Art of War Archives - Dr. Rich Swier

A popular trend among self-styled conservative pundits is to mock Democrats and left-wingers as stupid, and it isn’t difficult to understand why. Every time that Joe Biden invents a new dialect of gibberish, every time that Kamala Harris cackles like a hyena in public, every time that a White House press secretary has to “circle back,” every time that a Democrat-nominated Supreme Court pick can’t answer basic questions about basic biology, it’s fodder for Fox News’s alternative to “The Tonight Show.” But for all the outrageous, logic-defying nonsense that Democrats spout, there is one field of study that they have mastered completely: war.

It was once the case that Democrats and Republicans agreed on representing the best interests of the American people but simply disagreed on how best to represent those best interests. Should we raise taxes to provide more services for those who can’t afford them otherwise, or should we lower taxes so that those folks can afford those services on their own? Should we regulate this market or that to ensure that companies are trading fairly, or should we trust the public to make their preferences known through the almighty dollar?

This system no longer exists, and if events continue on their current trajectory — unobstructed, unchallenged, and unchanged — then the very America which could even facilitate such a system will be no more than a distant memory relegated to the realm of impossibility. At this juncture in time, there is no common ground, there is no agreement between Democrats and Republicans on representing the best interests of the American people or even on what those best interests are. Now, there is only war, and Republicans are losing. Worse than that, some Republicans seem to be blithely unaware that they are even involved in a war.

Democrats have captured and weaponized nearly every single American institution of any significance or consequence. Schools catechize children in LGBTism and secretly transgenderify kids, the FBI targets American Catholics and concerned parents as potential domestic terrorists, and the Democrats’ chief political opponent has been convicted in a sham trial that would have made even a Soviet’s jaw drop. What few institutions the Democrats don’t completely control are ignored, undermined, and targeted for either retribution or annihilation. The Democratic president openly defies the orders of the Supreme Court while his dogs in corporate media smear the credibility of its most conservative justices. Immigration law is blatantly and repeatedly flouted, leaving the nation’s borders in a dangerous shamble. The lawful impeachment of Democratic officials is summarily dismissed by the Party’s operatives in the Senate.

While Democrats have spent the past several decades infiltrating and slowly capturing and weaponizing everything they could get their hands on, too many Republicans spent that time poring over polling data, looking for “consensus” and “political viability.” In other words, Democrats were preparing for war while innumerable naïve Republicans were working on marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, there is still a wing of the Republican Party where this apparent blissful unawareness of the raging conflict over America’s soul is the norm.

Just last week, Democrats brutalized the American justice system in a punitive effort to imprison their chief political opponent, Donald Trump. The trial was a sham from the start. A Democratic prosecutor brought misdemeanor charges — that other prosecutors had already decided amounted to nothing — and elevated them to felony charges on the claim that Trump had committed another crime he has never been convicted of. The trial was conducted in a heavily-Democratic venue with a Democrat presiding as judge who devised a novel set of jury instructions — all to keep a political candidate off the campaign trail and put him in prison. Trump now faces a potential maximum of 20 years in prison.

The Trump conviction galvanized Republican voters. Countless conservatives who had expressed doubts about voting for Trump in 2024 now donned MAGA hats, tens of millions of dollars in campaign donations started rolling in, and polling shows that Republican voters are even more likely to back Trump after his conviction. But the naked abuse of the justice system didn’t galvanize Republican officials on the same scale. Some were bold enough to pledge to stand up to the Democratic Party’s Soviet-style political pogrom, defiantly pledging not to “aid and abet this White House in its project to tear this country apart.” But some seemingly just shrugged and went back to “business as usual.”

On Tuesday, for example, seven Republican senators voted with Democrats to confirm a Biden appointee to a federal court. Democrats had all the votes that they needed, no Republican vote was necessary. But instead, seven Republicans — after having witnessed Biden and his Democratic Party cronies subvert, abuse, and weaponize the courts and the justice system in a clear attempt to imprison the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — after having witnessed the Democrats attack and castigate the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, for years — even after all that, these seven Republicans still felt the need to turn their back on their own party, cross the aisle, and give their seal of approval to a Biden judicial pick.

Democrats aren’t stupid, but it seems that some Republicans might be. Up until recently, Republicans simply have not understood war. An entire swath of elected Republicans are still under the impression that they’re in high school debate club, that the teacher may stand up any minute now and remind the other team to play by the rules. There are no rules anymore. The prolific William F. Buckley, Jr. once offered his definition of what a conservative is: “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” Years ago, Republicans took this definition to heart, resulting in page after page of “strongly-worded letters,” thousands of tweets, and a nearly-unlimited supply of instances of Republicans crying out, “Hypocrisy!”

Democrats decided years ago that policy is war: anything that can be fashioned into a weapon will be, and no quarter will be given. Republicans must understand that Democrats do not value bipartisanship, they do not value a Republican senator’s seal of approval, they do not seek common ground — they eviscerated common ground with a scalpel and sucked up its body parts with a vacuum and now sell its organs on the black market. Democrats seek complete and total dominance. Not a compromise, not a coalition, not a peaceful transition of power, not a treaty, not a return to normalcy, only complete and total social, cultural, financial, political, and even spiritual dominance.

It is necessary now for Republicans to, in the words of William Shakespeare, “imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage…” The blast of war has blown in our ears, and all the compromises in the world will not appease the appetites of Hell, the very appetites fueling the abortion industry, Pride Month and the LGBT agenda, institutionalized child-grooming, and the opening of America’s borders to criminal cartels and millions of unidentified individuals with unknown motives. The majority of Democrats have made the wanton butchering of unborn children the central tenet of their scheme for the nation, they celebrate the sin of sodomy and tell its practitioners that they and their worth are defined by their aberrant sex acts, they condone ripping children’s groins to shreds and call the whole grisly affair “lifesaving.”

