Note: My Taki post is on the same topic. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for those who are in need of audio stimulation. I also have a post up about my recent trip to the doctor for the annual inspection.

Clausewitz famously wrote that “War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.” Like all overused expressions, this one is always used to end analysis rather than open it. The true meaning of the expression is much deeper than the simple comparison between two related activities. War and politics have much in common so the comparison should be used to take what is known about one and use it to understand something about the other.

You see this in the case of abortion. For fifty years religious and social activists in America have organized to overturn the Supreme Court decision that invented a right to abortion in the Constitution. From the perspective of most religious people, life begins at conception, so the court has institutionalized murder as a right. Others saw the issue as an assault on the logic of society. The Orwellian invention of new rights was simply laying the groundwork for arbitrary rule.

Within the pro-life movement, therefore, there was always this double helix around which the movement organized itself. One strand was the moral arguments about human life and the other strand was the rational arguments about the constitution and the structure of America politics. In the end, the court yielded to those rational arguments, but that could not have happened without the energy of the moral arguments that kept the movement going for over fifty years.

In war, men will die for their cause. They will not die for a paycheck or the promise of war booty after the battle. They will die for a cause because they are motivated by a sense of righteousness in the cause. When an army believes it is fighting for what is right, it is willing to do whatever is necessary to win. An army fighting with a bayonet at its back or because it is paid to fight is risk adverse. It will do only that which is advantageous to it because that is what reason dictates.

This is something people have known since forever. The ancients observed that men would fight like lions in defense of their own lands but became quite conservative when they crossed into the enemy’s lands. The reason militaries try to build bonds of brotherhood within units is they know men will fight for their brothers, even sacrificing themselves if necessary. In other words, a man will die for two brothers of eight cousins, but that is the limit of his sacrifice.

Therein lies the reason the pro-life cause was able to sustain itself for two generations fighting to overturn Roe. For the people in that movement, the logic of abortion is not what motivated them. In fact, most never bothered to think much about the legal and political logic of the issue. They simply focused on the morality of it. Abortion is murder and a society that institutionalizes murder is immoral. They felt a moral duty to commit their lives to end this immoral practice.

It is important to note that the only two issues the Right has had any success in America are guns and abortion. The gun people had the advantage of the second amendment but they never relied upon it. Only a few gun cases have made it to the courts and they have only nibbled around the issue. Instead, the gun people launched a crusade against the gun grabbers in every state and locality. Their task has always been to anathematize gun grabbing and the gun grabbers.

The lesson here for those engaging in politics is that like war, politics is about morality, not facts and reason. The soldier fights for his love of country, often expressed as love of his brothers in arms. He fights for a cause bigger than himself. In politics, the winners are those who frame the issue in moral terms, seizing the moral high ground and demanding opponents justify their actions in the face of morality. The losers are those who settle for facts and reason.

This is why the American Left has won every battle against the so-called conservatives over the last century. The Left makes moral claims while the co-called conservatives force opposition into rational claims. The exception has been the two issues where professional conservatism has had little role, abortion and guns. It is important to note that professional conservatism has opposed the NRA over the years and they opposed Trump, who promised to fill the court with pro-life judges.

It is why conservatives oppose the term “antiwhite.” They know that this is a morally charged term that offers no opportunity for them to negotiate away the interests of the people they claim to represent. It makes a clear moral distinction between us and them, which is the enemy of the sorts of people working in conservatism. The same is true of the word “groomer” which is not only factually accurate, but it also lays bear the moral implications of the sexual revolution.

In the end, the lesson of the abortion movement for dissidents is that the way to defeat the moral framework of the Left is with an alternative moral framework. You cannot defeat moral arguments with facts and reason. People will sacrifice for a just cause, but not for a logical explanation. It turns out that Ben Shapiro’s line about facts not caring about your feelings is just another trick to prevent a moral people from standing on their morals to oppose the moral framework of the Left.

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