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A popular topic on this side of the great divide is how the conservative movement managed to conserve nothing. Despite having billions of dollars and popular support, they managed to lose every fight. In most cases, they never bothered to fight at all, instead opting to preemptively surrender. The prevailing view is a cynical one in that it is assumed that their failures were profitable for the movement men. They got lavish lifestyles in exchange for being reliably losers.

There is always some truth to these cynical claims, but it does not explain why millions of well-intended white people signed onto the movement. Even today, after all the failures, conservative rackets like The Daily Wire, Prager U and Turning Point USA attract large audiences and rake in hundreds of millions. According to its last publicly available tax return, TPUSA raised $40 million in a year and paid its president, Charlie Kirk, close to half a million dollars.

In fairness, the bulk of the money that flows into these companies is institutional, corporate and oligarchical. National Review gets money from the tech giants, who also give money to the grooming gangs promoting crossdressing. The gatekeeping role of conservatism has been their most lucrative grift. Even so, the conservative movement has always enjoyed more support than it has earned. Given the record, it should be dead now but it staggers on.

That means it is more than a well done grift. Conservatism offered something to typical white people beyond practical politics. One clue is in this post on the American Greatness site. It is about Harry Jaffa, one of the leading intellectuals of 20th century conservatism, who is credited with founding the Lincoln cult. There is an effort to re-popularize Jaffa and his ideas, as a way to breath life back into the corpse that is the conservative movement.

What Jaffa offered conservatives was a way to attach themselves to the creedalism that came out of the war experience. By centering conservatism on the Declaration and Lincoln, conservatives could not only embrace the creedalism promoted by progressives during the war, but claim to be a purer form of it. After all, if conservatism is rooted in the Declaration, then the conservatives have as much of claim to creedalism as the the so-called Left, maybe even a better claim.

Now, Jaffa’s argument was always nonsense. There is little evidence that the Framers viewed the Declaration as their foundational text. The Constitution should be proof enough, but the Federalist Papers end all debate. The long public debate about the new constitution makes only a few passing references to the Declaration. The debates during the drafting make no mention of it. The Declaration was an expedient political statement, not the foundation stone of an ideological movement.

This was obvious when Jaffa was selling this stuff to desperate conservatives looking for a way to steal the moral high ground from the other side. Willmoore Kendall was one person not taken in by Jaffa. Mel Bradford was another. They understood that Jaffa was simply adapting the progressive moral framework created in the war years, so that opponents of the New Dealers could participate in politics. The result was a weird cult of Lincoln that lacked an alternative moral grounding.

Despite the irrationality of it, conservative creedalism was powerful magic. Middle-class white people, unhappy with what they were seeing from the political and cultural elites, had an antidote to progressivism. They could still have the rules and order that normal people expect, but also feel they were defending the ideals and mission of the country, as stated at the founding.  The religion of America was faith in the ideals of America and the best way to make the faith real was conservatism.

This is why conservatism had no answer for multiculturalism. The best reason to exclude people from alien societies is they are not like us. When you firmly believe that anyone can be “us” as long as they get misty when reading the opening lines of the Declaration, there is no good argument against open borders. Openness becomes a prerequisite, as the only way aliens can become “us” is if you let them in, which opened the door to generations of social experimentation.

It is also why conservatives had no answer to the assault on private association waged by progressives in the last century. Excluding woman from a social club, for example, was tantamount to excluding women from the American dream. Any organization that did not allow access to everyone, based on objective criteria, was deemed to be un-American and therefore against the law. Creedalism required the end of free association and conservatives had no choice but to nod along.

It is also why suburban white people have been so slow to break from conservatism, despite getting little in the way of practical accomplishments. Conservative creedalism provided a vision of the future and validation for the present. Suburban white people, seeing nonwhites repeat lines from the creed was validation, but also presented a vision of a future in which everyone lived like Americans. Our ways were not just tradition or custom, but a template for all mankind.

This is a good lesson for those thinking about what comes next. Humans are believing machines and they will commit themselves to a set of beliefs if those beliefs offer a vision of the future free of some unwanted bit of the present. The people we insist on calling the Left are simply true believers, funneling their instinct into secular fads as a way to feel validated, but to also focus on the glorious future. Their natural instincts have been hijacked by ideological opportunists.

The alternative vision to crossdressers waving their genitals around the schoolyard is not a spiffy new graph showing IQ differences. The antidote to progressive lunacy is not appeals to the magic of the marketplace like “go woke, go broke.” The way to defeat the prevailing orthodoxy is by presenting an alternative moral order with a vision of the future that promises salvation for the intended audience. Conservative creedalism failed to do that, so it must be replaced.

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