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Showing posts sorted by relevance for query conservative failure. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query conservative failure. Sort by date Show all posts

Thursday, June 9, 2016

Who killed conservatism - by Vox Day

I am not a conservative and I have long had to correct those who mistakenly believed I was. Nevertheless, I promised John C. Wright that I would address his question concerning when and how "conservative" became a label to avoid, and who was responsible for the destruction of the ideological brand.

I am a conservative. Four months ago on this blog, if I had said that, everyone here would assume I mean conservative as opposed to 'establishment republican' meaning small-gov, separation-of-powers, gun-toting, Christ-loving, pro-family, strong-military, mistrustful of big government and big business.

Now, everyone here uses it as a term of abuse, to refer to the exact same thing, four months ago, you all were using the term 'neocon' or 'GOP establishment' to refer to: globalist, pro-crony-capitalism, Wall-Street-Incest-with-DC, pro-abortion, fuck-the-bible-thumpers, rule-of-man-not-rule-of-law.

Why did you switch the label? Why are you calling the name I call myself to refer, for example, not to what Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have in common (and they have more in common than what separates them) but to what Jeb Bush and Barack Obama have in common (and they agree with each other on all points where I disagree.)

Who or what marred the brand name? When Derbyshire and Anne Coulter was booted out of the good graces of National Review, I assumed National Review had lost it right to call itself conservative, not that Coulter and Derb (and I) were now a part of some new faction with a new name.

If y'all here are using the word conservative to refer to people who don't favor the original intent of the US constitution and don't know jack about history, this word simply does not describe me.

What is the word you use for someone who believes 1. reality is real 2. truth is when thoughts and statements reflect reality 3. beauty is when art reflects natural or divine glory 4. life is sacred 5. family life is sacred 6. the Rights of Man (life, liberty, property) ergo liberty and equality are sacred. God is sacred.

Add to this a love of one's flag and ancestors, a loyal to one's posterity, and a distrust of sudden or violent social change, and you have a crisp and clear picture of what it means to be a conservative.

But you gentlemen neither use the word to mean this, no provide me with any other word to use to describe myself.

I have never had this problem on the Right before, only on the Left. They go through backflips of misdirection and bad definitions to prevent me from having a word to use to refer to myself and those of my camp.
Who or what marred the brand name? Three men, William F. Buckley, (((Norman Podhoretz))), and (((Irving Kristol))). Buckley began the National Review tradition of reading out various members of the Right from "the conservative movement", a tradition which began with Buckley's demonization of the John Birch Society and was subsequently continued by (((David Frum))) and Rich Lowry.

Those read out of conservatism include: Samuel Francis, Paul Craig Roberts, Joe Sobran, Jerry Pournelle, John Derbyshire, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, and Mark Steyn, among many others. Earlier this year,Commentary lamented Buckley's absence and warned of "The Coming Conservative Dark Age" due to his successors' inability to exercise the same authority when playing conservative thought-police.

"When William F. Buckley Jr. died in 2008 at age 82, conservatives were deprived of his wit, his intelligence, his charisma, and his panache. But they also lost something more important than their leader’s charms. They lost his authority. And they need it now more than ever. It was Buckley who for decades determined the boundaries of American conservatism.... National Review is a great example of media gatekeeping theory: By exiling anti-Semites, Birchers, and anti-American reactionaries from its pages, the magazine and its editor determined which conservative arguments were legitimate and which were not."

Podhoretz, the father of (((John Podhoretz))), was the liberal Democrat who edited Commentary and helped it "transform the Jewish left into the neoconservative right". Irving Kristol, the father of would-be third-party founder (((Bill Kristol))), is the founder of neonconservatism.

"One can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.... Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the "American grain." It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its 20th-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked."
- Irving Kristol, "The Neoconservative Persuasion"

While the Bush family, and its two presidents, also bear a fair amount of blame for the damage to the conservative brand, no one considered Bush the Elder a conservative and even Bush the Younger had to style himself a "compassionate conservative". The failure of the Republican-controlled White House, House, and Senate to accomplish any of the conservative movement's declared goals also played a role. But it was not until globalists such as John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush were anointed as true and proper conservatives, while avowed American nationalists like Donald Trump and all of his supporters were declared by the mainstream and conservative presses alike to be "not conservative", that the brand was fatally tarnished. The conservative brand is now rightly rejected by the #AltRight and by every American nationalist.

To be a conservative now means to deny that an American national interest exists. It means to be opposed to the very idea that an American nation even exists except as "a proposition" to which one may assent. It means to be a nominal international equalitarian while at the same time putting Israel first. It means to regard GDP as the one true metric of national well-being. It means to advocate a strong US military in order to permit the USA to continue to police the world. It means to believe that the Holocaust is the worst thing ever to happen in human history, except for four score and seven years of slavery in America.

To be conservative means to conserve nothing, not even the posterity of the Founding Fathers, for whom the Constitution was written and whose unalienable rights the Bill of Rights was supposed to secure.

I think the old conservatives would do well to call themselves Constitutionalists, because it is obvious that the current batch don't give a damn about it. And neither do we of the #AltRight, because it is obvious that the Constitution has not only failed, completely, by its own stated purpose, but is today being used as a means of hand-cuffing the Right. The #AltRight believes in three things:
1.    Nationalism.
2.    Western civilization.
3.    Winning.
Everything else is negotiable or a means to one of those three ends. We aren't conservatives. We aren't philosophers. And we don't care about the Constitution, the Rights of Man, the Enlightenment, the Holocaust, or anything else with capital letters that is likely to get in the way.

