The Cringening of the Conservative Mind
Trump lost last year’s election. Some think it was robbed from him, and I’m inclined to agree, but that ultimately doesn’t matter now. What matters is that he’s no longer running the country, and he’s also no longer running the Republican party—at least as their top figurehead. Some have to wonder if he ever really was, though it’s fair to say that he at least tried.
Forty-Five’s most lasting political accomplishment, however, will probably turn out to be something that his presidency had almost nothing to do with. It’s not going to be a policy, his positions, or even the deals he negotiated while in the White House. It probably won’t even be the stated positions of the nominally “America First” populist platform that he whipped into existence in 2016. It won’t be any of these things for a number of reasons, ranging from his failure to deliver on his campaign promises to his continuing an Israel-first foreign policy despite his patriotic rhetoric. But most striking among these was his neglect to address what turned out to be the single most important issue of our time: the amount of control that the media and technology have over American minds.
The sentiment he harnessed and transformed existed before 2016, as most of us probably remember: the Tea Party movement had cut its teeth during the Obamacare protests in the late 00s, before it got co-opted by the sort of Koch-style big business interests that inevitably rub shoulders with Regime insiders. But at the beginning, the Tea Party was—like Occupy Wall Street—a grassroots attempt to address legitimate concerns. And like Occupy, it was intentionally derailed, but where Occupy served as the test bed of identity politics that would later be inflicted on the rest of the country, the Tea Party just had to be made to look like fools. Many of its proponents didn’t even realize it.
Trump’s most significant accomplishment will be the construction of an aesthetic. He built off of the rising tide of populist energy that Obama’s administration inadvertently encouraged by being so flagrantly divisive. But the reason this became “Trumpism” in 2016 wasn’t because he could articulate a platform any better than someone else could. It was because he knew how to craft an aesthetic. What was left of the Tea Party remembered America, but they didn’t necessarily know how to imagine it outside a loose and popularly-bludgeoned cultural sentiment. All Trump needed to do was in 2016 was brand that, and coalesce his platform around the images of American populism. It worked, as we can remember from just the ‘meme wars’ online; the image was far more important than the content.
But this is also where it all started to go wrong.
Conservatism In Context
Before we get to that, we have to address what exactly conservatism is. The Conservative Movement, with perhaps a capital ‘C’, begins with William F. Buckley, Russel Kirk, and the founding of National Review. This must be remembered, understood, and defined. We’ll get to this more in a moment.
Conservatism, at least as a general sentiment and as the ‘right wing’ of the American political spectrum, certainly extends much further back than that. Although criticism is warranted, Kirk’s 1954 volume The Conservative Mind authoritatively traces American conservatism back through to the thinking of Edmund Burke, a man generally reviled by the right for being too liberal. In reality, Burke’s thought typifies Anglo-Whiggish conservatism without going too overboard. Emphasis on blood and country, respect for traditions of a people over their fads and fashions, and the contextualization of law within the definitions of society and God all find their odes in Burke’s corpus. There’s little here to disagree with. Like many thinkers, Burke’s presumed proponents have done more damage to his credibility than either he or his critics ever could.
Burke didn’t call himself a conservative in any identitarian sense. Neither did the likes of George Washington or John Adams. The term, as mentioned just above, did not become the mark of a movement, a political identity, until the nineteen fifties. But the general ethos embodied behind the liberal/conservative conflict existed from the beginning of the American polity and is most easily evidenced by the fact that America has never had more than a two-party political system for any significant length of time.
Putting this all into context requires us to consider the 1960s. Conservatism became a platform that revolutionized the Republican party of its day. At the same time, the cultural revolution at-large culminated in 1968, which—following the racial, immigration, and sexual license reforms of that decade—changed the entire American social and political landscapes into the unrecognizable messes that they are today. Conservatism in 2021 sits about sixty years removed from the revolutions of the 1960s, and the ‘movement’ of Conservatism is cracking under the strain.
