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Fighting for the Sake of Fighting (II)

This is a remarkable quote from Sen. Mike Lee on the shutdown fight: Some say we shouldn’t have fought because we couldn’t win, but this country wasn’t built by fighting when victory was absolutely certain. Well, it wasn’t built by fighting when victory was impossible, either. Republican defeat in this standoff was as certain as […]

This is a remarkable quote from Sen. Mike Lee on the shutdown fight:

Some say we shouldn’t have fought because we couldn’t win, but this country wasn’t built by fighting when victory was absolutely certain.

Well, it wasn’t built by fighting when victory was impossible, either. Republican defeat in this standoff was as certain as such things can be in politics, and it’s not as if no one mentioned this to Lee and his allies ahead of time. There were quite a few people on the right warning against a course of action that was sure to fail, and then it failed just as they had said it would. As we have seen in one poll after another, that failure was costly. A new Post/ABC News poll confirms the earlier findings:

There was little in the findings for the GOP to feel good about. The party’s image has sunk to an all-time low in Post-ABC surveys, with 32 percent of the public saying they have a favorable opinion and 63 percent saying they have an unfavorable view. Almost four in 10 Americans have a strongly unfavorable view of the GOP.

There is an argument that Republican defeat in this case wouldn’t have been so complete if there had been greater unity on the right in support of the doomed strategy, but that just drives home how foolish the strategy was all along. The defunding goal was clearly unachievable, and in order for the GOP to get anything at all out of the standoff large numbers of Republicans and conservatives would have to endorse what they knew to be a futile and self-defeating effort. The idea is that people should abandon their better judgment for the sake of party unity, and that party unity should be maintained so that some minor gain might be salvaged from an avoidable debacle. If the party has failed to avoid a debacle, the better course of action at that point would be to try to end it as soon as possible rather than continuing to “fight” for the sake of fighting. Then again, realizing that it is necessary to cut one’s losses requires understanding that one is already losing.

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