A Constitutionalist can be our ally. A Zionist can be our ally. A National Socialist can be our ally. A Pan-Arabist can be our ally. We don't care who you are or what you believe, as long as you're aiming in the direction of the enemies of nationalism and Western civilization.

Such as, for example, the self-styled conservatives who have turned their backs on America and proved themselves to be the Judases of the West, very nearly as dyscivic and dyscivilizational as the Left they nominally oppose. It is perhaps useful, therefore, to understand that conservatism was never what many of today's conservatives erroneously believe it to be. From Cuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed America by John Red Eagle and me:
In the early 1950s, the dominant political ideology in the United States was center-left liberalism, itself a reaction to the excesses of the socialist, totalitarian, eugenics-loving progressive movement. That today’s SJWs have re-embraced the progressive label is no accident and would be material enough for an entire book of its own. We have no plans to write such a book, though, since Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism provides a reasonable description of both the historical antecedent as well as the modern neoprogressive. With the onset of the Cold War, and the embarrassing revelations of the real conditions of life under socialist rule, the American left found itself going through one of its inevitable crises of confidence.

Into that void stepped a small group of intellectuals who set out to remake the even more shattered and demoralized American right. The older right, though sometimes referred to as paleoconservative by modern writers, actually had no such singular identity at the time. Unlike the United Kingdom, in the United States the word “conservative” had not been regularly applied to any particular political party or tradition. At most, it could be said that the older strains of thought shared a common Anglo-Saxon skepticism of centralized power, and a particularly American suspicion of elites, both foreign and domestic. But none of these intellectual strains were of any serious political influence in mid-20th-century America.

The early new rightists were interested in discerning the deeper roots of historical American political thought, and in turning its various strains into a viable, coherent political tradition. Some of them looked so deeply that they found inspiration from decidedly non-American sources, such as British conservative political thought. The latter was a generally elitist tradition, openly contemptuous of American-style independent citizenry and the freewheeling style of American political discourse. Among the leaders of this Anglophile camp was Russell Kirk, who is generally credited with coining the American use of the term conservative as a distinct political label. His most famous work, The Conservative Mind, proved to be quickly and profoundly influential soon after its publication in 1953. Kirk’s book synthesized various ideas from diverse 18th- and 19th-century thinkers, most prominently Edmund Burke, into six canons, or principles, of this new conservatism:
1.    Belief in a transcendent order, or body, of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.
2.    Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.
3.    Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a “classless society.”
4.    Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked.
5.    Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power.
6.    Recognition that change may not be salutory reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations.
The astute reader will surely notice that cuckservatism, especially with regards to immigration, directly violates no less than one-third of Kirk’s conservative principles, namely, the last two. Cuckservatism fails to respect tradition, as it manifestly does not distrust those who would reconstruct all of society, and it refuses to recognize the possibility that change of the magnitude necessitated by the size of the 50-year mass migration will destroy, rather than improve, the nation.

Whatever the left may say about them, Kirk’s principles are hardly the stuff of SS rallies. As a set of ideas, they’re not particularly systematic, particularly when compared with more radical philosophies like Marxism and its innumerable offshoots, or at the other extreme, the Objectivism of Ayn Rand. They are arguably more a set of generalized assertions and attitudes rather than principles per se. Even so, they do represent a particular worldview, though it is not the worldview of the Founding Fathers or of the early American political generations.

Notice as well that several of these principles are primarily defined by that which they opposed: the dominant left-liberal worldview of the mid-20th century. From their very beginning the principles of conservatism were subordinate and defensive in nature, or less charitably, they were submissive and passive-aggressive in their relation to the left.
Speak of the devil. As it happens, as of this morning, Cuckservative is now available in paperback on Amazon. It is 236 pages and $12.99.


Tuesday, August 16, 2016

The conservative void - Vox Day comments on article bt Russel Kirk

Conservatism, by definition, is unprincipled, anti-ideological pose that relies on rhetoric rather than dialectic. It was literally defined that way by the man who articulated American conservatism, Russell Kirk:
Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles.

Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.

The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.
Translation: Conservatism is FEELZ.

Doesn't that explain a great deal about both the conservative failure of the last 60 years as well as their inept, rhetorical, fainting-couch responses to the rise of the Alt-Right?

The amusing thing is that they consider themselves "the hard-headed realists", but they don't even have an ideological foundation. Their intellectual movement isn't even built on sand! It's built on "a state of mind", something that is intrinsically malleable and subject to emotional manipulation.

Say what you will about National Socialism, but at least it was an ethos! Conservatism is intellectual nihilism, it is an ideological void.

If you are of the Right, stop calling yourself a conservative. It's absurd. Not only has conservatism failed to conserve anything, it was as doomed from the start as the atheists attempting to fight a religious war without a religion.

One can't win a gunfight without a gun, and one can't win a cultural war without an ideology.


Jerry Pournelle, for one, understands this.
Conservatism isn’t an ideology; Russell Kirk called his book “The Conservative Mind”, and when specifics were demanded he wrote a book for his times, A Program For Conservatives; not an ideology.


Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Conservativism Failed American Christianity - Vox Popoli

 The Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, the organized Christian churches, and the conservative movement all collectively failed both America and American Christians:

The danger is that a marriage between conservatism and Christianity will place the Faith in a position to be compromised, just as conservative politicians are compromising every day. This would result in a Christian faith which conforms to politics instead of a politics which conforms to Christianity.

This is not to say that the conservative movement has never been Christian or never supported Christian values. It is very true that in past decades the conservative movement was where devout Christians of all stripes could find allies in the culture war. Catholics and Evangelicals found themselves side by side in the fight to protect the unborn. Presbyterians and Methodists found themselves in the same trenches defending the sanctity of marriage. This was only possible because a critical mass of American society was, in fact, devoutly Christian, and therefore the conservative movement was trying to conserve a Christian America. Politics was downstream of culture and culture was downstream of Christianity.

