Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Giving the left an even bigger victory

Daniel Greenfield cautions,

You don't win by making your enemy stronger. The left understands that. That is why it's strategies once in power involve deepening and expanding its institutional power while destroying those of the right.

Allying with the far left against the left on national security can be as tempting for some libertarians as bending on social welfare and amnesty is for some liberal Republicans. But it's equally a dead end.

In a long struggle it is easy to lose sight of your principles. The question is have we lost sight of our principles in fighting terrorists, as the left insists, or after fighting a long bitter war against Obama for so long are we losing sight of the fact that our larger struggle is not against Obama, but the ideas and institutions of the left that he is a part of?

The enemy isn't just Obama or his flunkies. It's also Glenn Greenwald and Michael Moore. It's the entire transnational idea that denies the right of nations to defend themselves and indicts them endlessly for imaginary crimes against the Third World.

The only way to make a conservative case against tactics like the NSA wiretapping is to reject that premise and the likes of Greenwald. Unless that is done, the case belongs to the far left and adopting it is not an act of principle but expediency. Trying to beat Obama with the ideas of the left by undermining America will only give the left an even bigger victory.

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