The fight is the thing

A couple of interesting pieces in the last day or so, one from David French and Liz Bruenig. They're both writers I admire - though, perhaps, I don't always fully agree with them - because they're more interested in staying true to their principles than in relentlessly defending their respective tribes. Which means that it often seems that they don't really have tribes - at least not on Politics Twitter.

Anyway, let's start with French. He's talking about a recent First Things essay that criticizes evangelist Tim Keller's "winsome" approach to public discourse as outdated and suggests a more, uh, muscular approach is needed because secular culture has become so hostile to Christianity.

Here's French:

Yet even if the desperate times narrative were true, the desperate measures rationalization suffers from profound moral defects. The biblical call to Christians to love your enemies, to bless those who curse you, and to exhibit the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—does not represent a set of tactics to be abandoned when times are tough but rather a set of eternal moral principles to be applied even in the face of extreme adversity.

And here's Bruenig, talking about how parenting is increasingly just another culture war prop. 

America is a much harder place to be a child than it has any excuse to be, and a much harder place to have and raise a child than it has any possible reason to be: It’s hard to find a politician who’ll disagree with either proposition, and harder yet to find one with any intention of doing anything about it. When it comes to the crucial business of caring for children and families, our country is an international embarrassment.

Politics is downstream of culture, and this is perhaps the greatest defeat of all: Having and raising children itself now seems poised to become a culture-war issue, daily losing its discursive resemblance to an ordinary life event and gaining all the markers of a personal consumption choice that makes a statement about who you are and which side you’re on. The GOP seems all too happy to nudge the process along with caricatures of childless libs and the specter of armies of “groomers,” broadly labeling scores of left-wing educators, activists, and parents as pedophiles. The fact that Republicans are up two-to-one versus Democrats among households with kids in Marist’s latest pre-midterm survey suggests that they’re enjoying some success in this push to become the Party of Parents, and on it goes.

What a terrible thing to witness, and how distant from anything like a victory. Nothing beautiful survives the culture war.

These are different pieces from different writers on different topics. But they share a theme. For many participants, across the political spectrum, the fight has become the thing. Politics becomes not a way to pursue one's principles in the public sphere, but an excuse for battle -- and one that eventually subordinates the ostensible principles to the urgency of the fight. And as Bruenig suggests, making the fight the thing often does little to create the better world we supposedly want. It just leaves us angry. 

For the GOP, any woman will do

Interesting tidbit from Dave Weigel:

Adam Serwer recently noted Trump is struggling to make a culture war case against Joe Biden:

For the past few months, Trump and the conservative propaganda apparatus have struggled to make the old race-and-gender-baiting rhetoric stick to Biden. But voters don’t appear to believe that Biden is an avatar of the “radical left.” They don’t think Biden is going to lock up your manhood in a “testicle lockbox.”

 But Republicans can be relied on to use scare tactics when it comes to Democratic women. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez follows Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton as bogeywomen of the right. They'll keep doing it as long as they think it's successful.

No, Curt Schilling is not a free speech martyr.

Some angry talk these days from my conservative friends about ESPN's firing of famed pitcher Curt Schilling after Schilling posted some anti-transgender comments to social media the other day. "Progressive America is sending a message," National Review's David French wrote. "In the institutions it controls, there is no distinction between the personal and professional. Keep dissent to yourself. All your words belong to your boss."

I don' think that's quite the lesson to draw here.

This is what Curt Schilling posted:

It's a distasteful, near-pornographic image — one that, even if it said something like AMERICA IS THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD or VOTE FOR BERNIE SANDERS might've caused most people a bit of faint-heartedness.

Now, understand too: Schilling had already been suspended last fall for THIS post:

Too me, the sentiment is objectionable without being pornographic. This is the incident I might've criticized ESPN about. But Schilling, at the time, very much affirmed ESPN's right and wisdom to take him off-air.

"I understand and accept my suspension. 100% my fault. Bad choices have bad consequences and this was a bad decision in every way on my part," he wrote.

So Schilling knew there was a line, and had affirmed his employer's right to hold that line.

I have no idea what Schilling's contract said, but if you're ESPN, you're not just paying Schilling for his opinions, but to express himself in a manner that's entertaining, insightful -- and, because it's a business, doesn't turn too many customers away at the door. Cause people to want to actually turn away from your product, and, well, you have a problem. ESPN is not in the business of supporting expression that makes it *harder* for the company to do business.

Listen: ESPN knew — everybody knew — that Schilling is a conservative when the network hired him. If it hated conservative expression so much, that move is impossible to imagine. It knew what it was getting.

So if Schilling had said something along the lines of: "I have concerns about sending my daughter to bathrooms with people who are born men and I support the North Carolina law," most likely he'd have his job, without changing the underlying substance of what he said. He might've caused an outcry; ESPN would've distanced itself from his remarks; maybe he'd have been given a warning of sorts. Bad enough, certainly. 

Instead, he chose to say it with one of the more grotesquely offensive, off-putting — and, yes, outlying — images possible. That there are consequences from his employer does not make him a free speeh martyr.