Those days are more or less over. America is only nominally Christian, if that, and hence it is increasingly common for conservatives to identify as non-Christian or pagan. The campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy is a good example of this. While he may preach a familiar set of conservative policies, his social and religious views sound more similar to a mid-decade liberal than a traditional Christian conservative, as he is a vocal and devout Hindu. This is not to rail against his faith but to point out that he is a glowing example of how one can be uber-conservative and non-Christian. If it is the essence of conservatism to preserve and to change slowly, and our culture is no longer Christian, no wonder our conservative movement is less than Christian. There is little Christianity in our nation to preserve!

What Exactly Are Conservatives Conserving?, CRISIS MAGAZINE, 28 August 2023

It’s now more than apparent that the American conservativism articulated by Russell Kirk and championed by Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan was a complete and unmitigated failure that was unsuccessful in conserving anything from the American people’s majority in the United States to the historic concept of the two genders. Like Churchianity, its failure was inevitable because it was focused on inclusivity and expanding its numbers rather than requiring a dedication to the truths it proclaimed on its members and policing the legitimacy of that dedication among them.

American Christians must put Jesus Christ, heritage America, the good, the beautiful, and the true ahead of all the niceness and inclusivity and equality and civnattery and all the other fake virtues, or they will continue to drown in a swamp of judeo-churchian conservatism.

DISCUSS ON SG

https://voxday.net/2023/08/29/conservativism-failed-american-christianity/

Monday, July 25, 2016

Jerry Pournelle on free trade - by Vox Day

Thanks to his There Will Be War series, Jerry Pournelle was one of my biggest intellectual influences as a teenager. If you want to ensure that your teenage sons have an antidote to the progressive and globalist nonsense in which they are engulfed by the mainstream and conservative medias, you simply cannot do better than give them a book or three from that series; the educational aspect of TWBW was the reason it was my absolute top priority to get it back in print. We've got seven of the original nine back in print already, and we'll have the rest out by the end of the year.

Now Jerry is turning his still-formidable intellect towards one of the great questions of the day: free trade. It is of particular import for conservatives:

One reason Conservatives are advised by Conservative leaders to disagree with Trump is his position on Free Trade. The problem for me is that I do not see Free Trade, particularly laissez faire Free Trade, as necessarily Conservative at all,

The advantages of Free Trade are lower prices for stuff. That means they are more cheaply produced. As the economist David Ricardo wrote, there is a principle of comparative advantage that coupled with free trade guarantees maximum profits for when there are no trade restrictions, and impediments to free trade are supposed to be mutually disadvantageous.

But do understand, what is conserved is lower prices. Nor social stability. Not communities. Not family life. Indeed those are often disrupted; it’s part of the economic model. Under free trade theory, it’s better to have free trade than community preservation, better to have ghost towns of people displaced because their jobs have been shipped overseas; better to have Detroit as a wasteland than a thriving dynamic industrial society turning out tail finned Cadillacs and insolent chariots and supporting workers represented by rapacious unions in conflict with pitiless corporate executives.

The theory of free trade includes liquidity: liquidity in capital flow, and liquidity in labor relocation.

What was conserved by turning Detroit into a wasteland? How was that conservative? Wouldn’t it be more conservative to argue that if everyone pays a little more for stuff made here, by people who work here, we are better off than having it made south of the border and inviting our people to go work there at their prevailing wages?

Go further. You don’t have to move. We’ll pay you for not working and you don’t have to move. Of course we’ll have to raise taxes on those who do work to pay those people no longer working, but that’s life. But after unemployment benefits work out – in my days the government would pay you $26 a week for 26 weeks – you’re in trouble. So much so that welfare benefits kept being raised. Food stamps, which became larger and bought more items. Negative income tax. And if you dropped out of the labor force – no longer looking for a job – you are no longer unemployed. The unemployment rate just went down. You stopped looking for a job. Of course you don’t have a job – you are certainly not employed – but you aren’t unemployed and don’t count toward the unemployment rate. I wouldn’t have thought that sort of lying to the people by government officials was a very Conservative thing to do at all.

Would a 15% tariff on cars have saved Detroit? It would mean that I would have had to pay about $5000 more for my 1988 Ford Eddie Bauer V8 Explorer I bought in 1999. I could have afforded that. And I suspect that I’ve paid more in income taxes sent to welfare recipients in Detroit than that. Is paying people not to work more Conservative than trying to keep their jobs – and manufacturing capabilities and potential here, bot dismantling it and leaving its former site to rust away – Conservative?

And is encouraging people not to work – at least making it easier and more possible – building a Conservative nation?

What, precisely, is being conserved here?

At the core of the intellectual case for free trade is the idea that Say's Law somehow applies to labor, that the aggregate supply of labor necessarily creates an equal quantity of aggregate demand for labor. Hence the claims that since those who had been employed by technologically outdated buggy whip manufacturers found jobs working for automobile manufacturers, those who no longer work for corporations that went offshore will find them doing something else.

But this is a complete failure of logic. The buggy whip workers were able to go to work for the auto manufacturers because those factories were located in their home states. A Detroit auto worker cannot go to work for a Korean or a German manufacturer, or even for a US automaker who sets up a plant in Mexico.

Free trade is, in fact, intrinsically anti-conservative, which of course is why revolutionaries such as Karl Marx have historically favored it.

