If you are worried about where Conservatism is, or where it should be, read this. While I disagree with the intent of this complete call out of Libertarianism (I think he’s over the top on harshness even as some of his points hold water), it notes the need to re-arm, re-load, and re-lock onto base Principles instead of just the politics thereof.
Related: We’re Not Supposed to Go after Kamala Harris After what the Left did to Sarah Palin?
Reformatted, emphasis mine (with a few observations).
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What is conservatism in America today? It’s hundreds of millions of dollars a year spent fiddling while Rome burns. It’s ideas with little to no consequence. It’s getting trampled all over by History, but while yelling Stop! Conservatism is the seven cheers for capitalism and the deafening silence on demographic change, feminism, and corporate malfeasance. It’s the same tired cast of speakers blathering about limited government almost a century after the New Deal. It’s the platitudinous Reagan quotes and the worn-out Buckley anecdotes. It’s the mindless optimism and the childish exhortations—if something can’t go on forever, it won’t!
If it were only that, conservatism would simply be a harmless persuasion for nostalgic Baby Boomers. Or to be more generous, one big Benedict Option to offer a semblance of an alternative to the pervasive progressivism of our age. But conservatism is also the endless wars, the nation-building, and the outdated alliances. It’s the free trade fetish. It’s the foolish libertarianism that hates the government more than it loves America. It’s the unconscionable refusal to clamp down on immigration.
Worst of all, conservatism is the cowardice and accommodation in the face of leftist hegemony. It’s the long list of enemies to the Right. It’s the court eunuchs and other members of the controlled opposition who offer an echo, but never a choice. It’s the faux grandstanding while living in fear of being called a racist.
Admittedly, this is not the whole of conservatism. There are still dissidents, contrarian thinkers, and courageous gadflies who refuse to lick the boots that crush them. Alas, their voices are, more often than not, drowned out by those of the conservative establishment.
I would hope that GraniteGrok would be considered one of those “courageous gadflies” in the Conservative (note I did not say Republican) world.
If this is conservatism, then we may be inclined to say, let the conservatives keep it. Perhaps the time has come for patriotic Americans tired of the Left desecrating all they hold dear to go beyond conservatism?
Conservatism may indeed be unsalvageable at this point. The old guard is too heavily invested in—nay, it benefits too much from the status quo to own up to its failures, correct its leftward drift, and reground itself in the realities of the 21st century. Its business model works, as evidenced by the hundreds of millions of dollars that flow into its coffers each year.
And yet conservatism, in its dotage, cannot shake the nagging suspicion that it no longer speaks to the country it loves, in particular to those who have no living memory of the Cold War. This dawning realization could be amplified through probing questions:
- Is America today more conservative than it was when the conservative movement began 70 or so years ago?
- Is conservatism itself as conservative as it was then?
- On the off chance that the conservative agenda were to be implemented, would it fundamentally transform the United States of America and lead to conservative hegemony (or would it simply save us money and buy us time)?
Across the board, the answer is a resounding no. Conservatism must therefore overhaul itself. If it refuses, then it should be left to die with the passage of time. A new Right, in any case, is already overtaking it.
This new right, which of yet has no name, is anchored in the realization that the conservative project in America today is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary one. We lost. They won. Painful as it is to admit, we no longer feel at home in our own country. In this progressive theocracy in which all must worship at the altar of Wokeness, conservatism, if one can still even call it that, is more about overthrowing than conserving. Burke’s edifying exhortation—“Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna”—must be altered to suit the times: Sparta was your inheritance, now reclaim her.
As such, this new Right has a decidedly unconservative temperament. It is spirited, manly, and combative. We fight with the same intensity, resolve, and clarity of purpose with which the Left fights. And we fight not to stem our losses, but to win. As Pat Buchanan once wrote, we “want to engage the Left on every front; to defund it; to drive it back into the redoubts whence it emerged decades ago. We want to return to their places of honor the republican beliefs, cultural norms and moral values we were raised with.”
Are you, or are you not, glad that “republican” was spelled with a small “r” and not a capital “R”? As far as the norms and morals bit is concerned, it is easy to see what the Left’s Culture and the Left’s Morality is when you look at what the Progressives / Socialists / Communists are doing in our big urban cities right now. Tell me, which are the superior ones now?
This new Right understands not just ideas, but power.
Power to Conservatives, it seems, is just winning the election. The Left plays for keeps and uses that elected Power to ram all kinds of their agenda items through via policy after policy enacted on scores of Legislative bills just lined up like an Elephant Walk ready on the tarmac ready to take off. How often have we complained that we can’t keep up when they are in power (just like NH has and is seeing right now flowing through the Democrat Legislature. They take advantage of the moment and actively seek to get their philosophy enacted.
