People on the Right are scrambling to say what they wish had been done differently in order to have won. Not whether those things were ethically right and in the U.S.’s interest.
People are legit arguing that we shouldn’t have attacked the Islamic Republic because it may have cost Republicans their seats.
You know what else can cost Republicans their seats? Getting anti-socialist, anti-Woke policies pushed through. After all, doing so might agitate Democrats enough to show up at the polls in droves.
OMG. So definitely stop trying to do the very things the freedom-loving Right stands for! 🤦♂️
The thinking is: Gosh, this thing — who cares whether it was right or wrong — might have contributed to the loss. So we shouldn’t have done it. Or, worse, the fact that we lost IS the evidence that it was wrong!
That kind of thinking is how you truly lose, globally.
You have to distinguish between local losses in battle and a long-term war for freedom. Long-term wars require global optimization, and ARE GUARANTEED to NOT be locally optimal at all times.
But too many want to sacrifice principles in order to get elected. Yet if you violate the very principles you claim to possess, you have already lost them. You no longer embody them, and you don’t teach or spread them.
Dealing with the expanding threat from the Islamic Republic WAS in America’s interest. If Republicans lost this election because of that, that is NOT evidence that it wasn’t in America’s interest, FFS.
As I’ve argued before, politics is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of character. The way you fight politically shapes the character of your movement, and thereby the culture from which future politics emerges.
If you teach people to abandon principles whenever expedient, that’s the culture you’re building.
Freedom isn’t something you install after victory. It has to be practiced on the way there.
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Politics is downstream of culture — and culture is downstream of character. Moment 539
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And, by the way, neutering the Islamic Republic was clearly in America’s interest. Only someone obsessed with Israel, and who interprets anything good for Israel as bad for the U.S., can’t see this.
And this does not require being a Neocon:
Venezuela, Iran, and the case for decentralized international action. Moment 580
See also…
Iran and the False Trilemma of Foreign Policy. Moment 582