I should also mention that There Will Be War Vol. VI is now out in ebook, and Vols I and II are now available in a hardcover omnibus edition.


Saturday, July 1, 2017

The GOP is dead - comments by Vox Day

It is shocking - absolutely shocking - to discover that a model minority named "Avik Roy" is opposed to the transformation of the Republican Party from a conservative party to a nationalist party:
 Avik Roy is a Republican’s Republican. A health care wonk and editor at Forbes, he has worked for three Republican presidential hopefuls — Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Marco Rubio. Much of his adult life has been dedicated to advancing the Republican Party and conservative ideals.

But when I caught up with Roy at a bar just outside the Republican convention, he said something I’ve never heard from an establishment conservative before: The Grand Old Party is going to die.

“I don’t think the Republican Party and the conservative movement are capable of reforming themselves in an incremental and gradual way,” he said. “There’s going to be a disruption.”

Roy isn’t happy about this: He believes it means the Democrats will dominate national American politics for some time. But he also believes the Republican Party has lost its right to govern, because it is driven by white nationalism rather than a true commitment to equality for all Americans.

“Until the conservative movement can stand up and live by that principle, it will not have the moral authority to lead the country,” he told me.

This is a standard assessment among liberals, but it is frankly shocking to hear from a prominent conservative thinker. Our conversation had the air of a confessional: of Roy admitting that he and his intellectual comrades had gone wrong, had failed, had sinned.
But this is not why the Republican Party will die, it is why the conservative movement has lost control of the Republican Party, and why the conservative movement will die. Since when was the primary objective of the Republican Party, the USA, or the Constitution "a true commitment to equality for all Americans", particularly in a world where "Americans" can be born anywhere? And it is nonsense to claim a political party should be driven by a commitment to something that does not exist; Roy might as reasonably decry the failure of the Republican commitment to unicorns.

The irony, as usual, is that Roy is practicing the very identity politics he decries. He's opposed to American nationalism because he isn't an American, he's just a paperwork facsimile. And he's wrong, of course, because the Democrats are not going to dominate American politics, because the more the demographics shift against white Americans, the more strongly they are going to be forced to band together in their own self-interest and defense.

The reality is that Roy is going to become a Democrat, just like all the other so-called conservatives whose identity is non-white. Because people like him have been practicing identity politics all along, they've just been doing so under cover of equalitarian ideology.


Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Conservatism in ruins - Vox Day on article by Andrew Klavan

Andrew Klavan's first thoughts on rebuilding conservatism:
The conservative movement has collapsed and is in ruins. Its vehicle for political expression, the Republican Party, is now in the hands of an authoritarian nationalist who has never read the Constitution and does not believe in free expression, free trade or the separation of powers. Its central vehicle for expression in the news media is in disarray as Fox News becomes embroiled in scandal. Even its defenders on talk radio and in the blogosphere are severely at odds as they are forced to choose whether to defend Trump as the lesser of two evils or to stand fast with the founding fathers against both terrible sides.
The conservative movement has collapsed and lies in ruins. And it has done so due to the deceit and dishonesty of conservative commentators like Andrew Klavan, who apparently feel the need to make provably false statements about everyone from Donald Trump to the Founding Fathers.

Let's look at the three false statements in this one diagnostic paragraph alone:
1.    Donald Trump is not an authoritarian.
2.    Fox News has never been a central vehicle for expressing conservative views. It has, rather, pushed neoconnery as nominal conservatism while serving as a politically moderate alternative to the hard progressivism of the ABCNNBCBS cabal.
3.    The Founding Fathers believed in trade protectionism and a white America. Whether he gives a damn about the US Constitution or not, Donald Trump has as much or more in common with the Founding Fathers as the conservative movement does. The Constitution exists only to safeguard the unalienable rights of white Americans who are the posterity of the Founding Fathers, that is its sole purpose.
Now let's look at Klavan's proposal for rebuilding conservatism, which strangely enough, he provides without ever considering just why the movement is in ruins.
1. There is no substitute for victory. A political philosophy should be an outgrowth of moral values but it is not a moral value in itself. Its purpose is not to be good; its purpose is to be as good as it can be and still win power. A Christian may count it a victory when he is devoured by lions for his faith, but a conservative who is repeatedly devoured by the opposition in elections is just a self-satisfied schmuck. I am completely opposed to those — like Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam — who essentially argue  that conservatives must win by becoming watered-down liberals. But clearly, the methods by which we have been selling our philosophy to the voters have not just failed but failed utterly, and we should rethink them.
True enough, and yet Klavan observably knows so little about the history of conservatism in America that he doesn't understand that conservatives have never had a philosophy proper. He obviously hasn't read Russell Kirk, anyhow. That's why they can't sell conservatism to anyone anymore; it doesn't even exist as a coherent self-contained philosophy. Conservatives have never been much more than philosophical parasites on the Left. Klavan should read Cuckservative; if nothing else it would bring him up to speed on the intellectual inadequacies of conservatism.
2. Win what minority types we can with the truth. The opposition likes to point out that too many conservatives are white men. They're right — but only because blacks and women have been successfully sold a destructive bill of goods in leftist racialism and feminism. The facts are: black people are not oppressed by the police, women are not underpaid for the same work, white privilege is a destructive and racist myth, and true freedom means people you don't like are going to say things you disagree with in ways you find offensive. These are hard sayings but they need to be said, and they don't need to be said by conservatives to other conservatives, they need to be said by conservatives to blacks, women and sexual off-beats of all stripes. The Democrats have co-opted these people with destructive lies that make their lives worse. We can't win them back by jumping on that bandwagon. We need to proudly, unapologetically (and politely) tell it like it is — to them, in their neighborhoods and organizations. We won't win a lot of them. Not at first. But facts have a way of getting through over time — if you speak them courageously without being a jackass about it.
This is remarkable. And it's a tactic doomed to failure; conservatives like Klavan can't win anyone with the truth for the obvious reason that they don't know the truth. They religiously subscribe to the idiotic lie of the Proposition Nation and they attempt to win over minorities that will never, ever, be won over in significant percentages by the alien ideals of 18th century whites. Klavan can't explain historical anomalies that puncture his precious Ellis Island myth like the 1790 Naturalization Act, which means he can't tell it like it is because he doesn't actually know what it is.