This isn’t the first time that the country’s landscape has shifted so radically and so quickly, but the fact that ‘Conservatism’ remains mired in the past is a little unique. Consider the fallout on the right after a previous American revolution. At the turn of the last century, the Southern Agrarians could be understood as the embodiment of the American right at the time, though they may not have necessarily considered themselves as such. Writing sixty years after the end of the American Civil War, John Crowe Ransom expresses a broadly American conservatism in his writing while dealing specifically with the fallout of that war:
There are a good many faults to be found with the old South, but hardly the fault of being intemperately addicted to work and to gross material prosperity. The South never conceded that the whole duty of man was to increase material production, or that the index to the degree of his culture was the volume of his material production. His business seemed to be rather to envelop both his work and his play with a leisure which permitted the activity of intelligence.1
Despite what the contemporary Conservative Movement wants to tell you, the mindless embrace of slavish material gain (under the auspices of ‘work ethic’) is not a right wing value. The sentiment expressed by Ransom is one of life considered in its proper context and oriented toward its proper ends. It presumes a world order governed by a natural law, which is knowable both by ordered reason and by the recognition of one’s culture and traditions. Ransom distinguishes this cause and ethos from the sort of industrialized modernism typified by the revolution that conquered the South.
And he’s key to distinguish this sentiment from the North per se. Passive readers of history frequently try to flatten the American Civil War into a conflict between industrialism and agrarianism—a true enough reading in a certain sense, but too-easily simplified into a view of history that concerns nebulous forces pulling the levers of mankind. That people have ideas goes without saying, but that people also make decisions, and that those decisions affect other people, must never be lost in the analysis. Ransom’s note on the war’s consequences for both sides, though he speaks abstractly, maintains this truth:
Industrialism, the latest form of pioneering and the worst, presently overtook the North, and in due time has now produced our present American civilization. Poverty and pride overtook the South; poverty to bring her institutions into disrepute and to sap continually at her courage; and a false pride to inspire a distaste for the thought of fresh pioneering projects, and to doom her to an increasing physical enfeeblement.2
There are two points to consider here. Firstly his specific use of wording: industrialism overtook the North, which we are to understand had a distinct American identity independent of industrialism itself. As we read Ransom’s essay, there’s the distinct indication that industrialism perverts what it touches; indeed, skepticism of industrialism, and the acknowledgment that a certain toleration of it is necessary, forms the core conflict that Ransom tries to address. How to maintain a cultural identity in the wake of the globalizing forces of industrialized modernity is a problem that never found a solution, if we can recognize that the fears of an agrarian in the 1930s are every bit as valid today as they were then.
The second point to consider is Ransom’s recognition of the fight that was lost. The Civil War was a total war, particularly for the Southerners who experienced conscription and quartering by their own kind, and the widespread pillaging, burning, and slaughter by Northern armies. That they lost that revolution was not something that could be rationalized away.
The praxis then, for Ransom and for the rest, was what to do next, and how to deal with the identity crises at the heart of the American polity. The union was tacitly accepted, if more begrudgingly by some than by others, but there remained no consensus on American identity—and the modern world, which Ransom understood in material terms as the industrializing impulse, threatened to change the identities of both the North and the South. As he approaches the conclusion of his essay, Ransom notes:
The question at issue is whether the South will permit herself to be so industrialized as to lose entirely her historic identity, and to remove the last substantial barrier that has stood in the way of American progressivism; or will accept industrialism, but with a very bad grace, and will manage to maintain a good deal of her traditional philosophy.3
And there you have it. American polity is defined by the contrasting opposites of progressivism versus traditionalism. Ransom’s essay seems to indicate that this uneasy interaction became the present crisis because the country’s acceptance of industrialism did not occur, in fact, “with a very bad grace,” at least not such that the country maintained any of her “traditional philosophy”. Instead, it accepted industrialism for a time, and then—in a move that I don’t think any American from 1930, even those acting in the worst of faith, could have predicted—it outsourced its entire economic utility to other countries and replaced its agrarian class with immigrants from the third world.
The Conservative Movement
By the 1950s, America had fully recovered from the Great Depression, conquered Europe and Japan in a few long years, bested their long-standing rival and former motherland in its imperial claims, and developed civilization-ending weaponry capable of annihilating cities with the push of a button. It also found itself deadlocked in cold war with communism, a threat by then recognized internationally as a scourge. Although communism had transformed from its Bolshevist roots into its various Soviet-styled Stalinist knockoffs, the revolutionary sentiment remained. America’s response to its spread was a policy of containment rather than head-on confrontation.
