Big Conservatism and Politics-As-Game

Within the martial arts community, there exists, essentially, two camps.

The one camp consists of those who have been specializing for decades in supplying instruction in close quarter combat/self-defense.  Its contemporary representatives—men like Bradley J. Steiner, founder of American Combato; John Perkins, founder of Guided Chaos; and Al Ridenhour, founder of Warrior Flow—claim as pedigree for their tradition William Fairbairn and Rex Applegate, famed founders of what have since come to be known as “World War II Combatives.”

The other camp is comprised of the teachers and practitioners of classical martial arts; boxing; wrestling; Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu; MMA; kickboxing, etc.

Although it may not be entirely accurate to characterize the relationship between these two camps as one of conflict, there is indeed tension—even if it is largely felt only by those in the combat/self-defense camp.

The latter categorically reject the claim that the kind of training suited for the competitive “combat” sports and arts is equivalent to training for genuine self-defense purposes.

While competitive sports and arts are not without their share of benefits, and while no one denies that a skilled practitioner in any of them is likely to be able to hold his own against an assailant on the streets, the position of those who train in close quarter, WWII-style combatives boils down to the following: Against the State: An ... Rockwell Jr., Llewelly... Best Price: $5.02 Buy New $5.52 (as of 11:35 UTC - Details)

The kind of training appropriate for competition-oriented “combat” sports and arts is of a fundamentally different kind than that which is proper for real self-defense, i.e. defense against a life-or-death attack.  Professor Brad Steiner, a one-time student of Marine and World-War II hero, Charlie Nelson, and a teacher for over a half-of-a-century of these war-proven styles and methods of self-defense, has been banging this drum for decades.  In his American Combato monthly newsletter, Steiner writes:

“In real combat, either in warfare or in self-defense, the most effective, reliable, and practical techniques are BLOWS [that include]…open and closed hand blows; fingertip gouges, thrusts, and jabs; elbow smashes and arm strikes; head butts and biting; knee strikes; low kicks and stomps; clawing, crushing, and grabbing.”

Additionally, real combat training consists of “some few very select combat throws and strangulation methods, as well as neck-breaking” (italics and underline original) [.]

Steiner is clear that his intention is not to either knock competition and sport-oriented martial arts or to deny that their practitioners are capable of defending themselves in a street attack.  His point, rather, is that these arts and sports are, well, sportive.  As such, they require of their participants training that is fundamentally distinct from, and largely incompatible with, the training required for combat/self-defense. The latter “is a field, a study, and [sic] undertaking unto itself.”  Steiner writes:

It cannot be mastered by competitive training and participation in matches.  It requires a unique, very specific program of technical, mental, tactical, and physical training(bold-type original).

For decades, Steiner has been insisting that, as he first put it around the time that I was born 47 years ago, “self-defense is war in microcosm.”

My own Master, retired Lieutenant-Colonel Al Ridenhour of the United States Marine Corps, a man who engaged in about 100 combat operations and who was entrusted with the responsibility of teaching Marines in the ways of armed and unarmed combat, takes this position as well.  “Yes, we are teaching people life and death combat.  For us, a real fight is akin to war. You either go big or you go home. There is no in between.”

Master Al, like Professor Steiner and most close quarter combat instructors, teach their students how to “kill the bad guys,” as Master Al puts it, and how to do so with a “ruthless intention” that is sure to end the attack within seconds.

Though it should be obvious, it nevertheless (unfortunately) bears repeating that those who engage in any of the pugilistic or “combat” arts and sports are most emphatically not trained along these lines.

In other words, self-defense/combat martial arts operate within the paradigm of warThe paradigm shared by participants in any of the competition and sports-oriented martial arts is that of a game.

These paradigms can be applied to politics as well.  We can call them, “Politics-As-Game” (PAG) and “Politics-As-War” (PAW).

Interestingly, when we turn our attention to politics, or at least to American politics, it’s hard to escape the impression, derived from the words and deeds of all partisans, but especially the words and deeds of so-called “conservatives,” that American politics is infected with a kind of schizophrenia:

The rhetoric of war is used regularly, and not infrequently in a tone which at least suggests some measure of sincerity on the part of those who speak of “cultural wars,” “a war for the heart and soul of America,” “resistance,” and accomplishing their ends “by whichever means necessary.”  What’s for certain, however, is that self-styled “progressives,” i.e. left-leaning ideologues, are immeasurably more sincere than are their enemies in the so-called “conservative movement,” for while leftist ideology is indeed every bit as bad, as evil, as Big Conservative media figures and the GOP politicians for whom they apologize make it out to be, at least the left walks the walk by acting on their talk.

The same most assuredly cannot be said for Big Conservatism, what I call, “the Big Con.”

