Malcolm X’s contribution to the erosion of American political rhetorical standards lives on, most recently in President Trump’s speech at a rally in Tennessee. But at least he was characterizing the expediency of his enemies.
In 1963 Communist-sympathizer Jean-Paul Sartre penned the words that in English become “by any means necessary.”
Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Ernesto Che Guevara, 1960, Cuba
Their African-American popularizer employed it to everlasting effect the following year. (He was assassinated the next.)
Conflating the necessary with the sufficient, it’s literally nonsense. “Any” doesn’t go with “necessary.”
There is, for example, more than one way to get to Times Square from Grand Central. One can walk a few blocks; or hop on the westbound M42 bus; or take the subway, either the shuttle (one stop) or the No. 7 (two). Each of them will do, but none of them is necessary.
The seductive power of the phrase overrides logic. “By the one means necessary” or “by any means sufficient” lacks punch. What the hackneyed phrase’s users mean is: “What I want is imperative, and whatever achieves it is permissible.” “Whatever it takes,” or “The end justifies the means,” which evacuates “justifies” of meaning.
Few express their amoral pragmatism so frankly. Yet some of those few may be found among today’s Democrats. They demonstrably believe that the ruination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s good name with unsubstantiated assertions is a small price to pay for the obstruction of the President’s agenda. An equally good bargain, in their view, is the undermining of our Anglo-American habit of presuming the innocence of the accused.
This habit is codified in our courts of law, but its scope is not confined to them. It is not to be suspended during a “job interview.” (And, as Alan Dershowitz noted the other day, it’s not a “job interview” if half the hiring managers are dead-set again hiring you under any circumstances,)
You see, in their eyes, the President is another Hitler. What wouldn’t you have done to impede Hitler’s designs? Probably little. Kavanaugh’s destruction, for them, is but collateral damage in pursuit of a noble goal. So is the loss of Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s privacy.
Their identification of Trump with Hitler is pathological. It makes them potentially dangerous, enemies of good order: they seek to overturn the way we conduct political business, which is to say, how we regulate the use of violence to settle differences.
We are probably living through the run-up to a civil war. All that stands between it and us is adherence to the Constitution. But once Socialists—be they organized as parliamentarians or frank socialists—realize they can no longer rely on that institution as their Politiburo, they will adopt direct methods. And the latter won’t be parliamentary. Their political life will imitate the violent images of their propaganda.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation holds out the hope that the Supreme Court will one day be composed solely of republican exegetes of the Constitution, rather than socialist eisegetes. That hope is their nightmare, and that’s why they act like the denizens of one.