—“This essay reminds me of the debate between charliekirk11 and Tucker Carlson about consecutives focussing on growth/free markets at the expense of things like affordable family formation.”— @Biorealism
Just to serve as resident nerd for a moment, the reason? Conservative intellectuals failed (like the church) to develop a ratio-scientific set of arguments to modernize their moral intuitions – so libertarians (economics) did – which only exacerbated the problem. The unions were a vehicle for the radical left and libertarian economic warfare against them eliminated their treat to the polity. But there was no equal vehicle for ending the academy, media, state complex. Even so, the conservatives did win the moral debate holding down the state, and would have defeated the academy and media.
In the rock-paper-scissors game of ideology, reason defeats supernaturalism, but pseudoscience beats reason. Without science to defeat pseudoscience conservatives lost the argument.
[pullquote]In the rock-paper-scissors game of ideology, reason defeats supernaturalism, but pseudoscience beats reason. Without science to defeat pseudoscience conservatives lost the argument.[/pullquote]
That said, history still proved them right by the evidence, because of individualism’s destruction of the family, and economic and military relative decline as resources(revenues) were devoted to financialization, the education problem, and redistribution to underclass and bureaucracy instead of financing of the intergenerational family. Even so, without immigration the right would have been proven right.
The dirty secret of western success has always been soft eugenics of the family, economy, military, and law. The problem is that the eugenics movement needed to succeed to prevent regression to the mean. And the postwar ban on the subject made conservatism impossible to advance.
So while the left engages in lie-deny-pseudoscience-and incrementalism, the right engages in not telling the truth and empty moralizing. And in all things – truth rules. Until the right uses truth it cannot defeat the lie-and-deny-pseudoscience and sophism of the left.
This is why democracy is not survivable. It’s suicidal.