Yet although they routinely assure the members of their audiences that we are in a state of war with the left, that we need to fight, and that each election is “the most important of our lifetime,” the one that will make or break America, they just as frequently make remarks that reflect their treatment of politics as a game or sport.  The most recent illustration of this latter phenomenon is provided to us by Mike Gallagher, who, with an audience of millions of human beings, consistently ranks in the top ten of nationally-syndicated “conservative” talk radio hosts.  Although Mike spares no occasion to assure his legions of listeners that we are in a war, when Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings died, he implored them to “put politics aside” and recognize that “humanity” (or something to this effect) transcends politics.

Mike then proceeded to offer his prayers for Cummings’ family.

The problem with this approach should be evident: Had Mike been around during World War II, would he have urged those over whom his influence extended to “put politics aside” and, out of interest for humanity, offered prayers for the loved ones of Adolph Hitler, the Nazis, and those Japanese soldiers who lost their lives fighting for their countries?

As I write this, President Trump just orchestrated the assassination of Islamic State Chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.  Thus far, Mike Gallagher has not urged his listeners to suspend politics and pray for the loved ones of the late terrorist, kidnapper, rapist, and murderer.

Here’ the point: If, as Big Conservative media personalities are inexhaustibly telling us, the political conflicts between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, right and left, constitute war, and if, as these same personalities (rightfully) tell us, the left poses the biggest existential threat to the country as we have known it, then they should treat their opponents as the enemies of war that they otherwise depict them as being.

The talkers and scribblers of Big Con media possess an enormous reservoir of resources in money and influence.  Yet, outside of waxing indignant over the left’s outrages, they do virtually nothing else:

No calls for boycotts.

No marches, demonstrations, or counter-protests to the street protests of the left.

No attempts to construct technological infrastructural alternatives to the tech giants that are busy demonetizing and de-platforming those who challenge leftist orthodoxy.

No attempts to put Republican politicians on notice that acts of ingratiation toward the left will be met with unrelenting punishment at the ballot box.

And, certainly, no calls for Americans who are threatened with violence by the left to defend themselves.

Big Conservatives never tire of making reverential references to Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Father who authored those immemorial allusions to “unalienable rights.”  Yet there is another quotation of the author of the Declaration of Independence that they never invoke: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.”

The blood that patriots shed while shedding the blood of the tyrants who threaten their God-endowed liberty—it is this blood that Jefferson calls the “natural manure” of the tree of liberty.

Jefferson and his contemporaries regarded their circumstances as justification for armed revolution against the mightiest empire in the world at that time.  Yet the oppression with which the patriots of ’76 charged England is no oppression at all compared to what Americans in the 21st century experience courtesy of their government (and the cultural and media elites who support the latter).  The so-called “federal” government that the Founders framed has long since degenerated into precisely the sort of behemoth that they dreaded.

And, yet, lest their enemies on the left—i.e. those who they repeatedly identify as the threats to America that they are—think negatively of them, Big Conservatives will never so much as even hint that they and their constituents may have a right to use violence to defend themselves against an increasingly violent left.

Despite all of their references to the heroism of America’s Founders, Big Conservatives never note that the men who seceded—yes, the Founding generation was successful in doing what its posterity nearly a century later were prevented from doing—from the Mother country and established America as an independent country did so, and were willing to do so, at the cost of their own lives and, critically, the lives of the enemy that they were willing to kill—and kill for a lot less than what Americans in 2019 tolerate on a daily basis. Secret Empires: How th... Schweizer, Peter Best Price: $5.99 Buy New $11.07 (as of 07:25 UTC - Details)

This is correct: America, considered as a union of sovereign states, was birthed in blood, the blood of patriots and that of those who these liberty-loving patriots saw as threats to their liberty.

The Big Conservative media personality incessantly uses the rhetoric of Politics-As-War (PAW).  However, simultaneously, he acts like he endorses Politics-As-Game (PAG): We are in a war with an enemy that is determined to destroy America and the West, but, the only possible strategy to victory is to…vote Republican.

Vote Republican.

We are left to draw one of three verdicts from the schizophrenic character of the Big Con media personality: (1) He is a charlatan, a con-man, who doesn’t believe a thing that he’s saying about either being at war with the left or the danger posed by the left to the American way of life; (2) He does believe his own rhetoric, but he’s either too intellectually obtuse and/or cowardly to boldly follow its implications; (3) He simply doesn’t know the first thing about the nature of war.    

In any case, its rhetoric of war notwithstanding, the Big Con is devoid of warriors.  Had matters been otherwise, then, given its oasis of resources, the left would not have been able to make the enormous and tireless advances that it has made and that it continues to make.