Don’t be fooled, whatever it happens to be, radicals’ talking point du jour is invariably a mere ruse aimed at achieving a darker, more nefarious, more strategic long-term goal. Mod-cons often make the mistake of engaging radicals on the substance of their talking-points, as if radicals are advocating for or against a given policy in good faith. But this is folly. The talking-points of radicals, their issues of the day, are always mere trojan horses for accomplishing a deeper agenda. When radicals take up the mantle of a given issue, it’s as an avenue for pursuing something far more profound. So, you’ll never be able to get a hardened radical to abandon his endorsement of, let’s say, expansive firearms restrictions, even if you offer irrebuttable proof that crime rates are lower and murders are fewer in areas where legal gun carriage pro-liferates.31 The issue, for the radical, was never truly an intolerable level of violent crimes; that was all a decoy—a convenient setting for emotive lip-service aimed at providing the justification for a re-imagined society.
Mod-cons would be well-served to understand, for example, that the debate over gun-control isn’t about reducing deaths; it’s about making people more dependent on government by depriving them of self-sufficiency. Likewise, the debate over abortion isn’t about “a woman’s right to choose”; it’s about “freeing” women from the home by enabling women’s careerism. The debate over unfettered immigration isn’t about relieving the world’s poor, tired, huddled masses; it’s about ushering in globalism and undermining the sovereignty of the nation-state. The debate over raising taxes isn’t really about balancing the budget; it’s about income redistribution. The debate over “climate change” isn’t really about protecting the environment; it’s about handicapping the economies of first-world nations so that third-world nations can achieve parity of wealth. The debate over gay-“marriage” isn’t about “equality of rights”; it’s about debasing and undermining Matrimony and the family, which are viewed as patriarchal and oppressive. The debate about “trans” rights isn’t about respecting human dignity; it’s about undermining the moral order and crushing sexual taboos. The “true believers,” those wonks who become embroiled on the radical side of the foregoing fights, fail to comprehend that they are mere pawns in a larger game that is being played by cleverer people. If you don’t know whether or not you’re a pawn, then you’re a pawn.
On a meta-level, what radicals are really pursuing is a humanist “utopia”—a world without borders, class distinction, sex distinction, and wealth inequality, a world where each man is free to live out his unique, “artistic” identity, doing as he pleases, unshackled from “arbitrary” constraints placed upon him by a “domineering” ruling class. It’s a subjectivist-existentialist vision wherein each man can make of himself what he wills, serving not God, but his own whims and thereby, (ostensibly) the community. Till this ultimate stage of the radical vision is achieved, the state must be grown and empowered so that it can be used as a bludgeon to implement the unnatural policies that will ensure the attainment of the longed-for utopia. But, out of fear of backlash, radicals have to scheme to bring about their new order in secret. They can’t broadcast what they plan to do, because it would prove fatally unpopular. So they have to implement their grand vision piecemeal, never tipping their hand, till all becomes clear in one chthonic denouement.
Be reminded that the radical vision is an inherently godless vision, one that must be heartily rebuffed by the retrograde. Efficient causes (creators) imbue their creations with final cause (with purpose). Since God is our creator, we cannot “choose our own purposes in life.” To decide man’s purpose is God’s unique privilege, and he has decreed, once and for all, that our purpose is to know, love, and serve him. Living life outside of these parameters leads only to misery and ruination. That said, we need to attack the radical vision in its unmasked form. There is no use debating an endless litany of decoy issues with radicals, except to temporarily stave off an attack; rather, we need to attack the philosophical errors that are at the core of radicals’ doctrine. Becoming bogged down in the morass of policy minutiae with radicals is a fool’s errand, since their mania for the utopian state moves them to ignore the illogic of the many planks of their platform, just as the tail wags the dog.
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31 John R. Lott, Jr., “Guns, Crime, and Safety: Introduction,” The Journal of Law & Economics 44, no. S2 (2001): 605, 610, doi:10.1086/341243.