MDC

They’re mad that I said Kirk contributed to the partisan rancor. But it’s the truth.

Odd that you think violence isn’t justified, don’t gloat over people’s misfortune, and the political discourse in our country has gotten out of hand are … liberal messages?

I guess my main points were that violence like that is never justified and we should all turn down the temperature.

Oh no.

I wouldn’t say Kirk brought it on himself. I’d say he contributed to an environment where this sort of thing is more likely to happen.

Had a long talk with my son over dinner about the Kirk assassination. I told him that between the mental health crisis, easy access to guns, and the tone of political rhetoric in this country, I’m not surprised this sort of thing keeps happening. Every time you call someone Hitler, call them the enemy of the people, falsely accuse folks of heinous crimes etc. it’s like flicking a lot match at a pool of gasoline. I told him violence isn’t the answer. Kirk had a wife and kid who loved him, and we shouldn’t ever gloat over a tragedy, even though Kirk himself trafficked in exactly the sort of rhetoric that makes this kind of violence more likely. My son said Kirk seemed to believe what he said. I told him that’s true and there’s some integrity in that, unlike people who say outrageous things just for cash clicks and attention. But, I told him you can have integrity and still he dead wrong and reckless. “Do you know who else meant what he said even though he was dead wrong and dangerous?” He asked me who. I said “That guy Dave down the block. He believes everything he says, and he’s a retarded jackass.” We had a good laugh and played some Madden. I love my boy.

If your point was that you’re as much of a bed wetter as the most deranged lefty, mission accomplished!

Muh rhetoric!

The pearl clutching and crocodile tears.

No. All lefty minorities are DEI hires. Kash is just unqualified.

What side are you and the other darkies on?

A few Geeks are organizing Civil War 2.

You forgot to log out and in again.

I think the left and right are about even on political violence. The left has the edge on property damage but righties lead on murder.

Yeah. Link?

Lots of people are talking about it, huh?

I’d pump the brakes a little, given often you guys get duped by fake news.

If Trump signed this card, does it even matter if he personally drew the doodle and wrote the narration? Are we saying he not only didn’t write it, he didn’t even read it before signing?

If Trump didn’t look at it how’s he know where the pubes were supposed to go?

POTUS who threatens to deport US citizens, calls the press the enemy of the people, and says there won’t be a country anymore if he loses an election complaining about rhetoric.

You’re serious?

I’ve been seeing this commercial on repeat: Who is this for? Felons who can’t buy a real gun? Suburban moms who watch a lot of Fox News?

The comparison was between MAGA whining about “rhetoric” in the Charlie Kirk thread vs. the way they acted in this thread. HTH.

