Amerika

Conservatives find themselves in an interesting place. The stolen election and refusal to investigate proved to us that our civilization has reached terminal decline, and that people are looking for something different.

At the same time, conservatives have for years defended the status quo with the notion that we can patch it up and keep it working for another few centuries. Over time however the Left has held sway in policy and actions.

We now need to offer a better civilization to our voters. This means one that avoids the problems of the past, including the new problem we have added to the list, Communist takeover by an alliance of media, big business, diversity, China, and Democrats.

Unfortunately for us, very few conservatives know more of conservatism than a defense of the status quo against the constant onslaught of neurotic ideas by the Left.

Part of this comes from the fact that the Left had a first move advantage: they distilled politics, a complex subject, to a simple idea, “equality.” Conservatism has no competing short definition.

The closest we get to a truncated version is to say that conservatism means the preservation of order, in contrast to the liberalization of order so that individualism has fewer consequences, especially through honoring what has worked best in all of human history.

We are preservationists, working against the tide of seemingly endless human attention-getting and power-seeking behavior, by which people attempt to change the order for their own benefit and make someone else pay for it.

The closest that most get to that now, however, is to believe that we defend some traditions which we think create the good parts of the status quo, but that also leads us to defend some of the changes that the Left has introduced.

Much of our confusion arises from the “redefinition” of conservatism back in the 1960s:

“He collapsed in that book religion, economics and political ideology,” Bogus says, producing the mix of ideas we recognize today as conservatism: free-market capitalism, support for American military actions, libertarianism and social conservatism.

“It was Buckley who made that coalition. He held within him all … of those beliefs. He was what we call today a neoconservative, a social conservative and a libertarian.”

Though he later reconsidered his position, Buckley at first was staunchly opposed to the civil rights movement. “The magazine is, from today’s perspective, quite shocking in its views about race,” Bogus says.

Buckley gave conservatism a new face: Christian Libertarianism. Instead of trying to make a working social order, conservatives focused on defending their own rights in the civil rights model, which made them accept the Leftist ideal as a foundation.

Oops.

We have now seen that this has backfired massively and resulting in conservatives in public becoming just another version of Leftist, one that adds to the Leftist canon a belief in free markets, defense, Christianity, and autonomy.

This approach has failed to conserve both social order and the freedom of the individual, as we see that Leftists have entered their final phase where they no longer fear to be Communist lite.

These neo-Communists have erased your freedom of speech, stolen an election, and are in the process of demonizing conservatives and laying the groundwork for their prosecution under domestic terrorism laws.

As others have pointed out, reducing conservatives to Libertarians has alienated us from our basic mission, preserving social order by upholding the best of our history:

The coalition of economic libertarians, social conservatives, and foreign policy hawks that kicked off the Reagan revolution, vanquished stagflation, and won the Cold War is rightfully proud of its accomplishments. But that bargain—whereby each camp took charge of its own portfolio—left wide swaths of public policy in the hands of a small clique of market fundamentalists. They shared few values or intuitions with conservatives, who were themselves consigned to talking about “social issues.”

A big tent defaults to what it has in common that is also regarded as inoffensive, so conservatism under Buckley steadily backed off from talking about social order and saw everything as a market problem instead.

However, as someone said during the Clinton election, “it’s the economy, stupid.” People care first about what is closest to them, namely feeding their families, and they associate this with the economy.

Perhaps they should look more at taxes which both sabotage the economy and make it harder to feed their families, but people need simple answers. They do not understand how the economy works, only how they experience it.

The problem with seeing everything as a market problem is that this conflicts with our need to conserve things that have value outside of the markets: nature, culture, heritage, traditions, and sane behavior, including relative chastity and realism.

One conservative suggests the type of outlook that you have seen around here for some time, based on preservationism, which aims beyond the markets to conserve civilization instead of defending markets so that individuals can (theoretically) choose to live civilized Libertarian lives among the Leftist chaos:

In short, the language of conserving — of stewardship — is foreign to many conservatives. Thus, we have a significant group of people who call themselves conservative but who have lost the inclination (as well as the practice) of conserving. Recovering this disposition is a key component to revitalizing American conservatism.

