It is fair to say that American conservatism is dead, at least the version that has been sold to us by the conservative industrial complex. They still rake in millions from corporate donors, but the public audience for this stuff is largely confined to rest homes in the sun belt. Flag waving and tax breaks for corporations is just not the crowd pleaser it was a decade ago, much less forty years ago. Conservatism as a political force is headed to the dustbin of history.
The question is, why did it fail? Lost in the endless stream of outrage, real and manufactured, is the fact that the winners are ridiculous. Conservatism lost to men in sundresses demanding to wave their genitals in the face of school children. They lost to people who think Hitler is hiding under their bed. They lost to childless middle-aged women drunk on cheap wine, complaining about men on Twitter. It took effort to lose to this collection of bourgeois misfits.
One reason conservatism failed in America is that conservatives could never accept that people lie in politics. In fact, lying is an essential part of politics. The reason is you must paint your opponents as the bad guys and your side as the good guys, which means gross exaggeration. Conservatives never accepted this. Instead, they demanded as much factual accuracy from their side as possible. When people on their side would exaggerate, conservatives were there to set the record straight.
This was not the result of stupidity. American conservatism evolved into the 1980’s as the antidote to politics. They used to make this point in the Reagan years. Conservatism was the lack of politics. Instead, it was just problem solving. That was very appealing to people who did not like rolling around on the mud with left-wing kooks, but it was a terrible way to engage in politics. It is part of what made conservatism the beautiful losers described by Sam Francis.
Related to this was the fact that American conservatism embraced the libertarian idea that people are motivated by rational self-interest. For conservatives in the 20th century, people were not spiritual beings, so much as moist robots who naturally responded to incentives, particularly economic incentives. This is why conservatism was the accounting department for the welfare state. The only way they could relate to their audience was through the jargon of popular economics.
Another result of this was the habit of conservatives to rely on charts and graphs in response to moral claims. The Left would demand we do something about some victim group and conservatives would respond with a table of figures showing that the victims were not really victims. It was not that it made conservatism heartless, but that it made them seem brainless. They kept falling for the same traps, eventually succumbing to the moral claims of the Left.
That is the probably the main failing of American conservatism. To this day they insist that politics is about solving problems. This is false. Politics is always about friends and enemies and those are defined on moral terms. No one wants to fight someone for making a math error. Politics is so nasty and feral because the opponents see one another in moral terms. The other guy is the bad guy because he does not love what you love and hate what you hate.
The Left has always understood this. The reason that the demand for Nazis exceeds the historic global supply is the Left always needs villains. Even when their opponents agree with them, they still call them the worst names in their book. Donald Trump would have been happy to make generous deals with the Democrats, but they needed to hate him more than they wanted a deal. This is why the Left steamrolled conservatives on every issue. They work only in morality, not facts and reason.
This inability to understand what drives politics may explain the inability to accept that their opponents genuinely believe what they are saying. Much of what makes up conservative commentary is a claim that the Left does not actually believe what they are saying, but instead they are using it as cover for money and power. For conservatives, everything is reduced to money and power, because this is what motivates the moist robots they imagine as their audience.
This is why conservatives have always underestimated the Left. Because they cannot accept that these people believe what they are saying, they just assume they will stop saying it once they have money and power. Instead, the Left uses their newly acquired money and power to act on what they said and produce more outlandish things they can push onto society. When you think people are moist robots, you stop believing that people can be evil, which is how evil triumphs.
Finally, the great failure of American conservatism will be seen in the Republican primary that kicks off this summer. The field challenging Trump will insist that everyone must rally around cleaning up the mess created by the Left. They will make the oldest of conservative arguments. That is, you must forget about the crimes committed against you by the other side and instead rally with your fellow citizens, even the ones who hate you, to fight for America!
Of course, this requires you to not get anything you want and instead normalize the latest insanity from the Left. You see, it is your duty as an American to sacrifice your interests for the nebulous concept of America. This was powerful magic forty years ago when the country was 85% white and had a handful of foreigners. In a country being overrun by migrants and hyper-racialized lunatics attacking white people, this rallying cry sounds like a suicide cult.
Robert Lewis Dabney famously described conservatism as “merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.” This was always true, for sure, but it worked for a long time because the radicals were still aspirational, rather than suicidal. The dialectic between the Left and the Right in American was a useful engine for maintaining the ruling class consensus. One side proposed, the other side opposed, and the consensus was some compromise.
This changed just as conservatism reached its peak. The triumph of conservatism in the 1980’s was followed by the descent of progressivism into the dark, suicidal politics of nihilism and Gnosticism. Conservatives have never come to terms with this and as a result have been a steep decline ever since. As America descends into tribal politics that must follow the transition to majority-minority demographics, conservatism will become a museum piece and then forgotten.
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Powerful essay. The realisation that conservatism is a dead ideology is hard for most normies to accept. They still want to believe that we have a Constitution that protects citizens, and that the rule of law applies to all. Even with daily examples of this not being true, they prefer to live with the delusion because the truth is too hard to face.
10
“they cannot accept that these people believe what they are saying, they just assume they will stop saying it once they have money and power.”
That’s because this is how conservatives behave every time they win. All the promises and supposed principles go out the window as soon as they are sworn in. “Read my lips” should be the party’s epitaph.
7
Indeed! Conservative friends still insist that there is always a rational, usually financial, reason for the Left’s demolition of America..It’s a form of autism…
4
There is no way to win or achieve some sort of dominance in this framework anymore, if there ever was. Lying, cheating and manipulating like the Left will not get us anywhere except to be the very same empty damned souls they are.