The alternative is that he does know what it is and he is knowingly deceiving his fellow conservatives. But I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he is merely ignorant.
3. Fight the culture wars in the culture. The culture wars are problematical because too often conservatives come across as anti-freedom or bigoted. That makes victory tough. I feel passionately about some cultural issues and indifferent to others, but I believe all of them should be fought on a cultural and informational level rather than a political one. For instance, I believe that abortion is the taking of a human life and that government therefore has a right to forbid it. But just speaking bluntly and honestly, I don't think I can win that fight in the political arena right now. Happily, the truth may do what politics cannot. The truth is on my side and the more the truth gets out about what abortion looks like, how it's done, and who the people who support it are, the more the public will know that it is unacceptable. Then we can win politically. As for sex issues, I confess I care not at all about other people's sexuality (I'm so deeply immersed in my own), but I do care very deeply about religious liberty and the freedom not to participate in what you abhor. That's a fight we can win and we should argue it everywhere as a freedom issue.
Correct concept, inept execution. Winning the culture war is NOT getting the truth out. It is rhetorically convincing others what the truth is. This is why the arts are the most vitally important battleground in the cultural war.
4. Some class occasionally would be nice. Conservatives have been all but banned from universities, the news media and show business. In response, we formed our own media in blogs, talk radio and Fox. Those are great venues for informing our own, but we could use some outreach to open-minded Democrats. I've wasted too much breath trying to convince conservatives that art is good and can change the world over time. They just won't believe me. But could we maybe agree that screaming at people and calling them evil and talking like a belligerent loudmouth know-it-all is not always the best way to bring them over to your side? No, huh. Well, it was just a thought.
For fuck's sake. He's another hapless tone policeman. This is why the Alt Right is going to win; because we don't give a quantum of a damn about "class". Someone once told me the important thing was "to win with grace and style". No, the important thing is to win, even if you have to get bloody and dirty in the process.Klavan, like a good conservative, is far more interested in going down to noble defeat and surrendering while wearing a nice clean uniform than he is with winning.
It very much looks to me right now as if Trump is going to lose this election on pure incompetence and mean spirit. That might actually make it easier for conservatives to regroup in the ruins of the Republican Party. If he wins, we may need a new party of our own. But whichever way things go, I think we need to open a discussion about how conservatives can not only remain conservative but also win elections in modern America.
Is he even watching the political conventions? This sort of wishful thinking is why no one should bother paying any attention to a cuckservative like Klavan now or in the future. Conservatism is dying. Its diseased remnants are flocking to the progressives, as we always knew they would. And we watch them go with dry eyes and a grim smile, because we don't need a bunch of useless cucks and moderates who were always happier shooting at their own side than the enemy.

I have never been a conservative. I will never be a conservative. I am delighted to see the conservative movement crumbling into dust. Conservatives conserve nothing, accomplish nothing, and stand for nothing. They will not defend the Church, they will not defend America, and they will not defend the West.

The Alt Right will. Join us, if you have the steel.


Thursday, February 2, 2017

Why do proven failures always insist they're right and continue to lecture us? With 'friends' like these, who needs enemies, eh?

Rod Dreher does not disappoint as he wrings his hands over the God-Emperor's surprisingly restrained rule:
The astonishing audacity and recklessness with which Trump has begun his presidency is a bad sign. For me, it is not so much what he has done (though I do object to some of it) as it is the reckless manner in which he has done it. As every well-raised Southern child knows, manners express morality. Yes, manners are artificial, but they embody a social code that governs the conduct of people who live under it. True, it is always better to do the right thing than to work unrighteousness under the cover of minding one’s manners. But as Brooks points out, there’s something crude and vicious about the way Trump goes out of his way to provoke, to rub the noses of his opponents in the exercise of his power. In Trump’s case, manners express the man.

In other words, we know what kind of president Trump is going to be by the way he has carried out his executive actions so far. He does not consider himself bound by law or custom. He is a law unto himself. That doesn’t make him wrong about everything, but it does serve as fair warning to Republicans and conservatives, both on Capitol Hill and out in the country: sooner or later, he’s going to make us take sides. In the moment of testing, you will only be able to make the right call then if you have prepared your conscience, and exercised it by being more faithful to the Truth than to your president.
Demonstrating, as always, that for the moderate, it's not what you do, it's the genteel manner with which you do it.

Moderate: Okay, gentlemen... take 5 paces, then turn and shoot. SJW has won the coin toss and will shoot first. Understood?
Conservative: Yes.
SJW: Whatever.
Moderate: One...
SJW: turns and points pistol, hand trembling in terror
Moderate: looks at SJW scornfully Two...
SJW: CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE! shoots in Conservative's general direction... misses horribly
Conservative: What the deuce? turns around You bastard!
SJW: How dare you turn around! You're not a gentleman!
Moderate: Conservative! You must take three more paces before you may turn around!
Conservative: That coward shot at me after two!
Moderate: Do not lower yourself to his level! Death before dishonor!
Conservative: That doesn't mean what you think it does! aims at SJW
SJW: EEK! cowers
Moderate: How dare you! draws pistol on Conservative If you do not turn around this instant, I shall shoot you myself, you dishonorable cur!