Enter William F. Buckley, Jr., the father of the Conservative Movement, so-called. His 1951 God and Man at Yale was published just he began working for a two-year stint at the CIA. Prior to that, while he as still at Yale, he had worked as an FBI informant and was a member of Skull and Bones. You can’t ask for a backstory that glows any brighter in the dark.
Since neither military involved in the Cold War wanted to run the risk of mutually-assured destruction, the war unfolded equally as much—if not more—in the departments of their propaganda ministries as it did in their armed forces. For the Soviets, that meant their foreign KGB departments and how they funded and engaged with subversive groups across the West. See any honest history of the American Civil Rights movement for more on that topic. For the Americans, it meant the CIA.
The Cold War, perhaps unintentionally, cornered Americans and the other Western powers into the entertainment of false dichotomies. Terms like capitalism, individualism, and freedom became emptied of their proper contexts to be stand-ins opposite of communism, collectivism, and authoritarianism. International finance came to be seen as the opposite of state-run centralized economics. As a result, by the 1980s, libertarianism became wedded to the Buckleyite Conservative Movement, despite being in direct opposition to anything that could be defined as conservative. But we’ll get to that later.
Ostensibly considered a polemic, God and Man at Yale reads like a combination of a college gossip rag and the immature political projections of a young liberal—partly because it is. Some of that can be forgiven, considering Buckley’s relative youth at the time of its publication; he was only twenty-five when he wrote it, though he’d experienced as much by then than most people twice his age today. So goes the life and times of an Ivy Leaguer in mid-century America, perhaps, whose wit and intellect attracted the attention of a quickly modernizing federal intelligence apparatus.
But to humor a brief example, try taking Buckley at his word. Writing on the economic texts of Yale’s curriculi, Buckley indulges in the sort of cliché apologias for the free market that conservatives have been repeating ever since:
It is clear that these economists believe that it is good economic (to say nothing of political and social) policy to redistribute income to a far greater degree than is already being done in the United States. […] Not one of them mentions contrary observations by highly reputable economists. Not one of them so much as pays lip-service to the highly respectable doctrine that it is anti-democratic to take from someone what the people in the first instance decide to give him. If several hundred thousand people, acting without coercion of any description, elect to pay Joe DiMaggio $100,000 a year for the privileged of seeing him at bat (and of course in a free economy, it is the people who, in their role as ultimate employers, pay the wages), and the government promptly turns around and absorbs the greater part of this sum, who is thwarting the most directly expressed will of the people?4
The movement was expressed here, in 1951, within the pages of God and Man at Yale: an ambiguous adherence to a vague sense of Christian rationalism, an emphasis on individualism, and an appeal to Ivy League-educated Yankee culture. Despite Buckley’s Catholic upbringing, and despite his apparent embrace of traditionalist Catholicism in the wake of Vatican II, religion occupied a private sphere to be dictated by individual conscience. The free market would provide, apparently, though anyone with sense can read the passage above and notice how utopian both his individualism and his free market really were.
At Buckley’s personal discretion, the Conservative Movement steadily cordoned off the definition of the term and systematically excluded all elements of the right that were odious to upper class, white-liberal sensibility. Consider whether the Southern Agrarian thought of, say, John Crowe Ransom would have had a place in the movement possessed by individualism and free enterprise. Of course, the Southern Agrarians were all Democrats, but the Democrats of the 1930s retained some shred of Southern conservatism that defined its popularity before the Civil War. The Democrats of the 1950s, on the other hand, did not.
And yet the sentiments expressed by the Southern Agrarians is undeniably of the same strain of conservatism that remains consistent to its namesake. It offers coherent definition of right and left that lack the false dichotomy imposed by Cold War ideology. Even if we offer Buckley the benefit of the doubt, his entire framework and the framework of the movement he spearheaded remains mired in Cold War politics. And this movement is so entrenched in the American elite that it exists as a self-serving machine that continues the work of exclusion so favored by Buckley himself.
