Apparently, I need to add “prophetic visionary” to my online resume.

Or, I can add “shameless plagiarist” to Michael Medved’s.

I recently wrote about the ways in which we can build communities. I still hold that in the long run, you are better off building slow through good content and sound reasoning than you are starting with the universe and whittling down. I called it Addition by Subtraction. It was also designed to be the thematic introduction to Invenntiveness, which continues the meme of defining by “circling the wagons.”

Which leads us to Michael Medved’s latest Townhall.com column, which says everything I was saying, but goes much further into the consequences of using Addition by Subtraction.

In the run-up to the fateful election of 2008, conservatives face a clear-cut choice: we can rebuild our movement as a broad-ranging, mainstream coalition and restore our governing majority, or else settle for a semi-permanent role as angry, doom-speaking complainers on the fringes of American politics and culture.

We can either invite doubters and moderates to join with us in new efforts to affirm American values, or we can push them away because they fail to measure up to our own standards of indignation and ideological purity.

In short, we must choose between addition and subtraction: either building our cause by adding to our numbers or destroying it by discouraging all but the fiercest ideologues.

His basic point advance beyond mine (if you are not so inclined to browse for yourself) is that those who slash the fiercest and cut the deepest in carving their Circles are most likely to end up their own bloody victims.

And thus ends, in circular fashion, my one-minute review of a movie critic. (And Michael, I was kidding about the ‘plagiarist’ crack. I seriously doubt you are one of my dozen readers. Although, if you are, a comment now and then wouldn’t hurt.)

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Michael Medved, Ann Coulter, partisanship, social media[/tags]