The left-leaning historian Rick Perlstein noted in his book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001) the different tone between Goldwater and the McCarthy-Birch rhetoric: “Conscience of a Conservative didn’t blame invisible Communists for America’s problems. It blamed all-too-visible liberals. It’s anticommunism was not about raising nameless dreads but about fighting—hard and in the open.” Petulant Provocations In light of Goldwater’s rhetoric in Conscience, the “extremism” aphorism shouldn’t have shocked. Examining the speech’s development, however, reveals that the phrase owed its origin to an act of restraint and conciliation by Goldwater. On the eve of the GOP convention, Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania mounted an eleventh-hour bid to wrest the nomination from Goldwater, issuing an ill-conceived broadside that contended “Goldwaterism has come to stand for a whole crazy-quilt collection of absurd and dangerous positions.” Although Scranton took full responsibility for it, his operatives supposedly wrote the letter without his knowledge or approval. In any case, it reinforced the charge that Goldwater was an “extremist.” More importantly, it ruled out any possible reconciliation between Goldwater and the Republican establishment wing, or of a Goldwater-Scranton ticket (which may have been the letter’s purpose). Goldwater was furious, according to Lee Edwards’s account of the episode in his biography, Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution (1995). Clif White, one of Goldwater’s key strategists, intuited that the letter would backfire and assure Goldwater the nomination in a first-ballot landslide. But it was political scientist Harry V. Jaffa who suggested using the letter to Goldwater’s advantage. Jaffa, now a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College, had abandoned the Democratic for the Republican Party after the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961, then been invited to work in the Goldwater presidential campaign. He argued for sending the Scranton letter to every GOP delegate, along with a magnanimous statement from the Goldwater campaign that quoted Lincoln’s response to an editorial attack from Horace Greeley: “If there be perceptible in [the editorial] an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.” But the Republican anti-conservatives persisted, with Nelson Rockefeller charging in his convention speech that the John Birch Society was attempting the “infiltration and takeover of established political organizations by Communist and Nazi methods.” Goldwater’s delegates on the convention floor held their disapproval, but the audience in the galleries, who were not under the campaign’s control (Clif White suspected they might have been Rockefeller plants intended to embarrass Goldwater), booed loudly. These and other petulant provocations from the GOP’s liberal wing led Goldwater to remark to an aide, “Christ, we ought to be writing a speech telling them to go to hell.” He was not inclined to affect a conciliatory tone with Rockefeller, Scranton, and the rest of the immoderate GOP moderates whose accusations were as intemperate as liberal Democrats’. In a more serious mood, Goldwater signaled that he thought his acceptance speech should indicate that his nomination and campaign marked a “historic break” for the Republican Party. It is also likely that Goldwater wanted to keep faith with “the ones who brung him,” as the old country slogan goes. Goldwater had been much impressed with Jaffa’s suggestion about the Scranton letter along with other material Jaffa had provided to the platform committee, which included a version of the “extremism” couplet. As Jaffa explained in a 1980 interview: While the “extremism” line is wholly defensible on its own terms, in the context it was certain to overshadow other notable passages in the speech that also bear testimony to Jaffa’s distinctive thought and style. There is an invocation of the “laws of nature and of nature’s God” from the Declaration of Independence, along with a brief for true—and truly conservative—egalitarianism: “Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.” Nineteen years before Ronald Reagan outraged fashionable opinion by calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” Goldwater said: And the prologue to the “extremism” passage is vintage Jaffa: In the full context we can make out how Goldwater’s speech connected his supposed “extremism” with the historical cause and disposition of the Republican Party going back to its roots. He might well have added that the Republican Party was branded as an “extremist” party in 1857 when the Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott decision, held that the new party’s central purpose, preventing the westward expansion of slavery in the United States, was unconstitutional. The decay in the proper understanding of the founding principle of equality—and the corruption of the Constitution that followed from it in Dred Scott—virtually required that principled opposition would have to stake out an “extreme” position against it. The paradox of the 1850s is that preserving the moderation of the regime required “extremism.” Goldwater was onto something important—that successfully opposing the advance of the administrative state would require an “extreme” disposition. The later record of the Reagan years showed that most conservative policy victories owed to a spirit of “extremism” (as the media would have it, as was seen in the split between “Reaganites” and “pragmatists” in the administration) rather than a spirit of accommodation and compromise. Goldwater’s differed from acceptance speeches of recent decades, Democratic or Republican, by offering a history lesson of the party’s core principles, with references to private property, federalism and decentralized control, the separation of powers, and above them all, the Constitution. Notably absent are the personal and autobiographical details that have come to dominate acceptance speeches (“a man from ‘Hope’”), still less a laundry list of promises about new ways government will make your life better. In sharp contrast to the cradle-to-grave government solicitude extolled in the 2012 Obama campaign’s “Life of Julia,” Goldwater declared: The More Significant Deed It is commonplace among liberals today to say that the Republican Party has shifted to the right over the last two decades, but there is little in today’s supposed “extremist” party not evident from the beginning in Goldwater’s speech. The significance of the Goldwater campaign is that, as Lee Edwards wrote, “for the first time in thirty years, a presidential candidate was challenging the basic assumptions of the welfare state.” Liberals were used to dismissing conservatism as the lunatic conspiracy ravings of the John Birch Society, and simply wouldn’t take Goldwater’s substantive challenge seriously. The premises of the welfare state were so axiomatic among liberals as to require neither explication nor justification. “Whether government should or should not tamper with the private economy,” economist Robert Lekachman wrote during the campaign, is an “obsolete question”—a formulation that recalls Carl Becker’s famous verdict in his 1922 classic, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas: “To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question.” Columnist Richard Rovere wrote one of the most caustic and dismissive summaries after LBJ’s general election victory: Rovere did smugly allow that “if Buckley and his men keep at it, Goldwaterism may triumph by 1996 or thereabouts.” Harry Jaffa would later remark that his chief contribution to future Republican presidential campaigns would be to refrain from writing any more speeches. But was the “extremism” line, in retrospect, a grievous mistake? Goldwater was not alone in knowing that his chances of defeating Lyndon Johnson, less than twelve months after John Kennedy’s assassination, were negligible. The most provocative sentences from his acceptance speech surely made no difference to the outcome of the election. Not until after the election did a few reporters allow that the media had performed shamefully. The Washington Post’s David Broder admitted that reporters concealed Goldwater’s “essential decency” and had presented a “fundamentally distorted picture of who Goldwater was.” Even Goldwater remarked, “If I had to go by the media reports alone, I’d have voted against the sonofabitch, too.” It is not much of a stretch to see Goldwater as the first victim of what would later become known as “political correctness.” The real question is whether the entire Goldwater candidacy was a mistake, not just the single line for which he is best remembered. David Frum has written that the Goldwater nomination should be regarded as a catastrophe for Republicans and conservatism, because “Goldwater’s overwhelming defeat invited a tsunami of liberal activism.” If a different nominee had suffered a narrower defeat, in other words, leaving Democrats with congressional majorities smaller than the two-to-one advantage they enjoyed in both the House and Senate, “the legislation of 1965 might have looked a lot more like the more moderate legislation of 1964.” Well, perhaps. Counterfactuals can be neither proven nor refuted. Winston Churchill once remarked that what is, is singular, but what might have been is legion. The bookend of the Goldwater extremism address was Ronald Reagan’s “Time for Choosing” speech in the closing hours of the doomed campaign, which propelled Reagan’s subsequent political career. Without Goldwater, Reagan’s presidency might never have happened. The Gipper aside, would “moderating” LBJ’s Great Society legislation have made any policy difference, preventing, say, rather than merely delaying the growth of Big Government? And, politically, would the crusade to enact careful seven-point programs instead of heedless ten-point ones have galvanized a Republican majority? It’s hard to see. Minnesota Senator Gene McCarthy once remarked that the chief purpose of moderate Republicans is to shoot the wounded after the battle is over. Absent Goldwater, it’s doubtful Republicans would have ventured near the battlefield at all. The rhetoric may have been imprudent, but the new fighting spirit it inculcated to the next generation of Republicans was essential. The historical record argues moderation in the pursuit of electoral viability is no virtue. Just ask Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. Steven F. Hayward is a visiting professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. You were saying something about anyone who ever made a Hitler / Nazi comparison being responsible for Kirk’s death? Guess that includes Kirk. And you.

Your dangerous Hitlerific comparisons are no laughing matter!