The Conservative Movement, or Conservative, Inc., or whatever you want to call it, exists as a mainstay of socially removed, financially insulated, ideologically isolated globalists who have helped to turn America into a shopping mall. These are the same types who consider America to be a plot of land rather than a nation of people, a set of markets rather than a mass of communities with families, and a massive workforce of consumers rather than human beings with innate dignity and freedom of will. Leftist theorists like Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard or, if you’d prefer, Slavoj Zizek accurately diagnosed the hollowness of American consumer culture throughout the 90s, though without the insight or without the grit to admit that they didn’t know how it happened or whether or not it was bad.
The Conservative Movement, then, is not the answer to America’s decline, but a fundamental element of what is bringing it about. This is why the purges were so crucial. I’ve cited Gottfried’s note about Buckley’s purges before, but it’s worth repeating:
The conservative movement that came into existence in the 1950s… did not engage in purges only every now and then; nor did it remove people, with the cooperation of liberal journalists, because its targets were “wing nuts.” Its victims became wing nuts by virtue of having been purged and slandered. The purges were not a passing or merely ancillary aspect of conservatism; they were a defining characteristic of a movement whose function was to stake out ground where the Left had been a moment before.5
Defining Right and Left
There has always been a grift no matter what side of the political divide you’re looking at. The Conservative Movement itself, taken in a certain light, was a grift, though instead of by cash-hungry entrepreneurial types looking to make a name for themselves, it was mostly hocked by Ivy League-educated Martha’s Vinyard types looking to control a particular narrative. This narrative, ultimately, is the same one that the Southern Agrarians had identified as a question less than a half-century before: what exactly is American identity?
The Agrarians were by no means the only conservative group of the early 20th century, either. Nor was William Buckley’s movement the only conservative group of the mid century, although his has turned out to be the most relevant because of how successful his purges were. The Buckleyites succeeded in dictating American identity as a definition of markets. Americans were those who existed in an American trade zone, presumably born into it, but immigrating to it sufficed as well. Wealth, trade, and the preservation of a military force necessary to enforce it: these were the practical considerations and the fruits of Buckley’s movement.
Any relationship to be found with the Evangelical right, with Catholics in general, and with those who stood against the sexual revolution—those who found common ground with the Conservative Movement on social issues, in other words—was wholly secondary to the appeals made to upper-middle white liberal sentimentality. With this in mind, neoconservatism comes across far more as a result of the Conservative Movement shedding certain social pretenses rather than the reaction it claimed to be, though in hindsight, this is pretty obvious.
Despite some of the early contributors to National Review reading like the sort of traditionalist conservatives one would expect of old-time America, the sad truth is that the steady expulsion of people and ideas from Buckley’s movement resulted in a magazine that more or less parroted the interests of the ruling Regime. All-too familiar terms of villainy and perfidiousness like racism, bigotry, and—most effectively deployed by the Buckleyites—anti-Semitism found use as exclusionary language straight from the pens of Buckley’s conservatives. It wasn’t just the left that found use in ostracizing the right from ‘polite society’; the Conservative Movement did a good enough job of that on its own.
In the mean time, the Movement coalesced around the anti-socialist Cold War invective—an admirable task, except that it came at the expense of being able to define conservatism coherently. Socialism became an empty term that even its proponents found difficult to express, and capitalism—once understood as an economy powered by the privatization of banks—came to be a synonym for the “free market”. Where this free market actually was turned out to be anyone’s guess, so in practice, “free market economics” just came to mean whatever Wall Street was doing at the time; it only seemed to make sense because there was a self-described communist regime to offer a counterexample.
A lot of this should sound familiar, because as the decades wore on, conservatism came to mean the Conservative Movement. Conservative American thought bent ever more readily toward what the Buckleyite understanding of the term required. It got harder, throughout the 90s and 00s—especially after 9/11—to find self-styled conservatives who disagreed with any significant aspect of Buckleyite thought. Where the left ended and where the right began was harder to pin down other than in some pragmatic sense: these two political or media figures publicly eviscerate each other with regularity, so clearly one is left and one is right. Which is meaningfully which is anyone’s guess.
