for it, but not on public buildings.

  50. Mike G.
    June 24th, 2015 @ 7:30 pm

    Really? How about the friggin’ “rainbow flag” which signifies “queerdom”. I find that flag very offensive, yet you don’t see me out protesting in the streets or taking to social media to have it banned. It’s a fucking INANIMATE OBJECT!!

    Perhaps you feel the need to give ground to the progressive machine, but as for me, they can pry my Confederate Flag…and my firearm out of my cold dead hands.