Much to their surprise, conservatives are discovering that they are increasingly the ones being disavowed by the Right now, as in this recent open letter to my old editor at the Dallas Morning News, Rod Dreher.
You are not going to gate-keep the right wing.
You aren’t going to veto the discussion of reality by pearl-clutching and making appeals to being “reasonable”, you aren’t going to restore the risk-averse conservativism of National Review by telling century-old horror stories about the ascendency of Adolf Hitler. You aren’t going to shut out critical conversations because you think their conclusions are distasteful.
The time when mainstream conservatism held this kind of power is over. And you will never have it ever again. Which is why you, and other conservatives, need to abandon the pretension and stop trying to pursue this futile task, for your good and the good of others that come after you.
Is it possible for conservatives to finally break from the form that has defined their own failure? Might you all stop quixotically raging against the sky and try to adopt a more practical approach?
I know that many of you are fond of that one saying by William F Buckley that “A conservative is someone who stands athwart the tracks of history, yelling Stop.” No doubt many conservatives find a certain nobility in these futile gestures, especially as America’s political reality grows much darker.
However, that train you now see coming down the tracks isn’t the crisis of modernity; nor is it some specific bad actor like Nick Fuentes, or even some popular mass delusion. The train is just a reality. It is the inevitable consequence of the politics promoted over the last three decades by those weak men too cowed to face hard truths head-on.
And no one can stop this train from coming, because all the opportunities to slow it down have been sabotaged, more often than not, by the very conservatives who were busy lamenting the sorry state of their predicament.
But lament your predicament or not, the train is still approaching. You are all going to have to make an adjustment to how you approach politics, or the juggernaut will run you down where you stand, not because you stood on some principle, but because you didn’t acknowledge the machine hurling towards you, just in front of your nose.
But perhaps this is history’s well-known sense of irony. Because, in the wake of this tragedy, everyone will naturally look back at your careers and wonder.
How?
How, after everything, after all of the articles, after all of the books, after all of the histrionic predictions of collapse and societal decline repeated over and over again, how could you still be so unprepared to face the world that you saw coming decades ago?
It is an eternal mystery. It is the story of how conservatism died.
Like everything that inevitably falls apart on its own, conservatism is dying under the weight of its own inconsistencies and incoherencies. Proclaiming “America First” while putting Israel first, waxing eloquent about the Constitution while never doing anything to defend the American Posterity, posturing about nonexistent principles, celebrating a capitalism that is built on a foundation of usury and fraud, and appealing to false histories and fake historical narratives, there is no reason to ever take conservatives and their gatekeeping seriously anymore.
They defend self-proclaimed democracy that violates the will of the people, enact injustice in the name of justice, proclaim an equality that has never existed anywhere, and in the process, conserve nothing. They are worse than worthless even by their own chosen measure.
And the train doesn’t care.
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