Again, we return to this issue of defining right and left, and what that means for American identity. Conservatives of a bygone era correctly attributed the distinctions to tradition and revolution, or less extremely, tradition and progressivism. In the case of the left, industrialism and modernity forced progressive ideology to a breaking point; by the sixties, it embraced revolutionary ideology and it hasn’t looked back. Although there were movers and shakers that encouraged this slide, it’s also not hard to chock up the shift to the progressive frame of mind itself. Abandoning the natural law, usually in pursuit of justifying sexual misbehavior, distinguished the revolutionaries from mere misguided liberals. As such, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that progressivism tended toward revolutionary fervor and radicalism in a way that conservatism doesn’t tend toward its own radical elements. Conservatism, both its ideology and those people who embrace it, simply aren’t cut from the same cloth.
That’s not to deny the obvious existence of right wing radicals, but it’s important to note that the most radical elements on the right tend not to associate with its more liberal elements, and vice-versa. Center-left liberals and progressives, on the other hand, generally pretend that the revolutionary radicals to their left simply don’t exist. They usually refuse to condemn the actions of their more radical accusers, while conservatives actively purge their own. We can attribute this to center-leftists tacitly endorsing their behavior, but there’s also a case to be made that they’re simply too stupid and misinformed to truly believe that leftist radicalism even exists—they’re the ones who seem to take mainstream media seriously, after all.
Most talk of individualism versus collectivism, however, or of capitalism versus communism, is found on the right. Again, the Cold War stirred up such definitions among conservatives last century, but the Cold War ended and their movement maintains the same ridiculous definitions. Up through Obama’s Administration, they parroted these talking points out of a legitimate fear of socialism creeping into the ranks of American government. While this is something that surely occurred, their kvetching came across as crying over spilled milk; the most dangerous and lasting effects of ‘socialism’ occurred long before Obama’s stint in office, and it was largely supported by the movement itself.
The reason their terms remain fixed in the Cold War paradigm isn’t even that they’re just dinosaurs who can’t change, either. Most of the people who believe in a meaningful distinction between individualism and collectivism aren’t old enough to remember the Cold War, anyway. Most of them, however, have grown up with the false belief that the libertarian-minded approach to government and political action is somehow more right wing than left, despite its embrace of progressive notions about man’s nature and his economic utility. American civics classes surely had their role to play in this confusion, but so has the Conservative Movement’s intentional disregard for actual conservative thinkers. Anyone who gets it right is called a kook by the elite white liberal establishment, and you’re called a racist or a bigot for reading or defending them. Any respectable thinking done on the topic usually comes from people who quickly find themselves without a platform to speak from.
When the Grift Turned to Cringe
So where are we at today?
Above, the Tea Party was used to illustrate the rising, seemingly ignored sentiment of disenfranchised Americans which Trump capitalized on during his 2016 election. That sentiment was still there in 2020, and for the most part, it very happily and very gladly wanted Trump to continue on for another four years. While some of their optimism was a little misplaced, it’s obvious—especially in retrospect—that whatever symptoms of decline his administration would preside over would be preferable to the alternative that we ended up with.
But in the wake of his loss, what direction has the Conservative Movement gone? His run resulted in a split within the movement: the Never Trump contingent of the Buckleyite and neocon holdouts, and the MAGA grifters. There was almost no middle ground left by 2020. The Never Trump crowd, seemingly irrelevant by 2018, still runs most of the party politics for the GOP. Granted, most of them dropped the “Never” part of the moniker and fell in line while Trump was president, but their adherence to the Regime didn’t falter. Most of the sitting Republicans in congress fit this bill, as became obvious during the handling of the electoral proceedings after November seventh—to say nothing of January sixth.
So the other side of this conservatism, the MAGA movement, what happened to that? Intuitively, Trump’s fall from grace was something that occurred from both the right and the left. The left so hated the man as to impeach him twice and even considered forcibly removing him from office. Although you could say that it’s hard to fall from grace when the left never dignified him with any to begin with, they still considered him president up until the events leading up to the January Sixth march.
As for the right, we watched him fail to level the playing field in preparation for 2020’s election, and we watched him subsequently flounder like an idiot as his political enemies so predictably closed in around him. And for the entirety of his administration, we saw him fire people who seemed most likely to carry out an American First agenda, only to be replaced by neoconservatives and Regime insiders that openly and actively undermined that same agenda. It’s hard to have sympathy for the failure of what seemed to be America’s last gasp for fresh air.
