My friend Bill Vallicella, having read our recent post and comment-thread on Rod Dreher’s essay on Marx (see Bill’s recent post on the same article, here), noted my formulation of the consistent principle of our opponents in the current culture war:

Defend your people, always. Attack the enemy with whatever comes to hand, always.

(The correct understanding of this principle, I’ve argued, renders pointless the accusations of hypocrisy and inconsistency that are always popping up in conservative critiques of the Left in public discourse.)

Bill wrote to ask me:

Are you advocating the “Defend your people, always, etc. ” principle, or are you merely stating that this is the principle that the hard Left lives by? One could do the latter without doing the former. But I think you do both.

This is a difficult question, and until he asked it I hadn’t tried to answer it for myself. My provisional response, which I will paraphrase here, was:

Certainly I think it’s the principle the hard Left lives by, just to get that out of the way. (It seems from Bill’s own post that he has come round to the same opinion.)

But do I advocate it? Well, I’d much rather not have to, of course; I’d prefer to work out our difficulties and differences in the arena of reason and dialogue, where the principle doesn’t apply.

But are there circumstances in which one should advocate it? In wartime this rises to the level of an existential question — and with Western civilization essentially at war now, it wants answering.

Off the top of my head, I suppose the question breaks down into at least these three subordinate questions:

1) Do my people deserve defending? 2) What are the stakes? 3) If the stakes are high, or (in the worst case) existential, what am I willing to sacrifice?

So: I’ll say yes to 1). (I think Bill would too.)

As for 2), I think the stakes are getting pretty close to existential. (Indeed, what I described as “the arena of reason and dialogue” is itself part of the territory that is under siege.)

So it all boils down to 3). Should we temporarily put aside reason and mercy and justice, if we must, to defeat those who would extinguish reason and mercy and justice? (The question seems related to Bill’s recent series of posts about tolerance of intolerance, and the interpretation of the Constitution.)

My answer: if that’s what it takes, then yes. We owe this to our children’s children, and to those who dedicated their lives (and gave their lives) to build and to safeguard the civilization of which we are now the stewards.

There is also another critically important question, one that I think is logically prior to the others:

4) What constitutes “my people”, and why?

Finally, the most important point of all: any group that can’t confidently answer questions 1) and 4), and that is thereby unable to cohere tightly enough to defend itself against external enemies who can, is doomed.

Or, to put it another way:

If you aren’t prepared to kill, you should be prepared to die.

Comments are welcome.