Short of some sort of armed takeover and instituting a dictatorial theocratic control over the populace, we are destined for more of the same.
Even our founders were not too optimistic about any long term success with the American experiment. John Adams: Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
7
I thought conservatism failed because it always fails? The minute we pick up the pieces of broken civilization, root everything and kith and kin once again, and start the process all over, we are just moving inexorably to where we are now.
1
Sam Francis gets some much-deserved attention today for coming up with “Anarcho-Tyranny.” He also had a name for the Republican Party that he used often: “The Stupid Party.”
4
“The question is, why did [conservatism] fail?” I think Uncle Ted provided the best answer:
“The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.”
– Industrial Society & Its Future
That some of a guy’s extracurriculars include heinous destruction in no way debunks his basic worldview. Anybody can attach psychotic behavior to any philosophy they want; the philosophy nevertheless stands or falls on its own terms.
5
It’s hard to know if they were fighting a battle that could be won even if they did a (better) job. The fight to keep modernity from ruining society has been going on at least since the printing press with only very modest success via rearguard actions (as it’s impossible to know the future).
How do we achieve technological success without having the victory defeat us? Perhaps conservativism’s big failure was in not even making an effort to find out.
1
Perhaps off topic, but local news (to Z man):
https://nypost.com/2023/05/23/maryland-dad-beaten-to-death-after-group-attacks-him-over-middle-school-fight/
Now, fights at an urban middle school aren’t that unusual. But when 5 thugs come to the kid’s home and beat Dad to death, I’d say a line has been crossed.
Curiously, I could find no mention of the incident at the Baltimore Sun’s site, including Anne Arundel, the country where the incident(s) occurred on Friday 05/19.
I stand corrected. By searching the surname of the victim, I find this:
https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/anne-arundel/ac-cn-homicide-brooklyn-investigation-20230522-gjjv6v4vcrdwfihmsoe453c6ym-story.html
It’s worth noting how little detail the Sun’s account gives.
It’s almost as if they’re trying to hide something; the race of the attackers, perhaps?
I did a quick search about Brooklyn Heights. It’s still mostly White but the black share of population roughly tripled to ~ 20% in past twenty years.
I haven’t checked other DC area media, but given the likely racial dimension of this crime, I’m sure it’s a topic of water cooler conversation, even if it’s been spiked by the local media.
3
Well, the core reason that conservatism fails, imo, is that it accepts the morality of the left; once you do that all you can do is drag your feet and push back timidly on specifics.
But the right wing populists are unfortunately not much better. The European blogger Kynosarges had a succinct summary of their problem back in a 2019 post, which he believes has six major deficiencies:
“Right-wing populists have no awareness of the depth of the [societal] problem and the necessity of a massive social transformation.
Right-wing populists consider metapolitics irrelevant. They view our plight as strictly a matter of state policy, therefore solvable by the legislative and executive branches (which is understandable given point 1).
Right-wing populists do not command parliamentary majorities or sole governments – neither in the past nor in the present, nor likely in the future. They are always in opposition or dependent on coalition partners who are not right-wing populists.
The institutional corset of late liberalism narrows the factual scope for political action to such a degree that profound changes are impossible.
Right-wing populists offer no grand designs for solutions because they lack a positive alternative framework beyond “liberalism without foreigners” (which is closely linked to points 1 and 2).
Right-wing populists are objectively too slow even where they bring about changes. A critical comparison between the development of right-wing populism and demographics during recent decades clearly shows that this approach is impossible solely due to lack of time (ignoring points 1–5)…”
Because of these issues, according to Kynosarges,
“ [Right wing populists] have no concept of how to actively solve the problems of late modernity or liberalism. They offer no counter-culture that goes beyond reactionary ideas. They become almost apolitical when they merely retreat into their nation-state bunkers (typical for Poland or Slovakia). They lack a dynamic counter-ideal, and they are not at all equipped to propagate such an ideal to the furthest corners of the West (and beyond), as the chief enemy is (still) capable of doing. The equation of our identity with the liberal state (e.g. the Federal Republic of Germany as the land of the Germans) inevitably leads to disappointments and at best to the realization that this state neither defends nor recognizes our identity, sometimes even destroys it. No Western constitution has a decidedly identitarian foundation, nor is there any trend in that direction. Anyway such a foundation would be incompatible with the self-concept of liberalism (universalism, egalitarianism, individualism) – the left is correct on that point! But right-wing populists believe that liberalism would only need a “right-wing” orientation to solve the problem, thanks to insufficient analysis…. Modernity can only be overcome with the experiences of modernity, not by an utterly impossible return to an earlier or pre-modern era. The profound change that is now necessary is not genuinely political but belongs to the cultural, metapolitical sphere. Such a counter-enlightenment or counter-culture requires – in contrast to the liberalist eclecticism of right-wing populists – a spiritual preparation for a new European myth that binds us to our oldest past and reconciles us with our future. Nothing less than such an attempt at European rebirth is our task and the most promising exit from political modernity.”
From: https://news.kynosarges.org/full-speed-into-the-void/
4
Today conservatives look nearly as ridiculous to me as those on the left. The political class of so called conservatives is obviously just in the game for money.
We have the Governor of Idaho for example. He took the fed money for all of the covid nonsense, long after it was obviously nonsense. Idaho still runs ads for the vax, presumably the fed gov pays for this to be done.
During his recent campaign in which he was reelected, he refused to debate his challengers. He stated that he did not need to debate because: ” The actions of his administration were unassailable.” The actions of his administration were indefensible not unassailable but the idiots here voted him in again.
Voting makes no sense and has not for some time. I read a good comment somewhere a while ago. ” Democrats use money to get power. Republicans use power to get money.”