No Enemies

 

I subscribe to email publications shared with me from Chris Rufo. I will share some lines from his email to me and other subscribers, his 9/26/23 email entitled, No Enemies to the Right.

 

I will comment on his pertinent lines from that publication.

 

Rufo: “The so-called dissident Right—a constellation of young right-wing activists, artists, and intellectuals—have brought much needed vitality, and some tension, into the conservative movement. The best of this cohort have disrupted stale orthodoxies, launched publications, and broken into the culture with provocative new ideas. But others have fallen into some predictable dead ends: right-wing racialism, street brawls, and conspiratorialism, all easily highlighted and use by the Left to discredit the political right as a whole.”

 

My response: I can never quite get over how smart and wise this young genius is: he is a deep thinker that uses language flawlessly, he captures what is going on and offer real, sensible solutions to identified problems. As Dennis Prager says, we need to value clarity over agreement, and Rufo brings us clarity, so then we know what the problems are, who the bad people are, and how we are to proceed.

 

Yes, young conservative thinkers like him are shaking up the conservative status quo, and that is refreshing and needed. Rufo is a moderate, a civilized conservative, that urges conservatives to not embrace without flinching or repulsion those conservatives that are fringe-dwellers, racialist, into whacky conspiracies and willing to brawl in the streets.

 

Rufo warns that we want to win over liberals, independents and women, conservatives must be strong but law-abiding and come with a sensible but not radicalized, fascist or alt-right extreme agenda that repulses, scares and angers the public.

 

He knows that Leftists do not debate our ideas, but they just label us as racists, bigots, Christian nationalists and white supremacists, and these Big Lies are believed by the public, though they are meritless, but segregating and distancing ourselves from violent or potentially violent, fringe racialists on the right.

 

Rufo: “Some voices in this network have called for a policy of ‘no enemies to the Right’. The basic concept—a play on the French Revolution slogan pas d’ennemis a’ gauche, or ‘no enemies to the Left’—is that constant infighting, gatekeeping, and self-regulation has rendered the Right fractured and impotent, in order to salvage the coalition, these figures argue, establishment conservatives must cease to criticize or exclude the voices on the movement’s outer limits. All politics they maintain, is friend-enemy politics. A man who would shun any potential friends is bound to kneel to his enemies.

 

My own inclination is one of prudence. The essential function of coalition management is to maintain a balance between size and strength and to calculate the tradeoffs between various arrangements, alliances, and entanglements. Furthermore, some elements on the fringes are moral non-starters—they should be given no deference, much less support.

Anyone who has spent time in large organizations will recognize a plain truth: sometimes, addition is accomplished through subtraction. This might even be more true in politics, which has always attracted an element of the pathological.”

 

My response: He captures the right balance: we need not be as bland as RINOS: we need and the nation requires a strong conservative program, lawful, civilized and nonviolent, centered on God, guns, capitalism, individualism, anarchist indivduator supercitizens and the rule of law, all within the legal framework of our constitutional republic.

 

We also must not associate ourselves with fringe whackos on the Right so that we cannot be so easily smeared by our enemies the Lefts and Democrats that hate America as being white supremacists, racists or Nazis.