Ross Douthat, meanwhile, claims populism is always doomed to failure and assumes both incompetence and an inability to learn on the part of a man who not only specializes in A/B testing, but went through THREE campaign managers in his successful campaign for the White House.
The great fear among Trump-fearers is that he will deal with this elite opposition by effectively crushing it — purging the deep state, taming the media, remaking the judiciary as his pawn, and routing or co-opting the Democrats. This is the scenario where a surging populism, its progress balked through normal channels, turns authoritarian and dictatorial, ending in the sort of American Putinism that David Frum describes darkly in the latest issue of The Atlantic.

But nothing about Trumpian populism to date suggests that it has either the political skill or the popularity required to grind its opposition down. In which case, instead of Putin, the more relevant case study might be former President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood leader whose brief tenure was defined both by chronic self-sabotage and by the active resistance of the Egyptian bureaucracy and intelligentsia, which rendered governance effectively impossible.

The Egyptian deep state’s sabotage of Morsi culminated in a coup. This is not my prediction for the Trump era. But what we’ve watched unfold with refugee policy suggests that chaos and incompetence are much more likely to define this administration than any kind of ruthless strength.
I, on the other hand, observe that the God-Emperor is simply starting small and testing the waters. I don't think we've seen anything at all as yet. But if the best he can do is to burn down the entire edifice, well, that's just fine too.

Saturday, December 21, 2019

Stop Blaming DaLeft – Look Deeper – It’s DaConservative Judases!


If we can’t even conserve women’s bathrooms, what can we conserve?

Tucker Carlson exposes our FAKE spokesmen that most of us rubes trust. Be sure to watch the video at the link provided – if you have never seen Tucker – he is the ONLY one at Fox News still worth watching!

I discovered the Conservative Conundrum a few years ago – Conservative voters are being fleeced by Conservative pundits. They use our ignorance and stupidity as their cash cow!

It may be time to reveal DaUglySecret – the real culprits are not DaLeft in DC – the real question is - who are their enablers? I have collected a whole library on this fact over the last 4 years - which conclusively proves that those pretend opposition agencies are nothing more than controlled opposition - funded by the same sources which fund DaLeft. This keeps us rubes focused away from them and wastes our time, energy and treasure on a road specifically designed to go nowhere! In fact, I have created a new test for Conservative sites - "Thou dost protest too much" about DaLeft! It's like a football team blaming their losses on their opponents - how stupid can we get? If I see nothing but Left blaming on a website - including comments - are we really that blind or just stupid?
A little close to home, folks?
Just saying!

Here is a whole reading list from DaLimbrawLibrary (DLL):
On Conservative Failure – multiple articles
On DaBigCon – Jack Kerwick eviscerates our ‘allies’ and our own stupidity


No more excuses – just git’er’done!

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Vox Popoli: Darkstream: there is no alternative - (Alt-Right is the natural successor to Conservatism)


From the edited transcript.

What we have to recognize when we're talking about the Right is that the ideology that hitherto was the leading expression of right-wing politics in the United States, the conservative movement, is effectively dead. Donald Trump killed it.

And it's not so much that Donald Trump killed it as he exposed the fact that it was an ideological zombie vampire, and the dates 1951 to 2016 that you see on the tombstone date from that first famous book of William F Buckley, the founder of the modern conservative movement, and its end with the presidential election of 2016.
Because the legacy of conservativism is this: it never conserved anything! And that is the most damning thing that you can say about all the conservative organizations, all the conservative opinion leaders all the various Republican groups, all that kind of stuff, all of it was a failure. None of it conserved anything.

Conservatives couldn't even conserve the ladies room. This is an illustration of how badly how completely the conservative movement has failed, and if you talk to a conservative, they love to talk about the Constitution, and yet what they always ignore is the purpose of the Constitution.
We have seen that the Constitution has completely and utterly failed in its purpose, a purpose that is stated very clearly in the Preamble. The Preamble states that the purpose of the Constitution is to defend the rights of American posterity, and what "posterity" means is the direct genetic descendants of the people who established the country in 1789.

It does not refer to immigrants, it does not refer to refugees, it does not refer to the descendants of those immigrants who came over much later. You know, this is something that I got in some very intense discussions and arguments with various conservatives(1) who are genuinely good people, genuinely smart people, but they are entirely unable to wrap their heads around the fact that their friends, their family members, people they like, people they approve of, are not and never will be American posterity, and that the Constitution was not written for those people. It wasn't. This is a basic fact, this is an established fact, and the amount of intellectual dishonesty and self-deception that one has to engage in in order to deny the very clear meaning of these words is rather remarkable.

So you know, now we see the same concept being expanded further and further, and what's funny about conservatives is that while at the one hand they push away and they deny the actual historical meaning of various concepts, they also try to deny the obvious consequences of their own positions. You know, if you're running around saying that because all men are created equal that 19th century immigrants therefore equal and their descendants therefore qualify as American posterity, then you cannot deny the position of Iranian president Ahmadinejad who says that America belongs to all the world and that the American government does not have any right or  any ability to deny the movement of people into the United States of America. That is the absolutely correct logical conclusion to the conservative argument.

(1) In the public sense, this primarily refers to my debate on Posterity with Tom Kratman. If you take issue with any of my assertions here, I strongly recommend that you read it first before commenting on this issue.