One of the chief reasons, of course, that Trump has been targeted is that he taught Republicans the art of war in a way they had forgotten decades prior. Republicans had been sending their finest debaters and orators to Washington, D.C. for years; Trump came as a pugilist, wearing a pair of rhetorical brass knuckles. Others have had the courage to follow his lead. A new generation of Republicans — both in office and on the ground — have learned that the nation is devoured by war and have determined not to debate, not to discuss, not to compromise, but to fight for the heart and soul of America. Men like Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro had the gall to stand for the American people and are now being sent to prison for their courage. Senators like Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) have the temerity to put America’s interests above their own and are slandered for it.

History, the legendary Winston Churchill once theorized, will be written by the victors. How will this chapter of America’s history be written? Will Trump be vilified as a traitor and a convicted felon, or will he be remembered as a man who put even his freedom on the line for the American people? Will the Democrats be remembered as champions of democracy, or will they go down in history alongside the NKVD and KGB? To determine the answer to these questions, Republican officials must decide whether or not they are willing to fight for the Americans they represent and the principles upon which this nation was founded. And Republican voters must decide who they want representing them — principled pugilists or the authors of strongly-worded letters?

The present chapter of America’s history will be written by those with the will to fight, those with the courage and conviction not to back down in the face of corruption and political persecution. Such men and women are out there, such men and women are even now fighting that fight. The only question is whether the American people will stand behind them as they, like the Bard, cry, “Once more unto the breach!” or whether the American people will be placated by strongly-worded letters.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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Are the Art of War and the Art of Enterprise two edges of the same sword?

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is justly known as one of the great works in strategic thinking. But although the text nominally concerns warfare, through the centuries it’s often been used as a business handbook more than as a military manual. Just like good economic writing, it brilliantly expresses complex ideas simply and concisely, and its dramatic prose makes for compelling lessons about conflict.

However, while analogies between the boardroom and the battlefield might seem appealing, they are erroneous. Economists like Mises have emphasized that market competition and military competition could not be less alike; one is productive and increases human welfare, while the other is destructive of human life and economy.

But The Art of War remains popular in business because it isn’t really about armed conflict. It’s about finding ways to advantageously avoid or resolve confrontation of any kind. It’s this sort of idea that opens the door to insights about enterprise.

One of Sun Tzu’s major attractions for the business world is his emphasis on entrepreneurial thinking. For him, strategic excellence is about creating opportunities and taking risks, the same abilities necessary for success in the market, where uncertainty constantly challenges the good judgment of would-be entrepreneurs.

Good decision-making also means one must be “formless,” so as to instantly take advantage of fleeting opportunities and adapt seamlessly to changing (market) conditions. The classical strategists realized that competitive success depends on one’s ability to control and manipulate the internal and external conditions of conflict. This means knowing one’s own abilities and weaknesses as well as those of the competition, as summed up in The Art of War’s most famous aphorism: “One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be endangered in a hundred engagements.”

The qualities that these classical strategists recommend in great generals are actually the traits of successful market entrepreneurs. For example, entrepreneurs are decisive and willing to bear the uncertainty of the market—unafraid of committing resources to projects that might fail. And they must be willing to endure hardship on the road to success, while never taking it for granted by becoming complacent or arrogant—traits that consumers often punish severely.

Comparing strategic and economic ideas raises an important question, though: If the analogies to the business world are so obvious, and the ancient texts really do have something in common with economic thinking, why didn’t the classical strategists realize their ideas were applicable to peaceful exchange? A simple response is that the market economy as we know it didn’t exist in ancient China (specifically, during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods). A more complete answer is that it couldn’t have existed. That is, ancient China lacked much of the institutional framework necessary for entrepreneurship and commerce to flourish—strong property rights, individualism, and the social acknowledgment of the importance of profit.

As William Baumol argues, a society’s institutions influence the course its entrepreneurial energy takes. Many of the great minds of the Renaissance—for instance, the inventors and innovators perfectly suited to improving welfare through the market—were military entrepreneurs in service to competing city-states. Political institutions offered patronage and the possibility of advancement, while opportunities to commercialize ideas were scarce, if not actively frowned upon. That is to say, the ancient Chinese states, along with countless others throughout history, lacked the “bourgeois virtues” that Deirdre McClosky argues provided the foundation for the industrial revolution.

This then is one explanation for the military turn of The Art of War and the other Chinese strategic classics. Having little explicit acknowledgment of the virtues of commerce, analysis of market competition presumably offered slight appeal. Without the institutional and cultural basis for market entrepreneurship, classical thought turned to analyzing destructive forms of competition that offered better “profit” opportunities—specifically, the chance to wield influence within the State bureaucracy. Spreading ideas usually meant finding a place in court and becoming a trusted advisor to the powerful. This much the classical strategists had in common with Renaissance intellectuals like Machiavelli—who, perhaps not coincidentally, also wrote a book titled The Art of War.

The lesson is that all societies face the problem of developing and keeping the institutions that allow enterprise to thrive—those institutions that direct the best of human creative energy to improving the lives of others, not to the service of the military State. Ideology plays a vital role in this social process and paves the way for peace and commercial prosperity. Instead of a guide to violent competition then, texts like The Art of War can help us develop a strategy for the battle of ideas. Ideas ultimately shape both society and our roles in it, so it falls to us to embrace and spread those that lead us away from the destruction of war making and toward the “creative destruction” of enterprise.

ABOUT MATTHEW MCCAFFREY

Matthew McCaffrey is assistant professor of enterprise at the University of Manchester and editor of Libertarian Papers.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image from FEE and Shutterstock

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Of Battlefields and Boardrooms by Matthew McCaffrey

ABOUT MATTHEW MCCAFFREY