“By any means necessary” revisited

That linguistic barbarism continues to spoil America’s discursive landscape. Once a mere hint of violence sporting the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability, it has evolved into a preferential option for “direct action” exercised by wide swaths of the populace, with its predictable vandalism, firebombing, assault on person and property, and usurpation of legitimate authority.

Below is this blog’s first post, dated October 3, 2018. Reference to the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh dates it only slightly (in my opinion; you may disagree). The logic of the deranged behavior that was on display two autumns ago is now being played out to its dystopian conclusion. I continue to hope that a majority of Americans will pull the country back from the brink this coming November 3rd—indeed, that they will be permitted to pull it back—but events have not allayed my fear that “we are probably living through the run-up to a civil war.”—Anthony Flood

“By any means necessary”: pragmatism on stilts

First published October 3, 2018

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 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 the Supreme Court 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.