Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

Boost of @impenitent@curtd@Weber_Kettle

Warning: Effort Poast incoming

That isn’t fatalism, it is an attempt to recognize the problem.
So long as the Enemy holds all the high points of culture and mass media they pick “our” leaders and always raise the feckless, incompetent or, more often, the compromised.

Yet that isn’t the root of the problem. The Internet could route around the media now and raise a leader. Like Trump. The problem is Conservatism. If one were looking for the perfect political philosophy to oppose you, one to ensure you never faced a real threat, you couldn’t design something better. It explicitly rejects making concrete policy proposals, it only attempts to “stand athwart History, yelling STOP!”

Having no policy preference of its own means it can’t attempt to undo any victory of the Left. So it is left holding and “conserving” them, at best making minor tweaks to make them less unstable and suicidal, leaving the Left to move on to the next battle. We all saw how fast National Review went from opposition to firing people for insufficient enthusiasm for marriage redefinition.

Conservatism agrees society “must change” and simply reverting Leftism wholesale would just be “turning the clock back” so it must accept each new innovation by the Left and try to “make it work.” And it is right that we just can’t “go back” because tech has changed the reality on the ground too much. The 1950s (or whatever your preferred “golden age” is, doesn’t matter) with cheap, rapid air travel and the Internet would not be viable.

What do we want?