"The anti-Trump resistance should stop bringing knives to a gunfight"

[robkelk]

CBC Opinion/Analysis: The anti-Trump resistance should stop bringing knives to a gunfight

Neil Macdonald was CBC's Washington correspondent for 12 years - he has a good grasp of how things work inside the Beltway. Previous to that, he was CBC's Middle East correspondent for five years - he also has a good grasp of what sort of responses to power do and don't work.

He is not advocating armed opposition. He's advocating giving as good as the other side gives.

Here's the start of the article:

Poor Laura Ingraham, the delicate snowflake.

The Fox News Channel manure-thrower has taken some time off, having been blasted right out of her cable-TV battlefield command post by a bunch of high school kids.

Such a satisfying outcome. And Ingraham, accustomed to siccing Fox's army of far-right orcs against the liberals and moderate conservatives they hate with such slavering intensity, plainly didn't see it coming, which made it all the more enjoyable to watch.

Ingraham, who began her career in university outing gay students, probably thought David Hogg, a 17-year-old survivor of the recent Florida high school massacre, would crumple, or maybe start crying — you know, the way sensitive liberals tend to do — when she unleashed one of her ad hominem attacks on him, mocking him for being rejected by UCLA.

Instead, Hogg turned around and pasted her. He in fact out-Foxed her.

"Soooo, @IngrahamAngle, what are your biggest advertisers…" Hogg tweeted after her attack. He and his friends quickly assembled a list, and began a boycott.

It was exactly the sort of hardball that far-right activists play, and boy, did it work. Ingraham's advertisers began deserting her Fox show, even after she rushed out a sanctimonious apology "in the spirit of Holy Week," which was promptly rejected by Hogg.

Facing the sort of destruction visited on her former colleague Bill O'Reilly by an early form of #MeToo boycott, she abruptly announced she'd be taking a break to spend time with her family.

Over the weekend, Hogg tweeted: "Have some healthy reflections this Holy Week."

Fox News, with an utterly un-self-aware absence of irony, denounced the boycott as an "agenda-driven intimidation effort." When I read that one over breakfast, I nearly passed coffee through my nose.

The article only gets more pointed after that. Two more quotes:

Unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose members frittered away strong political traction by talking themselves to death, Hogg, Gonzalez and company clearly intend to weaponize theirs and adopt the tactics of their enemies, which is exactly what needs to be done.

America needs a real resistance, not slacktivists who talk about it.

Democrats who sat on their hands in 2016, arguing about the soul of the Democratic Party, the ones who just couldn't vote for Hillary Clinton because they found her "strident," have seen the result of their self-indulgence: a churlish chief executive who sits in the White House eating cheeseburgers, tweeting out inanities and insults, laughing at women who object to his serial sexual misconduct, inspiring white supremacists, persecuting innocent undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as infants, dismantling environmental and fiscal regulations, demonizing the FBI and the Justice and State departments and even the courts (and probably preparing pardons for his cohort and maybe even himself), and of course borrowing future generations into debt to grant America's richest people – his pals — the biggest tax cut in generations, against all conservative principle.

Of course, conservative principles, such as they are, don't concern Trump or his followers.

But money does, and power does, and the only way to thwart them is to take it away. It can be done.

(And I don't want to hear any complaints about somebody who lives in Canada taking an interest in US politics. As long as the current POTUS keeps doing things that put international safety and cross-border trade at risk, it's our issue too.)

[Pyeknu]

Agreed, it is EVERYONE'S issue, both inside and outside the States.

[hazard]

To be honest, I don't like the tactics used by the MSD High survivors much, but I can't deny their effectiveness. And the author isn't wrong. It appears to be the only thing that works, so why not use it?

[robkelk]

They're the same tactics that their opponents use.

I know - "becoming the monster" and all that - but their opponents use the tactics because they work.

[hazard]

It's more that the tactics are distasteful and absolutely horrible when you want to arrive at any sort of sensible compromise.

Which explains why the Tea Party and the far right are using them. They don't want a sensible compromise, they want a capitulation to their values.

[robkelk]

It's more that the tactics are distasteful and absolutely horrible when you want to arrive at any sort of sensible compromise.

Which explains why the Tea Party and the far right are using them. They don't want a sensible compromise, they want a capitulation to their values.

Are these really people who one wants to compromise with?

They seem to me to be the type who use what Yes Prime Minister called "salami tactics" - carve off a slice at a time and eventually get everything you want. (Side A wants X, Side B wants Y. In an actual compromise, both sides get (X+Y)/2. In "salami tactics", the first step is that both sides get (X+Y)/2, then Side A says "time to negotiate again" and if Side B doesn't use the same tactics, both sides end up with (X+X+Y)/3, then Side A repeats and both sides get (X+X+X+Y)/4, and so on. Eventually, Side A gets X or close enough not to matter, and Side B gave it to them a slice at a time.)

If somebody wants everything and doesn't want to compromise, then it's foolhardy to offer them a compromise. One has to freeze these people out of the negotiation process so that everyone else can reach compromises and stick to them. If somebody isn't willing to play fair, then they don't get to play at all.

[hazard]

Are these really people who one wants to compromise with?

No not really.

The only sensible option is force them out of the negotiations, because they don't want to negotiate, they want their way and only their way. It's just rather counter to the way a democracy is supposed to work.

[Labster]

So that's how the sausage is made.

I've gotten to the point where I no longer want compromise. I know it's not sustainable. I know it's bad for social progress and wealth. But you can't just keep choosing the cooperate strategy against an opponent that chooses to defect half the time. Liberals need to choose defect pretty much constantly for the next two years, until we get a group that understands the value of compromise.

Like, I'm at the point where I just think we should take everyone's guns away. Do I really think that? Not so much -- I believe in a Californian's constitutional right to hunt and fish. And there are parts of the country with real wild animals that will kill you. But you know what? Fuck 'em. So many people are dying from American guns across North America, and so if we lose a few citizens to bears, so be it. It will still be less than how many die now. The social contract where the government answers to its citizens because they have guns is a fantasy -- if the modern military wanted to seize power in the U.S. there would be fuck-all we could do about it. Five and six year olds in Japan are expected to walk to school alone, but here in the U.S. adult women are afraid to go out alone. There's a long cancer on the country, and at this point, we probably gotta use the chemo because we're past the point where a minor surgery would fix it.