20 Sep Ben Shapiro: Lions and Scavengers
“It’s time – past time – to tone down divisive rhetoric.” – The Lonely Realist
But that’s not what Ben Shapiro is doing. (And he’s not alone.) Although that’s his Constitutional right…, he should exercise it more thoughtfully.
From The Free Press (“Je suis Charlie”): “The acceleration of political violence has been frightening: from the attack on the Capitol in January 2021, to the murder of a healthcare executive allegedly by Luigi Mangione, to the attempted assassinations of Trump, to the killing of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., to the shooting of state lawmakers in Minnesota. And now [Charlie] Kirk’s murder.” TLR shares TFP’’s perspective and the mission it espouses. Charlie Kirk was murdered while inviting discussion. Inviting discussion is what both TFP and TLR are trying to do. He was not killed by “the radical left,” as President Trump has said or, for that matter, by the radical right. Charlie Kirk’s death was the result of increasingly incendiary rhetoric that has inflamed the susceptible fringe. Kirk believed that “it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” but that doesn’t mean that we should endeavor to turn up the rhetorical volume to such an extent that it motivates unstable Americans to snuff out lives.
Which leads to a discussion of Ben Shapiro’s new book, Lions and Scavengers, The True Story of America (and Her Critics), which was going to be the subject of this week’s TLR before the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Ben Shapiro is one of America’s leading conservative commentators. In Lions and Scavengers, he postulates a framework for redefining Western civilization, describing it as a battle between “lions”—those who are guided by the spirit of success, duty, and God-given dignity — and “scavengers” – those who feed on Godlessness, envy and grievance. To Mr. Shapiro, the line is a bright one…, and Americans fall on one side or the other. There’s the “us” who strive for lionhood, and the “them,” scavengers who are slothful sinners…, and worse. No one falls in the middle because responsibility and faith cannot co-exist with Godlessness. Mr. Shapiro is a former editor of Breitbart News and Lions and Scavengers is his 21st Century spin on paleoconservatism in which he attempts to reframe the battle for American democracy as one between right-wing merit and left-wing envy. Although he uses terms that differ from the 19th and 20th Century class conflict labels of capital/capitalists and labor/laborers, the message is similar. The “them” today are the bad guys, the “deadbeats,” “welfare queens,” “deplorables,” etc. Lions are “us,” the good guys. Scavengers, after all, are “animals that feed on carrion, dead plant material, or refuse.” Pretty clear invective, no? It’s a form of vilification that incites not only emotions, but also action…, from every part of the political spectrum.
At its core, Lions and Scavengers is a polemic disguised as a philosophical treatise. It follows a pattern pursued by too many others, including Ann Coulter — it bears unhappy resemblances to her book, Adios America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole (discussed by TLR here). Each is readily distinguishable from philosophical discourse. and contrast starkly with the enlightened dissertations about core human values by Thomas Hobbs, John Locke, Adam Smith, Ayn Rand and Hannah Arendt.
In Mr. Shapiro’s view, America’s leftists are those who wallow in envy and blame their lot on the unfairness of capitalism. They are self-proclaimed victims. Their inadequacies, they believe, are caused by “lions” who have unfairly amassed disproportionate wealth. Their envy manifests in their hunger for a fair redistribution of that wealth which, in Mr. Shapiro’s opinion, is the root cause of America’s problems today. He believes that lions should be lionized for their success because lions “fight for things: truth, duty, and God-given dignity. Scavengers unite only in opposition: against the Lion, against the ‘system.’… The logical extension of this ideology is violence…. The Scavengers tear down; the Lions lift up…. The Scavengers will never surrender. The battle will go on for the rest of time. But they cannot win. Unless we let them.” Mr. Shapiro’s readers and listeners (he is host of The Ben Shapiro Show, the most listened-to conservative podcast in the nation) certainly understand these as “fighting words.”
But that was not Charlie Kirk’s expressed goal. He wanted to encourage Free Speech, not warfare.
The last time Americans fought against each other was in the 1960s, when Stephen Stills wrote “For What It’s Worth”: “There’s battle lines being drawn. Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.” Although he urged, “It’s time we stop,” America didn’t stop…, and Americans died (the most notable being Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy). Those words and their consequences (including “Paranoia strikes deep”) resonate today. Americans – each American – should draw the line at Charlie Kirk’s death. It’s time.
It would be fitting for Charlie Kirk’s assassination to mark the stopping point. Like the authors of Je suis Charlie, TLR too believes that the great majority of Americans want honest debates and open conversations where words are not an invitation to violence and opinions are not scarlet letters that label those Americans with whom we disagree as “enemy others” – scavenger rats feeding on society. Living in America’s democracy is a privilege. America is a land where differences are resolved not by bullets, but by honest debate and disagreement…, and compromise.
Mr. Shapiro believes in a society where people with greater abilities who make greater efforts should be encouraged to thrive. So does TLR…, and so do virtually all Americans. However, there is disagreement about how to maximize that merit without minimizing opportunity. American democracy can tolerate disagreement. Disagreement does not mean that Americans have to choose sides, that those with whom we disagree are scavengers or elitists trying to tear America down. Disagreement, diversity and debate — and, yes, partisanship — are essential parts of American democracy. Per Charlie Kirk, “When people stop talking, really bad stuff starts.” Exactly! Ben Shapiro – and others on both sides of the partisan divide – need to stop finger-pointing at “them.” They need to cease stoking the flames of division and disagreement and start focusing on commonalities and agreements. It’s past the time for partisan diatribes disguised as erudite philosophical ponderings; it’s time for more talking…, and not to fellow-thinkers, but to other-thinkers. Whatever your beliefs, or your prejudices, we’re all Americans.
ENDNOTE: TLR does not agree with a number of positions that Charlie Kirk advocated, and TLR is certain that many readers do not agree with a great deal of what TLR writes. That’s the point.
Finally (from a good friend)
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