Cuckservatism, and ceding the premise.
In the year 1560, Japan, Imagawa Yoshimoto led a force of around 40,000 men to attack the Oda clan castle of Kiyosu. The Oda clan had only around 2000 to 3000 fighting men at the time. The leader of the Oda forces, Nobunaga, was advised to hold up in Kiyosu and last as long as possible. But he knew that no matter the advantage a defender always receives from holding a fortified position, if he chose that path defeat would be inevitable.
So instead, he chose a different path. He ordered a few hundred of his men to setup a dummy army with straw, while he took the rest of his army around a secret path to attack the enemy during the night. His victory was total.
One of the most famous quotes from Sun Tzu is this. “Every battle is won before it’s ever fought.” There are a couple of ways to interpret this quote, but I like to think of it as explaining a concept pertaining to both political and martial conflict which I like to call “Ceding the Premise” or “Not Ceding the Premise” as the case may be.
Yoshimoto implicitly proposed a premise to Nobunaga as to how their conflict would be resolved. You hold up in your castle, I will besiege it, and whoever wins, wins. Due to the massive numerical advantage Yoshimoto held, he would have won the battle before he fought it, IF Nobunaga had accepted the premise of their fight, but he didn't.
This applies even better to a conflict which takes the form of a debate. Let us imagine a tall man is arguing with a short man. The topic of discussion moves to their height difference. “I’m taller than you, that means I am better! exclaims the tall man. “How dare you claim that you are taller than me! sputters the short man. I am just as tall as you are!”
Do you see how stupid the the short man is to accept the tall man's premise of how the debate was to be structured? Their height difference is as obvious as Nobunaga being massively outnumbered. Obviously the short man must make the discussion about which man is shorter, or about something else entirely. Now lets talk about Rhodesia.
The bit I am thinking of is at about 24 minutes.
This episode of firing line actually has enough easily missed euphemisms and hidden depths for half a dozen articles, but I want to focus on the part where Stephen warns against supporting the new Rhodesian government in case the USSR uses that to portray themselves as the real friends of black Rhodesia.
Having a capitalist moral system trying to beat a communist one on who is the best representative for the downtrodden masses, is like having Stephen Hawking challenge Arnold Schwarzenegger to an armwrestling competition. There are countless ways in which you can easily argue the moral superiority of a more Western Capitalist system as opposed to a socialist one, including on the topic of Rhodesia, but Communisms big moral weapon is its purported advocacy for the little guy, and Stephen is advocating that US foreign policy in regards to Rhodesia be conducted in part in order to win a moral fight with the USSR, on territory which the US would inevitably lose. There a lot of interesting conjectures one can make about why Stephen would advocate such a terrible policy, but the point is that it is a policy doomed to failure based on an impossible premise.
Here is a more interesting example in my opinion. Dinesh D’Souza wants to convince you that Fascism is left wing. Here I am not going to focus on whether Dinesh D’Souza is technically correct or not, (I think he makes good points but is ultimately incorrect) and instead focus on why Dinesh D’Souza chose to make this kind of argument and what premise he is operating under.
Lets list some casualty figures for Fascism and Communism
Communism: 85–100 million dead
Fascism: 11 million dead in the holocaust, or, 40 million dead in the European theatre during WW2 if you want to stretch the numbers to their limit.
Any reasonable way of calculating the deaths has Communism knocking Fascism out of the park by a big margin when it comes to death count. Why is this important? because this means that in order to argue that Nazism, or Fascism more generally (although lets be honest, whenever someone mentions Fascism 9 out of 10 times they are thinking of National Socialism) is morally worse than Communism one has to use a non Utilitarian moral system. Utilitarianism, by the way, is the idea that what is good is simply what is best for the most people, not a moral system I believe in, but it is a good starting point for what is morally correct and one needs a very good argument if one is going to argue against Utilitarianism.
Now lets analyse Dinesh D’Souza’s goal. His goal is obvious. He wishes for right-wing ideas to triumph over left-wing ideas, and for them to become more popular, morally acceptable, and widely held than left-wing ones. But he has encountered a problem. A national socialist problem. The problem has two main components.
- Nazism is considered to be the supreme epitome of evil.
- Nazism is considered right-wing.
Dinesh chose to attack the second premise while implicitly accepting the first. To illustrate the problems inherent with this strategy lets use another analogy.
There is a Romeo and Juliet style family feud going on. Both families use the crimes of the particularly violent members of the other family as proof that they are the hard done by side. Now imagine that one of the family members of family (a) says that the most violent members of their family who killed many of the members of family (b) was actually not the responsibility of family (a) because he was secretly a member of family (b). This will never work. The more violent and antagonist members of family (a) love the guy and will never believe he was secretly a member of the enemy camp, and family (b) of course hate the guy and even if he secretly WAS a member of their group they disowned him long ago. Also, concealed within this accusation is an admission that the violent man was evil and had no justification for his actions, a terrible point to concede to the enemy.
Painting your enemy as a Nazi is to cultural battles as holding a castle is to military battles. It may seem to be a temptingly powerful strategy, but it is often better to lead your smaller force to attack the enemy during the night. Conservatives won’t have truly won the cultural battle until progressives angrily exclaim that National Socialism is just as bad as Communism.