And yet, MAGA lives on. But it’s worse now. It’s embraced a delusional sense of self-satisfying and unrealistic American imagery that contradicts its own interests. It’s pro-cop, even as the cops revealed themselves to be stooges of a Regime that hates the American people and their way of life. It’s pro-military, even as the military purges MAGA-sympathetic servicemen and replaces them with people who are actually, proudly, and openly mentally ill. It’s pro-democracy, even as it readily acknowledges the ease and rampancy of electoral fraud and the problems with simply accepting election results without investigation. Most of MAGA is pro-gay or at least “tolerant” of homosexuality, oblivious to how sexual morality affects their families and communities. MAGA, as a movement, will tell you that it just wants to be left alone while it simultaneously prides itself on its obnoxious delusions of grandeur.
To illustrate one example: it should go without saying, but it’s not American to love Walmart. Walmart destroyed your communities and hamstrung your local economy before anybody knew who Jeff Bezos was. And yet, this seems to be the extent of the MAGA memory. In 2016, Free Trade’s exportation of labor and immigration’s crushing of wages were talking points that made MAGA a force to be reckoned with. Now it seems satisfied that people are working for Walmart instead of Amazon, as if this makes a difference.
With that in mind, let’s turn to a humble marijuana security guard: Ted Daniels.
A few years ago, Daniels gained mild notoriety for a clip of his helmet footage from a tour in Afghanistan. He’d been shot by an insurgent, disoriented, and proceeded to continue with his mission while wounded. Admirable behavior, to be sure, particularly considering that he was not a young man at the time. Prior to signing up for the military, Daniels’ life had already included a career as a cop.
He returned home and eventually started a security firm that specializes in guarding the now-prolific marijuana industry. Apparently he’s done quite well for himself, and he’s fashioned an image for the company as something of a biker gang comprised of ex-military vets that defends pot dispensaries. He’s done various news circuits in the past and is no stranger to the press.
So it’s not unreasonable, when one considers Daniels at face value, for certain words to come to mind. Business. Patriot. Legal weed. He saw the direction certain social policies were going and committed his expertise toward a burgeoning industry. You could even say that this expresses the entrepreneurial spirit of the great American experiment—that the business in question relies on pot is, perhaps, even more fitting.
Well, he’s running for congress out of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and he put together a campaign ad. Just as an ex-military marijuana security guard business perfectly expresses the modern entrepreneurial spirit, the bombastic obnoxiousness of Daniels’ ad perfectly embodies the MAGA movement of 2021. It’s an appeal to an utterly base, commercialized, abstract sense of Americana that defines itself purely materially. Guns, motorcycles, diners, wealth: that’s all MAGA has to offer up for images. To Daniels’ credit, he at least has something to support his message, unlike the absolute frauds over at Black Rifle Coffee who tried the same grift. But in a word: it’s cringe.
While we’re at it, let’s make a few things clear. Scranton leans blue pretty heavily. Not heavily enough to suggest that a self-styled outsider has no chance of winning, presuming that the usual tricks of the Democratic party aren’t completely entrenched in Scranton’s electoral process. But to say that the win is unlikely is itself quite a stretch. Notice the grift: run in a recognized blue region, pitch yourself as an unpopular America First candidate to appeal to Trump’s base, fill your rhetoric with knock-off phrases of Trumpian gusto, and open up campaign donations. We’ll just have to see how it pays off for him, but we’ve seen patterns like this unfold before.
The MAGA movement is absolutely full of this phenomenon, and yet it keeps falling for the grift. All of its commentators and public figures embrace a crass, translucent money-centered dishonesty that should be making the Conservative Movement scratch their collective heads: “wait, it was that easy? We just had to wave a flag and eat hot dogs and they’d just give us all their money?” Well, fifty years ago, they wouldn’t, but in a country that the Conservative Movement has helped hollow out and destroy, desperate times call for desperate measures. The supporters of the MAGA movement see someone like Mitch McConnell or Mitt Romney and rightfully recognize them as snakes; but they can turn around and see someone like Ted Daniels and think, heck yeah. Daniels at least built a business that doesn’t have a Wall Street mailing address, but if he thinks that talking about swamps and glorifying guns is a platform, he’s got another thing coming.