1. Conservatives must accept the responsibility to care for the natural world.

2. Stewardship must extend beyond the natural world to include the preservation of culture, communities, and institutions.

3. Effective stewardship of a place or an institution requires that we learn to speak in terms of proper scale, for individual actions and public policies are effective only to the extent that we can comprehend problems in concrete terms.

4. Politically, conservatives must champion a recovery of federalism, which has been so badly damaged in recent decades.

5. Any credible and effective conservatism must make the expansion of middle-class property a priority.

The Buckleyite “Christian Libertarian” dream died during the Obama years, when it became clear that the Left will not leave us alone, and depending on them to do that only made them strong enough to eradicate us (which they intend to do).

Our existence presents a threat to them because Leftism is a conjectural philosophy based on a begging-the-question fallacy. If we assume that equality solves all problems and is the highest morality, then Leftism must be good and necessary.

However, the existence of people outside of the Leftist equality envelope who are experiencing thriving and fulfilling lives serves as a counter-example which shows that we do not need Leftism, and other methods exist.

Since these methods are history-honored, they suggest — by the fact of existing — that Leftism is not only simply one option of many, but perhaps a bad option because it will both not achieve its goals and bring about destruction.

Conjectural belief systems collapse when the assumptions used to justify them are shown to be incorrect. Happy conservatives show that Leftism is unnecessary; Leftists must eradicate conservatives in order to feel “safe.”

That means that we must return to the question of civilization, which requires us to have a highest abstract value of goodness, instead of equality (as on the Left) which is a proxy for goodness.

Goodness includes a sense of well-being which only comes from having a non-failing civilization:

I have discussed the importance of focusing on material concerns instead of ideology (such as the nonsense of representation and “being seen”). But make no mistake: material well-being is a tool, a means to the end of living a full and good life. And maximizing material well-being does not necessarily maximize our spiritual well-being; in fact, I would argue, it will sacrifice many meaningful things at the “altar of growth” and GDP.

In other words, as usual, humans have become swayed by methods and forgotten goals. GDP may be a method of ensuring that prosperity exists, but it replaces the goal of having a whole society of health, including well-being.

This leads to a situation where Buckleyism replaced conservatism with a Leftist-friendly “Christian Libertarian” version, creating a status quo where conservatives have no idea who they are or what they want.

Trumpian populism rose into this void by emphasizing the “hidden elephant” shadow issues which had been widely denied: nationalism (contra globalism and immigration), Tea Party small government (contra entitlements and the administrative state), and social conservatism.

However, we may have to think bigger and instead focus on conserving civilization itself, separating means/methods from ends/goals. If we do that, everything else becomes a question of utility toward that purpose.

This gives conservatism a new mandate to be not a force of resistance to “inevitable” Chinese Leftism, but a change agent toward a rising civilization:

Mainstream conservatism today cannot reverse these potentially fatal trends and cannot conserve the American way of life because it lacks clear understanding of its own purpose.

This requires us to look toward civilization as a commons — with value in itself based on how organized, sane, and healthy it is, in contrast to the third world norm of corrupt, insane, and low hygiene — which we have to defend against all other forces by insisting that it has inherent value.

In our highly-regulated, tax-and-spend-driven era, that includes the bizarre markets produced by our hybrid socialist and capitalist system, which view the commons as a resource to be consumed instead of a source of value:

This is a place where the market fails to meet the public’s expectation. In an unregulated market, it makes no sense for an investor to spend money to take precautions that might be needed only once a decade. If they do, another generator will not and will thus be able to undercut the more cautious generator’s price. This is akin to the concept in economics known as the tragedy of the commons where a cost (in this case of making generation more reliable) is not fully reflected in the production of a good or service but ultimately will be borne by society generally – in this case in form of plumbing bills to fix broken pipes, of example.

He refers to the classic study of how collectivized self-interest results in the destruction of resources, including nature, heritage, culture, and civilization:

Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of -1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

In other words, without having our fundamental goal as preserving civilization, we default to “freedom,” which means that humans have no check on their narcissistic consumption and promptly tear down and carry away the things needed to produce value.

Those things include functional institutions, homogeneous populations, trustworthy governments, organic culture, and the population of higher-IQ who make up the middle class and above that drive innovation and productivity.

