To Get Power You Have to Use Power

[Fishrrman]

https://neociceroniantimes.substack.com/p/to-get-power-you-have-to-use-power

To Get Power You Have to Use Power
Theophilus Chilton
(this was originally posted in May, 2021)

Excerpts:

If there is one thing that becomes apparent when you talk to a lot of normie conservatives, it is that they have absolutely no idea how or why they keep getting rolled over by the radical Left. They work and they work and they work to win elections, they invest their time and money to get “their guy” into office, only to find him selling them out on the first important issue within a month of taking office. They pass laws, only to be thwarted in the courts. When they win in the courts, they get thwarted by the bureaucracy. They try and try to force government to abide by the Constitution, but find that this document applies in one direction only. No matter what they do, they simply cannot keep Cthulhu from swimming left.

Why is this?

It’s because they fundamentally don’t understand how power actually works. In a sense, normie conservatives long for a world that never existed. They desperately want to “keep” a republic where politicians work for the public good and where government is truly restrained by its founding document. So it’s something of a bitter pill for them to swallow when they finally accept that such a thing doesn’t exist, and really hasn’t existed in any reasonable form in the United States since the Civil War. America has continued to move left for the past 150 years because the Left has been perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to win. The Left has become adept at “manipulating procedural outcomes,” by which is meant the ability to game the system to make an existing structure which is “supposed” to operate one way bring about outcomes which were never really intended (or even considered possible) by the people who put it into place.

How do you get around constitutional restraints on, say, gun laws or federal encroachments on state prerogatives? Well, one example would be to use fraud and deceit to subvert the Constitution’s provision for elections to get your people in office, who then use the Constitution’s provisions for nominating and approving judges to get friendly judges in power, who then use the (dubiously) constitutional provision for judicial review to decide that whatever laws you want to pass are “constitutional.” Other than the initial fraud (which, since you run the show now, isn’t going to be challenged in any substantive way), everything you did was “technically” in line with the Constitution, even though the results are quite the opposite of what was actually intended. Wanna pack the Supreme Court? Technically, it’s legal! Ban political speech you don’t like? Call it “hate speech” and enforce it under provisions in administrative law that have already been allowed to stand by your judges. The Left has become very adept at appearing to “follow the rules” while working the system to undermine that same system for its own ends.

So that’s “how” the Left always seems to beat conservatives, even when conservatives manage to win an election. But WHY does this happen?

It happens because conservatives ALLOW it to happen.

Let’s be brutally honest here – normie conservatives are saps. They continue to play a rigged game, no matter how often they lose. And they do so because they believe it is virtuous to hold onto “principles” which inevitably lead to failure after failure. They never consider that if “holding to their principles” means the destruction of everything they profess to hold dear, then those principles are terrible principles that should perhaps be reconsidered. If you pat yourself on the back for your virtue in “playing by the rules” even as your house burns down around you and the neighbours are making off with all your stuff, then you’re the source of the problem. Don’t blame somebody else for capitalising on your stupidity.

So really, the simple answer is to stop playing the Left’s game. Here’s some more brutal honesty – the old “fair play, Marquis of Queensbury rules of constitutional what-for” simply won’t cut it anymore. What conservatives need to understand is that there will not be a return to the self-restraining constitutional system of America’s mythohistorical past. Continuing to tie a hand behind your back while the Left bodyslams you into irrelevance is going to result in the complete destruction of what is left of America. Huffing and puffing about your “sacred principles” of playing fair with the Left is not going to bring back anything.

What I’m saying is this – the only way to get power to do what you want to do (even if that includes restraining its use) is to use power that you already have. And if you’re in a situation where the Left is using its power to further manipulate procedural outcomes so as to shut you out of power permanently – and this is exactly what the various power plays and bureaucratic legerdemain in Washington DC are really all about – then you need to step outside the existing set of rules and play by some new ones. The Left will shout about it being “illegal,” but who cares? As any number of recent examples will show, they have absolutely no problem breaking the rules when their power allows them to do so. They broke the system. The Right is under no moral obligation to keep abiding by that now-broken system.

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