Imagine if the patriots of 1775 kept refighting the Battles of Lexington and Concord hoping for a different outcome. Not only would we have continued to lose the battles, we would have ultimately lost the war.
You raise a point here that I really think needs to be addressed (probably even make it a chapter in my book....) There's been this myth propagated that the Founders wouldn't compromise, it was all or nothing, etc. That's complete hogwash. The Founders signed the Declaration knowing they might lose the war, but
also believing they had a good chance to win. If it would have gotten to the point where defeat was inevitable, and further fighting would just have cost the lives of soldiers, they'd rightfully have surrendered. Patrick Henry aside, they weren't
aiming for martyrdom. They were aiming for victory.
And look at how we actually fought that war. Washington didn't follow some idiotic "no retreat" directive. For much of the war, his immediate tactical goal was to simply keep an army in the field, not win battles. One of his best moves as a general was escaping New York in August 1776. Less than two months after the Declaration was signed, Washington
abandoned New York when surrounded by the British. He gave up a critical city, but did so because he wanted to preserve his army. Some here would no likely have denigrated him as a moral coward for refusing to fight to the bitter end to save New York. Some back then actually did. But had he stayed and fought with a "no retreat" mindset, his entire army would have been bagged, and the Revolution over.
In the south, we pretty much lost every important battle for a good stretch. Our best general was Nathanael Greene, and it was his strategy that led to the victory at Yorktown. But he actually lost
every pitched battle he fought. He had a brilliant strategic plan, never stopped nipping at the heels of the British, and eventually compelled them to retreat through strategic maneuver.
The point is that in a war, you cannot insist on always attacking/never retreating. You have to fight hard, but also fight smart. Know when to attack, when to push your advantage, and when to take what you can get and not leave yourself open to a counterattack by getting too greedy. That was part of the genius of Washington at Trenton and Princeton. He attacked, did his damage, and then retreated before getting cutoff. The absolutists -- and there were some of those back then -- criticized him for not pushing his advantage harder and launching a general attack. But he did the right thing in grabbing those victories and not risking too much.
My point is that we are essentially in a war right now with the left, and to win, it is not enough to just be principled and fight hard. We must also fight
smart. It means fighting tough rear-guard actions when we lose, like we did in 2008. And it means taking victories whenever we can, even if they are not as complete and overwhelming as we might like. The "give me everything, or nothing at all" mentality will doom us to certain defeat, just as certainly as it doomed the entire German Sixth Army when Hitler issued his asinine "no retreat" order for Stalingrad.
We cannot confuse disagreements on strategy/tactics, with disagreements on principles. Most (not all, obviously) of us here are pretty staunch conservatives, and would like to bring the country to a much better place, which means much less government interference and control in our lives. Where we disagree is how best to get from
here, to
there. And it would be a real tragedy if we left that kind of disagreement divide us to the point where we are unable to achieve anything.
