If an active participant in a game were able to set the game’s rules in real time, and if he were at the same time an unscrupulous man, in his zeal to win, he’d certainly concoct rules favorable to himself, all but ensuring his victory. Unilateral power to set rules imbues the rule maker with godlike invincibility. Scenarios such as these are thinly-veiled “Calvinball”—the game from Calvin and Hobbes where the main character, Calvin, initiates an endless series of rule changes, all designed to set himself up to win.
In war, you don’t let your enemy dictate the terms of the battle to you. If you want to give yourself the best chance of achieving victory, you fight on your own terms. If possible, you don’t fight in the enemy’s chosen setting; you fight on your own terrain. You don’t fight with weapons favored by the enemy; you fight with the weapons he fears the most. You don’t fight him at a time when he expects it; you fight him at the time he least expects it. You don’t fight with tactics the enemy prefers; you fight him with tactics of which he’s ignorant.
Radicals have long been dictating to conservatives our rules of engagement, the rules controlling the outcome of our battle. Radicals have made a habit out of dictating those topics which are acceptable in public discourse. Through the bludgeon of political correctness, they’ve assumed the power to tell us what language we can use (and what language we can’t use) when describing a problem. We can no longer speak our minds with clear diction. Instead, we’re told to use muddled niceties out of sensitivity to the feelings of an ostensible victim class. Yet radicals can spew vitriol at retrogrades with impunity.
Under the present Calvinball regime, for radicals, dissent against an unfavored administration is “patriotic.” On the other hand, when retrogrades dissent against an administration favored by radicals, it’s “an affront to the dignity of the office.” Radicals can stage sit-ins and “occupy” vast areas of critical urban centers for weeks at a time to protest income inequality, but retrogrades must have a “buffer zone” to pray in front of abortion clinics. Radicals are free to hold gay-pride parades in any locale in the nation, but retrogrades have to fight tooth and nail to get a permit for a straight-pride parade in one city. Bigotry against Christians and Jews is openly embraced by radicals; yet, if a retrograde so much as hints that Islam may be prone to violence, they are branded as hateful and “Islamophobic.” In fact, anytime a retrograde reproaches some evil that radicals favor, we’re called “phobic” for doing so (e.g., “homophobic,” “Islamophobic,” “fatphobic,” “transphobic,” and “xenophobic”). Retrogrades have allowed ourselves to be hapless victims of bullying for too long, acting like the overly passive friend who knows his peer is cheating at a board game but does nothing about it. This paradigm must be altered, and it must be altered fast.
If retrogrades are to prevail in the ongoing political-cultural war, we cannot resign ourselves to sheepishness in the face of radical imperiousness. There’s nothing to stop us from insisting on our own set of rules. And when radicals are forced to play on our turf, let’s see who prevails.