Monday, August 13, 2018

They Are Not Never Trump – They Are Never You - by Kurt Schlichter

The recent utterly unsurprising utter capitulation by the Fredocons to the SJW/tech/media campaign to deplatform and silence any right-wing voice who is not trying to sell you a cruise cabin is a symptom of a bigger problem. It’s not a symptom of Trump Derangement Syndrome, though Trump has utterly deranged these pointy-headed geeks. It is a symptom of Conservative, Inc.’s contempt for you.
The dethroned conservagimps are angry with you. Donald Trump is not really the issue. He’s just a convenient target for those these establishment sissies. They truly despise you.
You.
They hate you because you refuse to honor and respect them, to validate their cheesy status within the Beltway hierarchy, and to acknowledge them as your betters. Your pig-headed uppityness has disrupted their scam. The old paradigm, the model of go-along/get-along and feed the crackers out there in America articles about lib outrages to keep them writing checks, no longer cuts it. You’ve stripped them of their status by holding them accountable for their failure to fight for conservatism, and for us.
And it is such a pathetic status – maybe they are fighting so hard because the stakes are so low. For some, it’s a mention on the masthead of an anorexically thin magazine that now publishes only because some zillionaire keeps handing its boss wads of cash, the actual subscribers to the cruise-shilling brochure having abandoned ship after the seven hundredth “Trump Is Icky!” expose. For others, it’s the chance to be the nominal conservative voice on Morning Joe, ready to pretend that actual conservatives concur with the ideological stylings of the Mick Jagger of flaccid, self-indulgent momrock.
Then there are those lucky few who get the “Here, boy!” to come live inside the house, collared and lying at the feet of their masters by the fire. What’s horrifying is that this is their dream, their sad, sad dream. Take the current occupant of the non-David Brooks prissy poodle position at the New York Times, Bret Stephens. He eagerly accepted the iron discipline of his new job after his first column hinted that the weird weather religion of the ruling class – the one that demands you Normals sacrifice your money and your sovereignty for the sake of the elite’s virtue – might not be, you know, totally a thing. He thank-you-sir-may-I-have-anothered, learned to heel, and pleased his masters by coming out hard against the Second Amendment like a good boy. Having got a taste for biscuits, he is still seeking treats – and gets them – like when he praised the firing of Rosanne and then praised the non-firing of actual racist Sarah Jeong.
Hypocrisy, thy name is True Conservatism™.
For decades, they fed us articles, columns, and books about the left’s campaign to muzzle the right, but suddenly Conservative, Inc., has discovered that it is all for muzzling of what it deems the wrong people on the right. And the best part is this revelation comes after nearly three years of their non-stop lectures about principles. Their only principle is themselves.
We watched as the he-men of the Weekly Standard and the rest of Conservative, Inc., leapt up off their couches to valiantly defend the liberal tech giants who have been testing the waters to see just how much silencing of conservatives they can get away with. All those articles about leftist impositions on our free speech were good to rile up the rubes, but post-Trump, when conservative speech is threatened by liberals dipping their toes in the pool by banning a fringy like Alex Jones, these conservaquislings prance about with unequivocal support. It’s easy to see their end game – they hope to be the last ones kneeling when the libs silence everyone else to the right of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Then they figure that if they are harmless and obedient enough, the liberals will let them go back to being the soft, ineffectual conservativish opposition that we rejected when we elected Trump.
We outsider conservative voices are competition to the puffcons, so of course the conservative establishment is eager for the overlords of Silicon Valley to erase us. The softies cannot compete, largely because they do not want to compete. They are about enjoying their lame sinecures, not moving the ball forward for our benefit. They hope to someday go back to when they could pose and posture and pretend to be fighting the good fight when all they really cared about was mapping out what think tank mixers they would hit that evening and what hors d'oeuvres they could wrap up in napkins, shove in the pockets of their threadbare sport coats, and take back to gnaw on in their crappy apartments by the flickering light of Star Trek reruns.

But we are never going back. Those of us who could care less about our cool kid status in the high school that is Washington, D.C., and more about actually getting results, have permanently screwed everything up for them. We rejected them, and they hate us for it. We ruined their little arrangement with the liberals – be non-threatening and you get some scraps. Their treacherous embrace of the liberal establishment’s war on dissent is a desperate attempt to turn back the clock to the era when the Bow Tie Brigade was not accountable to normal people like us.
How did our supposed betters get the idea they were better anyway? Have they done anything but go to college and write stuff they didn’t really believe? Have they started businesses? Served in the military? Done a push-up?
The fact that we are distinctly unimpressed by their mediocre resumes eats at them – our disrespect reveals the lies they tell themselves about their own significance. As my upcoming book Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy explains – with a lot more profanity and venom –we are in the midst of a cultural upheaval where our shoddy elite is desperately trying to cling to power and prestige it did not earn, has not wielded competently, and does not deserve. The recent shameful collaboration with the SJW left by those who once fancied themselves our leaders in conservatism just proves, again, how right we were to discard these losers.
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2018/08/13/they-are-not-never-trump--they-are-never-you-n2509229

