Military historians note a phenomenon when war breaks out. The generals who had achieved high rank during peacetime are nowhere to be found. That relates, I’m sorry to say, to the Indiana GOP’s upcoming battle against socialism.
The reason peacetime generals do not matriculate to war is chaos, it cannot be simulated at a war college or in managing a garrison budget. It is as Grand Marshal Ferdinand Foch famously observed of the French: “Superb generals in peacetime — who knew everything except war.”
And my assistant Grok came up with a less pointed explanation: The skills and personalities that keep a military institution healthy and funded in peace are not the same ones that win wars. The transition is rare because the environments themselves are rare in their intensity and unforgiving in their selection pressures.
I join our adjunct Dr. John Gaski in warning Hoosier Republicans that they will soon be faced with a war — a real one against a formidable enemy in the new socialist Democrats. Gaski’s article, “Yes, the Communists Can Win,” will appear in the upcoming issue of The Indiana Policy Review. He warns that things are going to get hot at the polling booth and in the streets.
Also in the upcoming journal, our Mark Franke reviews “The Coming Storm: Power, Conflicts, and Warnings from History” by Yale professor O.A. Westad, and no, there’s not much good news there. Wested relates our situation to 1914 with Communist China playing the role of Imperial Germany.
If Gaski and Franke can be dismissed under the rolling definition of “far right,” what about Jonathan Turley, a mild-mannered Washington professor of law? Turley dedicates this week’s column, “You Had Better Get Ready for War,” to listing one by one the spoken threats of politicians who would overthrow capitalism (1):
“In Chicago, radicals gathered for a conference on Marxism during what many view as the heyday of socialism in the United States. The Democratic Socialists of America is now larger and more powerful than at any time in our history. Socialist candidates are winning elections across the country as Democratic establishment figures from Sen. Chuck Schumer, (D., N.Y.) to Gov. Gavin Newsom pander to the movement.”
Look, envy-driven hatred is the historic motivator of socialists. As such, they will give you no quarter and you must give them none. That said, and keeping the Grand Marshal’s observation in mind, who in the Indiana GOP will stand up to them?
Gov. Mike Braun is an improvement over the supine Eric Holcomb, but he is a businessman’s idea of a political leader, someone who expects his adversaries to play by a certain set of rules. Braun is the “perfect model of a modern major-general” in the Gilbert-and-Sullivan phrasing. However, if Gaski and Turley are right, the reorganized Democratic Party will not be playing by any rules whatsoever.
My hopes are with U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, who knows something about war, or state Attorney Gen. Todd Rokita, both campaign-toughened political veterans too often ignored by the more sedate Republican establishment and its lobbyist fan base. I like what I hear from state Sen. Andrew Ireland and state Rep. Matt Commons. The GOP leadership has left Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith to be eaten alive by the Indianapolis corporate media. U.S. Sen. Todd Young, a darling of the Meridian Street set, is scrambling to find some conservative credential beyond a stint as a non-combatant Marine. Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence are peacetime generals polishing their medals.
There is another military maxim that might apply here: “If you cannot mount an offensive, you had better fake one.” I would feel better if the Indianapolis bunch could at least work up a credible threat, say, a legislative order that high school seniors be taught something about socialist government in preparation for the onslaught of leftist indoctrination that awaits them at one of the state colleges we fund.
The Florida”s board of education has done just that. It is equipping students “with a truthful, in-depth understanding of how communist ideologies suppress individual freedoms, abuse power and inflict widespread suffering.” In Indiana we couldn’t get that out of the GOP-ruled House Education Committee, Rep. Martin Carbaugh’s repeated efforts to do so notwithstanding.
Does that strike anyone else as weak, pathetically so? — tcl
(1) An etymological note: “Capitalist” is a word popularized by French socialists as a pejorative to denounce the free-market and private-property system that built Western Civilization. The word carries no actual understanding of capital or how it works in an economy.