But maybe this is too harsh on MAGA. This is, after all, a movement supported by people who recognize that the American political system has totally wronged them. Most of them intuitively recognize that they aren’t represented by their elected officials, and some might even recognize the degree to which corporate interests have have colluded with the so-called democratic process. But that’s no excuse for supporting the grift.
Waiting for the Mass Movement
What we need to remember, and very seriously take to heart, is that people are not going to wake up. There will be no Great Awakening, no great mass movement that gains broad appeal, no grassroots revolution, or ‘retrogradation’, if you’re daft enough to use such contrarian terminology. The last gasp of such a feeling should have been felt during Trump’s administration. The point the country has reached now, at the whims of the Regime and its government, is one that will not let 2016 happen again.
Maybe you’re tired of hearing this, but Trump had a chance to strike at their stranglehold over American consciousness, and he didn’t take the shot. Even if his plan would have failed, or even if it wasn’t a good one, if he’d at least expressed that a plan existed and attempted to implement it, he could take some credit for doing his best to avoid the reality of 2021. Instead, he left office with Silicon Valley stronger than its ever been in its entire existence, and an unimpeachable media apparatus that seems to have realized that ‘credibility’ among most Americans was never really the point. They shape the narrative, and the people in charge behave according to that narrative whether they believe in it or not.
But 2020 happened and is behind us. The nation, for the most part, accepted the infliction of anarcho-tyranny at levels utterly unprecedented and unimagined except by the most extreme of the right wing. Let us not forget: cities were on fire by mobs of Regime-championed ethnic minorities at the same time that local civil law enforcement was arresting soccer moms for bringing their kids to playgrounds. Burn these images into your head. This is the future. It hasn’t changed.
And yet, nonetheless, nothing happened. There was no great uprising. There was no great reaction. The most that could be attested to is a mob led by federal informants being let into the Capitol building by DC police so they could take selfies and put their feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. Except we know how that turned out: numerous Americans still rot away in extra-judicial solitary confinement while Donald Trump gives speeches at CPAC. There’s your leader. That’s your government. And the guy whose team stole the election fair and square can barely read a teleprompter and eats his own boogers. It’s comical how far the American empire has fallen in so short a time.
The Conservative Movement, meanwhile, tells you to mask up to protect yourself from the Delta Variant (TM). If you’re under fifty, you have far greater cause to fear the flu, if the CDC’s own numbers are to be understood. But Mitch McConnell will tell you to get an experimental vaccine that alters your mRNA. Ben Shapiro will, too. Sean Hannity bravely dons a CIA pin on his lapel when he addresses his viewers on Fox News. The last vestige of hope you might have as a normie card-carrying Republican is Tucker Carlson, a man who is very obviously stringing the Murdoch syndicate along until he gets his pink slip.
There will not be a mass movement of people who will retake the American government. Electoral reform does not address the root of the problem, and that’s if we’re optimistic enough to expect electoral reform to even happen. Regime change is not, almost without exception, determined by massive movements swelling up from the grassroots. They’re determined by dedicated minorities hell-bent on changing the direction of a given group of people. Either this will happen or it won’t.
Conservatism has become cringe. There’s no escaping that. The Buckleyite movement absconded with the term and it’s going to take a while before “conservatism” can get its proper definition back. And that’s affected the current strain of American populism, too. Whatever your own praxis is going forward, it should at least include this: drop the term “conservatism”. When grifters come out and declare that gay rights are conservative values, agree with them. When they tell you that choosing whether or not to murder your unborn son is conservative, let them know that if they say so, then surely it must be true. When they support Israel at the expense of American interests, call you an anti-Semite, and declare that immigration is a positive force for American sovereignty, recognize that this is exactly what conservatism is, now. Don’t fight over the term. Let them have it. You need a new term, because the sad truth is that conservatism has not been defined according to its namesake for probably longer than you’ve been alive.
1Ransom, John Crowe, “Reconstructed but Unregenerate,” from I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, ed. Lewis Simpson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 12.
2Ibid, 15.
3Ibid, 22.
4Buckley, William, God and Man at Yale, 50th Anniversary Edition, (New York: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2002), 52.
5Gottfried, Paul, “The Logic of Conservative Purges”, from The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement, eds. Gottfried & Spencer, (Washington Summit Publishers, 2015), 30.