Saturday, June 2, 2018

By What Right Do You Judge? - By Paul Gottfried


Recently, I overheard Laura Ingraham bewailing how the American left is now suppressing the public discussion of sensitive issues.  Laura's case in point is Kevin Williamson, a commentator whom Jeff Goldberg at the Atlantic sacked for an opinion that Williamson had posted on the internet in September 2014.  Back then, Williamson asserted that he would be tempted to hang women who choose to abort their unborn children.  Williamson's fate at the the Atlantic is supposedly proof positive that we're standing on the precipice, about to be pushed into a totalitarian society.  Although I too am concerned about our diminishing freedom, Laura's horror story seems small potatoes compared to other more alarming situations that she might have brought up, including situations I myself have been involved in.
The case of Williamson tells us little about our present cultural climate and lots about the mindset of Conservatism, Inc.  When it comes to defending its own, this establishment will pull out all stops.  Since I'm not of its denomination, I'll try to be more dispassionate.  Jeff Goldberg had a perfectly good right to fire an employee who took positions he found abhorrent, just as he had a right to hire Kevin Williamson for dumping on the white working class that supported Trump.  Neoconservative publications have the same right to publish Williamson when he mocks the singing of the National Anthem at NFL football games and continues to attack Trump as a clown.  What we're talking about is editorial staffs and donors extending or withdrawing support from controversialists who profit from being insulting.  (That seems to be Williamson's calling.)
Unfortunately, Conservatism, Inc. has long practiced the kind of censorship one might expect from the Communist Party.  As someone researching a monograph on this dismal subject, I continue to be appalled by the ease with which the movement's power-brokers have turned their onetime devotees into unpersons.  Whether it was William F. Buckley going after Jewish libertarians for their insufficient enthusiasm for battling communism internationally, the National Review editorial board savaging the John Birch Society for its failure to support the Vietnam War, or the more recent sacking and marginalizing of figures working for conservative magazines and foundations for bringing up I.Q. questions, Conservatism, Inc. has never hesitated to punish others for holding the wrong opinions.  In 1981, then-mainstream conservatives Irving Kristol and George Will poured oceans of slime on literary scholar and Southern conservative M.E. Bradford, who had the inside track on the job of NEH director.  This was done to make sure the position went to William Bennett, who was a liberal Democrat but also a confidant of the Kristol family.  The main evidence brought against Bradford was a footnote in one of his many books that made an unflattering reference to Abraham Lincoln.
We might also note how conservative intolerance has been spun in order to make it acceptable to the mainstream media.  This practice began when the talented WFB massaged his purging activities in justifying them to his liberal media friends.  Buckley claimed that those he kicked out of his movement and magazine were all anti-Semites and screaming racists.  The evidence for this is scant indeed.  The reasons for the expulsions have varied according to time and circumstance.  While the Cold War was on, anti-communism was the acid test for deciding who fitted into the movement and who didn't.  In the last several decades, I.Q. enthusiasts have been among those most likely to be booted out of conservative enterprises.  This was the well publicized fate of John Derbyshire at National Review in 2012 and of Jason Richwine at Heritage the following year.
Purges of this kind always look selective.  For example, Derbyshire, a widely published mathematician as well as a brilliant British stylist, was expelled from the N.R. editorial board in 2012 after suggesting that he would advise his children against stopping for a call for help from stranded black adolescents.  Whether or not one agrees with this position, one might ask why Victor Davis Hanson did not suffer a similar fate when he posted a similar piece of advice (that Hanson ascribed approvingly to his father) soon after Derbyshire's contretemps.  And why was Richwine fired from Heritage for raising I.Q. questions in a dissertation submitted and accepted at Harvard years before he went to work at a policy foundation?  Charles Murray said equally non-P.C. things about cognitive differences without losing his high position in the conservative movement.  The obvious answer is that conservative power-brokers grant indulgences to those who are useful to them, even when they express opinions that catch flak from the mainstream media.  But there are lots of people the bigwigs will happily throw to the wolves in order to avoid unwanted controversy or to build bridges to the national press.  I know those who suffered this fate personally.
This brings up the problem of mani sudicie (soiled hands) as opposed to the mani pulite (clean hands) that the judicial and police investigation of political corruption in Italy in the 1990s called for.  Conservatism, Inc. is not in a moral position to be defending open public discussion with clean hands, given its extensive, intergenerational purges of those who don't espouse its changing party lines.  Although one might sometimes agree with the examples of intolerance it cites, its own record on this score is so horrifying that one might be forced to ask: "By what right do you judge?"    
Postscript: Nothing written above should be misread as a trivialization of the war against intellectual freedom being waged by even the moderate left.  At the time of Derbyshire's firing, the Atlantic  incited National Review to go after Hanson, Heather Mac Donald, and other influential contributors as "racists."  Perhaps because such writers were better placed than Derbyshire in the conservative pecking order, they were spared.

Tuesday, May 24, 2022

National Review is Literally Gay - Vox Popoli

We always knew conservatism was a fraudulent failure of a pseudo-ideological movement. But lo and behold, it turns out that the conservative movement is literally fake and gay:

Until a few days ago, few people outside the offices of National Review knew that the revered conservative magazine’s publisher is a homosexual, “married” to a man.

“The publisher of the most important conservative magazine of the last 60 years, National Review, is gay-married?” wrote The Stream’s Peter Wolfgang, who broke the story. “Garrett Bewkes, the man overseeing the magazine once edited by William F. Buckley, has a husband.”

“He’s been the publisher for five years. How did this happen? And what does it mean for the conservative movement and the Republican party?” Wolfgang asked.  “I suspect a lot of NR’s long-time readers don’t know this. I wouldn’t have known if a local newspaper hadn’t run an article by Bewkes’ ‘husband’ Bradley.”

Just wait until conservatives learn that their historical opinion leader, William F. Buckley, was gay too, as was conservative icon Malcolm Forbes. This is why one has to be either stupid or ignorant to call oneself a political “conservative” – something you may recall that I have neverever, done – because conservatism is not only not an ideology, it is an intellectual, political, and moral dead end that couldn’t even conserve the difference between a girl and a boy.

DISCUSS ON SG

 https://voxday.net/2022/05/24/national-review-is-literally-gay/