The Real Battle (It's Not Between Left and Right)

Photo by James Sutton on Unsplash

With institutions across the nation failing in their core missions, the local leader has daily frustrations. She is the business owner, school principal, or corporate executive who has built a team, a service, and a way of life for herself and others. She wakes up each morning with responsibilities. Meeting those responsibilities takes all her smarts and competence. But her success gives satisfaction to herself and security to those around her. Her success also nourishes the community: she provides a setting where diverse people meet, talk, and work together.

Local leaders in businesses, non-profits, service organizations, and churches make our nation run smoothly every day.

Where can a local leader find reporting about Covid-19 that isn’t advancing some preconceived narrative? What is the best way to keep her business open while keeping customers and employees safe? Her business has become the front line in battles over politics, the economy, and public health. One tweet from Chuck Woolery can start an argument among her customers that could damage her reputation and her income. What are the wisest ways to defuse the fighting?

For America to recover, this local leader needs to take over. But, unfortunately, others are in charge: political activists on the left and right. By political activists, I don’t necessarily mean politicians. The activist is at work behind the scenes before the politician ever runs for office.

The activist has given his life to the Cause. He may have a job related to the Cause, or he may fight the good fight as a volunteer. But in terms of passion, the Cause is the only issue that matters to him. No person matters. No institution matters. The Cause dictates his ethics and demands his sacrifice. The Cause may be fighting racism, inequality, or pollution. It may be defending white identity, American values, or freedom. No matter where it comes from on the ideological spectrum, the Cause is all-powerful. It gives the activist an identity: ally, digital soldier, prayer warrior, revolutionary.

This level of devotion turns political activists into symbol-mongers. They communicate in chants, slogans, hashtags, bumper stickers, memes, profile pictures, posters, and swag. They do not use persuasion, only pressure.

Their devotion turns them into trolls. Activists bring the stock-in-trade of professional politicians — slander — to every relationship. For the activist, you are either a tool or a target. If you’re a tool, you’d better show your loyalty and repeat the right slogans. If you’re a target, the activist will call you a bigot, a Marxist, a racist, a socialist, an apologist, a member of Antifa, a white supremacist, or a Satanist pedophile. You have profaned the Cause. You have no dignity. (Consider the treatment of Bari Weiss. And David French.)

The Cause is more important to the activists than reason. The Cause is logic itself. Cherry-picking statistics is only the beginning. The activist argues from guilt by association. He was photographed with Ghislaine. Marx also believed in social justice. She attended Charles Murray’s speech. The activist makes endless distinctions without a difference. Christine Blasey Ford was credible but Tara Reade was not. Bill Clinton’s sexual sins stained the national culture but Donald Trump’s are in the past and shouldn’t be brought up again. The Cause is truth.

Back to the local leader, who creates common settings where all can meet, talk, and work. She is fighting for that space in her studio, café, or foundation. She believes that our communities can recover if people reason together with tolerance. She fulfills all her responsibilities the same way — building teams to solve problems and produce good work.

But today, everywhere she turns, political activists are wrangling to tear her work apart. The business, the non-profit, the church all must bow to the Cause — except that the activists never agree about what the Cause is. The real battle in our nation is not between left and right but between activists of every stripe and local leaders of every profession.

I stand with local leaders. I am not listening to the activists, for whom everything is a symbol of loyalty or blasphemy, for whom the enemy must be driven out, and for whom the Cause is a god. Activists leave communities in ruins, marching away from burnt-out relationships to the rhythm of their deranged utopian chants. But local leaders can make slow progress in an imperfect world — the real world.