Amerika

When solving a crime, investigators look at three major factors: means, motive, and opportunity. The first indicates whether the individual was capable of committing the crime, the second to the benefit they derive from it, and the third to their presence at the time it was committed.

Means factors in the least, mostly excluding small people from physically violent crimes. Motive often unlocks the case, since if someone gains money, power, sex, revenge, or status from an act, they are more inclined to do it. Opportunity means a timeline of those who could be at the location of the crime.

In the same way, when we look at politics, we should stare most closely at the interplay between motive and opportunity. Politicians, bureaucrats, media, teachers, scientists, and others have the opportunity to exploit certain situations, and this creates the basis for motive.

Originally few had a motive because their crimes were likely to be detected. In diversity societies, that likelihood goes down… way down. Suddenly doing the right thing so you become trusted and can have a long career is less of a sure bet than the quick score and flight to a non-extradition area.

Let us look at the motivation of the conservative politician. He needs to make claims that both interest and fool a wide group of people into thinking that these are “real action” and not just another distraction from the Big Issues, although they are of course that.

If he tackles big questions, he will face all sorts of adversity and be mobbed out of office by the media and other public figures wailing about him. If he ignores a problem, he can lose elections. If he creates a non-solution and doubles down when it fails, he seems like a real man of action.

For this reason, you find conservatives tackling symbolic issues that leave the actual problems untouched. This fools enough of the voters that it wins out, and those who know better become marginalized because the other voters do not want to feel like the fools that they are.

Over the last decade, social conservatism — the part that focuses on human behaviors that contribute to culture and thus civilization — has risen over fiscal conservatism, mostly because the latter had caused conservatives to retreat from public life and pursue “personal” values.

Conservatives focusing on social conservatism however tend to choose symbolic issues over practical ones, which allows those in power to keep claiming to be men and women of action while doing nothing more than collecting donations for the good fight and then handing power to the Left.

In every one of these cases, it was clear that thanks to existing law, these battles would never be won, only temporarily occupied before the Left overturned them in the next court case, executive order, or legislative act:

• Prayer in schools: like most of the items listed here, this one was doomed by the 14A which goes beyond the Bill of Rights to mandate government-enforced equality, which means forced pluralism, or in other words, we can no longer honor religious practice simply because the majority follow it. Pluralism means you accept all comers, so if you have prayer time, the Satanists are going to set up tables next to the Wiccans, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Rastafarians, and Ba’alists. You cannot have prayer in schools that is associated with any single religion; this is not “separation of church and state,” but a civil rights issue. Conservatives pushed hard for this anyway, becoming the religious fanatics their enemies said they were in the eyes of voters.
• Flag burning: similarly during the 1990s conservatives decided that it would make good copy to try to make it illegal to burn the American flag despite a long history going back to the Bill of Rights that supported political expression, even if this was originally intended to be written or spoken of a scholarly bent. However, the patriotism drive was strong, so conservatives came down hard for censorship, making them seem to be the fanatics that their enemies say they are.
• Satanic panic: looking for a way to unite their base, conservatives in the 1980s thought that using the symbol of evil, Satan, as a target would both explain the decay wrought by 1960s reforms and orient everyone toward the good. Instead, like most targeting of effects without causes, this means-over-ends experiment led to just about anything fun getting categorized as “Satanism” by nitwits and drove several generations permanently away from conservative ideals.
• Transgenderism: conservatives have long pointed out that sexual liberation has made people into whores for sale at competitive rates, but instead of attacking it directly, they wage little proxy wars by following the lead established by the Left. Neurotics brought pornographic books into schools and fostered Drag Queen Story Hours everywhere, but instead of demanding pluralism — that our values be “equally” represented as a special interest — conservatives have embarked on a series of censorship-heavy laws and regulations, all of which are going to be overturned on civil rights grounds.
• Abortion: this provides the classic example of conservative self-defeat by The Committee Problem, since in any group of conservatives most people oppose abortion in the abstract, but a slim majority want it to remain legal until the problems of sexual liberation are gone. However, to pander to their committee, conservatives like to fly the flag of strong opposition to abortion, only to have the Left overturn those laws and court cases within six months. Despite seeming to unite the Right, it makes many of us stay home and unites the Left against us because we seem to be coming for their civil rights.

This is not to say that social conservatism is nonsense, only that if you allow it to become a product, it will pander to the lowest common denominator among special interests on the committee formed of all conservative voters, and therefore will skip big problems and focus on symbolic activities.

Of course, looking into actual causes will never be popular because it requires waging war against some of the bigger problems in our modern world, and these are central enough to modernity itself to debunk it and imply that we need systemic change of the largest scale.

This upsets normies, who are defined entirely by their pathology of rationalizing whatever happens as good so that they can continue their pursuit of bourgeois individualism, which requires ignoring the consequences of actions in order to focus on profit and popularity.

Conservatives are not immune to the normie psychology and, because so many want any excuse to believe that our system can keep working with just a few tweaks, lots of people have gotten very rich selling conservatives inaction disguised as righteous outrage and patriotism.

Tags: abortion, flag-burning, normies, prayer in schools, satanic panic, social conservatism