We Need To Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives
Ideological screed from the far right. Take America back from the 21st, 20th, and 19th centuries.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Given the state of America in 2022, conservatives should stop calling themselves conservatives.
Why? Because the conservative project has largely failed, and it is time for a new approach. Conservatives have long defined their politics in terms of what they wish to conserve or preserve — individual rights, family values, religious freedom, and so on. Conservatives, we are told, want to preserve the rich traditions and civilizational achievements of the past, pass them on to the next generation, and defend them from the left. In America, conservatives and classical liberals alike rightly believe an ascendent left wants to dismantle our constitutional system and transform America into a woke dystopia. The task of conservatives, going back many decades now, has been to stop them.
In an earlier era, this made sense. There was much to conserve. But any honest appraisal of our situation today renders such a definition absurd. After all, what have conservatives succeeded in conserving? In just my lifetime, they have lost much: marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years, the First Amendment, any semblance of control over our borders, a fundamental distinction between men and women, and, especially of late, the basic rule of law.
Calling oneself a conservative in today’s political climate would be like saying one is a conservative because one wants to preserve the medieval European traditions of arranged marriage and trial by combat. Whatever the merits of those practices, you cannot preserve or defend something that is dead. Perhaps you can retain a memory of it or knowledge of it. But that is not what conservatism was purportedly about. It was about maintaining traditions and preserving Western civilization as a living and vibrant thing.
Well, too late. Western civilization is dying. The traditions and practices that conservatives champion are, at best, being preserved only in an ever-shrinking private sphere. At worst, they are being trampled to dust. They certainly do not form the basis of our common culture or civic life, as they did for most of our nation’s history.
To talk now of “family values” is to assume that there are enough Americans able and willing to marry and raise children together for something like “family values” to matter in the public discourse, much less in the halls of power. To talk of defending “religious freedom” is to misapprehend that the real risk today is widespread irreligion, which will leave so few religious Americans in the coming generations that the government and large corporations will inevitably — and easily — persecute them.
Conservatives are still invoking these things as if they are magic incantations that can roll back time, just as they did during the crucial decades of the past half-century when a cultural and technological revolution was re-making America before their eyes, and they did nothing to stop it.
In a recent essay for Compact , Jon Askonas argues convincingly that the conservative project failed because “it didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos of sheer profit.” Conservatives, he says, were too obsessed with “left-wing revolutionary politics” and missed the real threat, which was technological change so swift and powerful it fundamentally reordered society, swept tradition aside, and unleashed a moral relativism that rendered the conservative project obsolete.
Instead of questioning these technologies, asking whether they would contribute to human flourishing, conservatives acquiesced to their inevitability and focused instead on narrower issues. The result has been the transformation of society within the span of a single human lifetime, and with it the wholesale destruction of our traditions and the looming implosion of Western civilization.
While it might be necessary, as Askonas argues, to enact a serious program of technological development to build a future that supports human flourishing, it is also the case that to do so on a scale sufficient to save our country will require political power — and the willingness to use it.
So what kind of politics should conservatives today, as inheritors of a failed movement, adopt? For starters, they should stop thinking of themselves as conservatives (much less as Republicans) and start thinking of themselves as radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries. Indeed, that is what they are , whether they embrace those labels or not.
They might, looking to American history for inspiration, conjure up the image of the Pilgrims — those iron-willed and audacious Christians who refused to accept the terms set by the mainstream of their time and set out to build something entirely new, to hew it out of the wilderness of the New World, even at great personal cost.
Or they might claim the mantle of revolutionaries, invoking the Founding Fathers’ view (or, at least, Thomas Jefferson’s ) that periodic revolution to preserve liberty and civil society has always been and always will be necessary.
Whatever the term or image, the imperative that conservatives must break from the past and forge a new political identity cannot be overstated. It is time now for something new, for a new way of thinking and speaking about what conservative politics should be. The fusionism of past decades, in which conservatives made common cause with market-obsessed libertarians and foreign policy neocons, is finished. So too is Conservatism Inc. and the establishment GOP it enabled, whose first priority was always tax cuts for big business at the expense of everything else. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 heralded a populist wave and the end of Republican politics as we knew it, and now we are in uncharted waters.
To be sure, there has been plenty of talk on the right lately about what should be done differently now. Some, such as Sohrab Ahmari, Gladden Pappin, and Adrian Vermeule (along with a larger cohort of conservative Catholic thinkers), advocate a conservatism that is comfortable with big government and in fact sees it as necessary not only for the common good but to tame what Ahmari recently called the “private tyranny” of woke corporations empowered by unrestrained market forces. Conservative Catholics, he argues, should today claim ownership of a pro-worker, even pro-union political agenda that once belonged to the left, and which produced generations of Democrat-voting Catholic workers.
Indeed, a willingness to embrace government power has been a topic of fruitful debate on the “New Right” in recent years, as it should be. However uncomfortable traditional “small-government” conservatives might be with Ahmari’s argument, it is more or less true.
Put bluntly, if conservatives want to save the country they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it . Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips .
The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.
To stop Big Tech, for example, will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms. To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds. To stop the disintegration of the family might require reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce, combined with generous subsidies for families with small children. Conservatives need not shy away from making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.
In other contexts, wielding government power will mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code. It will not be enough, for example, to reach an accommodation with the abortion regime, to agree on “reasonable limits” on when unborn human life can be snuffed out with impunity. As Abraham Lincoln once said of slavery, we must become all one thing or all the other. The Dobbs decision was in a sense the end of the beginning of the pro-life cause. Now comes the real fight, in state houses across the country, to outlaw completely the barbaric practice of killing the unborn.
Conservatives had better be ready for it, and Republican politicians, if they want to stay in office, had better have an answer ready when they are asked what reasonable limits to abortion restrictions they would support. The answer is: none, for the same reason they would not support reasonable limits to restrictions on premeditated murder.
