The failure of conservatism is one of those things that has been observed many times by many different people, but why it failed is never discussed. The assumption is that conservatism failed because the people in it did not try hard enough, or they were easily corrupted by the big money donors. The underlying assumption is that it could have succeeded and created the civil nationalist paradise.
This is why these successive efforts over the last decade to create a new right have failed to get very far. They assume they just need to get new people saying the same old things and they can get the band back together. Christopher Rufo’s internet activism is in pursuit of the same agenda as Buckley conservatism. It has the same agenda because it learned nothing from failure.
The most likely answer to why conservatism failed, however, is that it was doomed from the start and by start, I mean the founding. Conservatism, in a nation that was never a nation, but rather a country that saw itself as a radical experiment in liberty, was going to be the first thing reformed out of existence. What a radical experiment of any kind can never tolerate is anything in its way.
Conservativism in America was just slow progressivism, with progressivism being the radical ideology at the core of the experiment. As Dabney noted a century ago, conservatives were merely a drag on progressivism. Its job was to slow the process but eventually concede to the progressives. This meant that the reason conservatism failed is the progressivism has failed.
That is the show this week. Technical issues made it difficult to record and compile the show, so it may sound a bit wonky. Getting over those technical issues left little time to organize my thoughts on this topic, so it is mostly thinking aloud, but it is a subject I may returned to in a future show. The death of conservatism is as much about the death of progressivism as anything else.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Intro
- The Death Of Conservatism
- Doomed From The Start
- The Mystery of Progressivism
- Buckley Conservatism
- Trumpism & Populism
- After Conservatism
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The main problem with progressivism is that it claims to know what the future is going to be and that they are making progress toward it. That is plain silly. No one in 1850 could predict the world of 1950. Marxism pushed science-y sounding theories of late-stage this and early-stage that which is just made up gobbledygook. None of the Marxist predictions came true. Anyone who tells you they know what the world will be like in 2070 is blowing smoke.
David Deutsch, the quantum computer scientist, has his own definition of reality, similar to Phillip Dick’s, but I prefer his. “Reality is anything that kicks back.” I live in a somewhat white lower middle-class suburb, adjacent to a wealthier white suburb. Drive through my neighborhood and you’ll see mostly Trump signs, some colorful, featuring Trump holding up his fist after getting shot, etc. Then a handful of Harris signs, usually staked in organic garden patches or adjacent to Ukraine flag displays. Go to the rich white neighborhood and it’s three to one Harris to Trump, and there are a lot… Read more »
Progressivism isn’t a mystery. Examine the statistics from the past century: Progressivism is the socio-political expression of ever-increasing collective female power. It isn’t just that, but it is mostly that. Who dominates your institutions? Blacks? No. Jews? Nupe. Women run your institutions and call all the shots. Pretending the problem is Something Else is, well, conservatism. ‘As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them’. (Isaiah 3:12) That was written almost 3 thousand years ago. Ain’t nothing changed. The problem has only gotten worse, to the point where what Isaiah wrote now is destroying your nations,… Read more »
Maybe that asshole neocon for Fox Brett Baier inadvertently crushed the dems hope in November. Harris has the worst, idiotic staff ever.