Winning the Moral High Ground: Getting Off Defense

Winning the Moral High Ground: Five Rules for Political Messaging (full series)
Worldviews, Values, and Will to Survive | Struggle for the Moral High Ground
Five Rules for Effective Messaging | Getting Off Defense

Getting Off Defense and Making the Moral Case for Liberty

Even a cursory scan of the current political environment confirms President Trump’s challenge to America and the West. Our survival as a free nation is indeed threatened, but within that threat lies an opportunity and a challenge for conservatives.

Consider the threat. As Andrew Breitbart said, the Left is waging a 30-front war across our cultural and political landscape. With their domination of our institutions of education, news, and entertainment institutions, the Left’s long march strategy is nearing its destination. Even corporate America, once a stronghold of conservative, free-enterprise thinking, is often used by the Left to promote an extremist environmental, social, and political agenda. And if speech codes on college campuses, harassment of conservative speakers, leftist indoctrination in tax-funded schools, and suppression of conservative ideas in social media were not concerning enough for advocates of free and open debate, we now have government claiming the power to patrol for “disinformation.” Leftists have used their dominance in those institutions to promote a false and dangerous narrative about conservatives as selfish, uncaring, intolerant, close-minded, bigoted, extremist, and a danger to democracy. That narrative has emboldened the Left and provided moral air cover for increasingly authoritarian tactics that include the suppression of conservative ideas and harassment of people holding those ideas.

But within those threats lies an opportunity. The Left has become so emboldened and so extreme in their rhetoric and tactics that the authoritarian reality behind their compassionate rhetoric is now becoming exposed. It is hard to claim the moral high ground on values such as tolerance and open-mindedness while shouting down and threatening people with opposing ideas. Accusing opponents of being dangerous extremists is a hard sell when your own supporters have blocked traffic, burned buildings, and dragged innocent people from their cars as forms of “protest.” The rhetoric of caring and compassion for illegal immigrants becomes transparent when viewed in light of the obvious self-interest of bringing in millions of new potential voters who will give the Left permanent one-party control of government.

Evident and alarming though the Left’s extremism might be, it will not necessarily lead people to embrace conservative solutions to the nation’s ailing condition. Support for election integrity, border security, sound fiscal policy, currency stability, free enterprise, and other policy goals that are critical to the survival of our Republic depend at least in part on making the case that those policies are morally sound. It is up to conservatives to highlight the differences in moral visions and the implications of those visions for policy and to make a more compelling case for our understanding of caring, equality, fairness, justice, tolerance, diversity, and the other values that are at issue in our divided political climate.

Buttressing citizen confidence in the moral soundness of our founding values such as the rights and responsibility of individuals, separated and decentralized power, and now even the right of free speech has never been more important. It is hoped that the five rules covered above and the flow from values to political solutions depicted in Figure 1 can help conservatives both in offering a more consistent and morally compelling case for conservative ideas and also for exposing the moral vulnerabilities in the Left’s messaging.

This article was published in the April 2024 issue of Capital Research magazine.