On the transgender question, conservatives will have to repudiate utterly the cowardly position of people like David French, in whose malformed worldview Drag Queen Story Hour at a taxpayer-funded library is a “blessing of liberty.” Conservatives need to get comfortable saying in reply to people like French that Drag Queen Story Hour should be outlawed; that parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; that doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and that teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.
If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.
To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.
For now, there are only two paths open to conservatives. Either they awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost, or they will watch our civilization die. There is no third road.
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These "deep thinking" far right "intellectuals" inevitably long for the days prior to 1860. Gee I wonder why. This particular one longs for the standards on society and conduct imposed by the "puritans"
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Perhaps these are the western civilization traditions the writer would like to preserve or resume. He also mentions the American Revolution as a fallback point in the defense of western civilization. By all means lets go back to the era when human beings were held as property by the political leaders, women were second class citizens, one could only vote if one held property, and many diseases were treated by attaching leeches to the afflicted's skin.
The modern world cannot go backwards, and those who try are mainly those who long for the day of white Christian rule and white European dominance.
On another seed today a comparison was brought up between the GOP today and pre WWII Nazi Germany.
Here on this article we see the writer call for
aka oppression.
"The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed."
Yep, we cannot go back, only forward. The transformation has begun, and Trump was the catalyst that got it started
Depends on how you feel about career criminal , pathologically lying, malignant narcissists running the country. MAGA loves it.
I feel like you wildly exaggerate and make stuff up.
Greg , if the day ever comes when I cannot out perform you on this forum, factually, I will quit and leave.
The truly intelligent, don’t need to tell others how intelligent they are.
You do that a lot here John when folks simply disagree with you and it is very telling.
Your insecurity is obvious.
Your cluelessness is obvious.
Bye. Have a good life.
Trump was the catalyst that got it started
Trump started a lot of things, such as Trump Steaks, GoTrump, Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, Trump: The Game, Trump Magazine, Trump University, Trump Ice, The New Jersey Generals, Tour de Trump, Trump Network, Trumped!, Trump Taj Mahal, Trump’s Castle, Trump Plaza Casinos, Trump Plaza Hotel, Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts, and Trump Entertainment Resorts - all of which have either failed outright or sought bankruptcy protection. Add that to being a twice impeached joke of a President, being involved in over 4,000 lawsuits, and a history of obvious daily lies that is rivaled by nobody else in history, it’s pretty clear that nothing that starts with Donald Trump has a prayer of going anywhere successfully.
They dont want success for the country, they want to burn it all down.
He did indeed start it. Others will carry the torch forward.
Progressives are about to get tossed onto the ash heap of history
Translation: Conservatives have long defined their politics in terms of what they wish to conserve or preserve — individual rights to discriminate against those they deem inferior, family values defined by they and their bible, religious freedom to demand a privileged position in America, and so on.
Total fantasy bullshit manufactured by conservatives to justify their rabid attacks on those they have judged as 'sinners'.
Woke: adjective - alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism
Conservatives of course would be anti-woke, they are opposed to anything that would shine a light on their history of injustice and discrimination that they continue to try and 'conserve' or 'preserve'.
The fight against 'woke' Americans has been going on far longer than decades.
Jefferson was one of those 'woke' Americans conservatives fought against in an effort to conserve slavery and inequality. Being aware to injustice is only ever a negative to those benefiting from and enabling the injustice. Conservatives have been benefiting from injustice in our society since our founding which is why they fight so hard to preserve the injustice and pretend that there is no injustice. They deny the effects of systemic inequality in our society because by definition inequality means one side is enjoying the benefits that another group is being denied. Rightwing white religious conservatives have always enjoyed an elevated position in American society, and they are fearful that their privileged position is being eroded by the majority who have been made aware of the inequality and are working hard to treat everyone fairly.
And of course, now these scum are encouraging 'radicalism' aka 'extremism'. This is why right wing extremists have been deemed more of a threat to America than Islamic terror.
Right-Wing Extremists More Dangerous Than Islamic Terrorists In U.S. : NPR
Too late, the rightwing has been corrupted for generations.
Fuck conservatives who think they are "saving" anything. They aren't saviors, they're neo-fascists trying to impose their beliefs on a society that is rejecting them and their archaic religious beliefs. They're pissed off because they're no longer considered relevant, and society doesn't treat them with the reverence and respect they used to.
Oh, so now conservatives are wanting their members to be 'woke' as well? But only 'woke' to the supposed 'injustice' of equality being inflicted upon those who believe they deserve to be treated as privileged and superior to other Americans who look different, pray different and refuse to kneel to the white Christian patriarchy.
Our civilization will be fine with or without conservatives, the only thing conservatives are trying to reclaim is their privileged position in American society.
Fuck all woke liberals, especially the woke ones who really have their heads up their asses. Thinking their cockamamie ideas advance freedom and liberty for the masses in any significant manner.
Dumbasses!
Things I don’t like:
Less liberty/freedom
A bigger even less efficient government.
Less government accountability
Less security, more crime.
Higher taxes
Higher costs.
Woke, progressive, dimbulbs
So ..... I guess I’m still conservative but for certain I’m not liberal by these definitions.
I'm not sure it matters. We still call people liberals even though the original meaning referred to what we would now call libertarians and liberals are now the party of racism and corporatism. Words evolve.
But there is some truth to the argument. After Obama's "fundamental transformation" of America, one isn't conserving the same thing they were decades ago. Conservatives used to be the go along and get along types who played by the unwritten rules and norms while Democrats flaunted them. The new right represented by the author doesn't want to criticize democrats for shitting on norms, they want to use Democrats precedents against them and play by the same rules Democrats have been playing by.