In contrast, how well have Republican unwound every single of those and then put in their own?
The Left’s ideological hegemony is not principally the result of better ideas, but of its long march through the institutions.
Especially education when young minds are formed. Michelle Obama said that out loud – “it is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives” – and what has been the Right’s answer to that steamrolling of the Left?
Crickets.
We understand the need to build new institutions—in particular those with the power to shape public opinion—and to reconquer lost ones or, at the very least, defund them. The universities, in particular, must be brought to heel.
I would have said mindset and political worldview as the Left has done; public opinion changes too quickly and thus is not a stable platform
We also understand the importance of knowing how to govern. However much we may long for a return to constitutional government, the modern administrative-welfare state is here to stay.
Republicans had the chance, after WWII, to kill it in its infancy; they lacked the cojones to do so. Trump is trying but failed to ensure that those he brought into Power with him had the ability to put their heads down and get the job done. Worse, many were just part of the UniParty Establishment and disliked entirely the role they had been tasked to do. Why do the change when your financial and social life depended upon it even though you mouthed fealty to the mission?
No one, not even the great Reagan, has succeeded in taming it, much less scaling it back. The right must be comfortable wielding the levers of state power. And it should emulate the Left in using them to reward friends and punish enemies (within the confines of the rule of law).
Again, I go back to “According to Hoyt”: Taking over the world and leaving it ruthlessly alone. If you are going to kill the King, KILL THE KING! Don’t just say – DO. Use those Levers of Power to DO what you’ve said for decades – and then failed to do. The Administrative-Welfare State is not the fault of the Left – that IS their end goal.
It IS the fault, however, of Conservatives to have stopped it and then killed it. The Words have been there – the will to execute those Words in action is entirely the fault of the GOP.
And not the Libertarians fault as he goes on to say.
Ours is obviously a non-libertarian Right. The common enemy that justified an alliance with the free market fundamentalists is long gone. Today, libertarians actively side with our enemies: they promote open borders and empty prisons, and strengthen China’s hand through their consumer-focused economic policies. Ours is primarily a conservatism of countries and borders, citizens and families, none of which can take root in the barren libertarian soil of atomized individuals and global markets.
He forgets about the VOLUNTARY association model that was a linchpin of our country’s early years – that we would band together, as De Tocqueville observed, fix the perceived problem, and then disband and not get Government involved by the throw away line of “well, SOMEBODY’s got to do something about it” (and always mean Government). Too bad that Republicans have deliberately infected themselves with this Left’s notion that Government is the first responder instead of weaponizing Civil Society back to being that grand buffer that our Founders saw what was needed to protect Liberty.
As for our priorities, they are clear. We must confront the great threats of our time: unsustainable immigration levels and rapid demographic change; cratering fertility rates and collapsing families; the corrosive acids of neoliberalism and identity politics (in all their manifestations, from tech censorship to racial preferences); pathological white guilt; a political system largely unmoored from the consent of the governed; fiscal irresponsibility; and the emasculation of men through feminized education and various forms of soma that sap spiritedness (in particular pornography). In short, the entirety of the ruling class’s ideology must be discredited.
He forgot about one (and most important) of the three main holdings of the TEA Party movement: Government staying in its Constitutional bounds. He also forgot to reject the Left’s complete rejection of the philosophy of Negative Rights. In fact, he blithely accepted (above) that it is fine to accept the Positive Rights (that Government MUST do something for us) that our Founders knew to be disasterous for Individual Liberty – as for Government to do something FOR someone, it must first take away from others.
He is right in that a more muscular and strident Conservativism must wage combat in the Arena of Cultural Ideas and not be limited to just that of Politics. It MUST engage and must be forceful in attacking the unstable foundations that undergird Socialism, Communitarianism, and Communism. It must find new ways to emphasis why WHO CHOOSES? is such an important question.
We must develop policies commensurate with these problems, identify plausible ways to implement them in a hostile landscape, and ensure they are enforced once enacted. Since the entirety of America’s rotten ruling class will oppose us, this bold undertaking requires both prudence and courage.
The task before us is daunting. It may be insurmountable. But this much we know: unless we succeed, we will eventually be reduced to second-class citizenship in a declining country whose only solace will be the distant memory of former greatness.
-David Azerrad (American Conservatism Is Fiddling While Rome Burns, assistant professor at Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government in Washington, D.C.)