When we give up on taking control of our government and focus on preserving individual liberties alone, the people who want control seize the government through a dark organization formed of allegiance to equality instead of civilization.

This happened in the 1960s in America, and resulted in the creation of a cabal within government, industry, and media that now serves as a tyrannical ruler despite not being a single organization:

What we now have, more and more, is a one-party oligarchy. This was the nemesis of the Trump presidency. Like all oligarchies, ours rules by coercion, not consent. It exerts its power primarily by constraining allowable, expressible opinion: it knows that the thing which cannot be said eventually becomes that which cannot be thought. And the chief thoughts it wishes to suppress are objections to its own misrule.

A one-party oligarchy, by definition, is a dictatorship; when it rules for its own good, and not ours, it is a tyrannical dictatorship.

Humanity has known for at least 2500 years that tyrants love diversity because it creates an anti-majority group that will not just vote for free stuff, but anything that will break the majority and force them to serve.

Resentment appears in all human interactions, but diversity makes it worse. On the back of the foreign-origin — i.e. not ethnic Western European, like the pioneer founders of America — population, the Left has found a ticket to permanent power:

“[W]e see what the Democratic Party is — it’s a socialist party now. They’re all in to socialism,” Scott said on FNC’s “America’s Newsroom.” “So, the Republicans’ civil war is absolutely canceled. We are going to focus on issues. I won my races, three general elections, one primary, because of issues. That’s what’s going to happen. The Biden administration is making it easier for us. They are killing jobs. They won’t open schools. You know, open borders. All these things. And what we are going to be known for, we are going to help families.”

He continued, “Republicans are going to be known and we are going to win because we care about your job, your kids’ education, we are going to fund the police — we are not going to what the Democrats are doing is defund the police — we are going to make sure we have strong military because we want to defend our freedoms, and we want to keep our freedoms. We are not going down the path of socialism. So, it’s important for us to make sure we focus on the issues, and the civil war of the Republicans, it is absolutely canceled.”

This group votes for socialism not just for the free stuff but because this free stuff comes at the expense of the majority, which means that the majority loses power and the coalition of minorities — soyboys, boxwine thots, homosexuals, minorities, transsexuals, neurotics — gains power as a result.

In my view, conservatives can never escape the fact that we are a majority party, which means that we uphold a homogeneous society for the simple fact that these work, while heterogeneous societies self-destruct.

Even more, we will always find ourselves defending other methods that work, like chaste heterosexual families, because these keep civilization alive. Otherwise, homosexuals and others create a tragedy of the commons where marriage applies only to the current generation and its sacred role in perpetuating families is lost.

Further, we cannot endorse equality in any form because it inherently destroys the competition we need to ensure that people in power are competent. Racial and ethnic diversity simply works to erode any remnants of competence.

This places us at odds with the direction that the Left wants to take the country, and shows how wrong Buckleyism was all along.

For us to fight the Left, we need to assert the ideal of America against their ideal of equality:

A restored Right must take two broad approaches. First, its immediate energies must focus on disrupting and weakening the Left’s institutional centers of power. Only parity of power can moderate the Left’s fanaticism. A new Right needs a tougher, more sober approach to the Left’s assets: the adversarial press and media, Big Tech oligopolies, and corrupt universities. This approach requires new legal strategies on issues that the professionalized Right is too scared to touch; bold new actions in the states to liberate them from the Left’s consolidation of powers; and large-scale activism. New strategies are needed for a new world.

Second, and most important, the Right needs to reclaim its mental and moral toughness, and that can come only from reviving its purpose — the preservation of the American way of life.

The “American way of life” comes from Americans, a term which retains its original meaning of ethnic Western Europeans who came here as pioneers and founders, not people who simply want to take advantage of a system.

Equality opposes that. It says that anyone who comes here and claims that their gender is “American” can take part in our system and sway it to their advantage, which means that over time the majority will be destroyed and replaced.

That in turn requires us to tackle the sacred dirt taboo which holds that indoctrinating people in our values, politics, and ways allows “America” to live on as an ideological construct through the suicide of its people:

What once separated the United States from the rest of the world was not the Constitution, but what used to be called the “genius” of the regime—the combination of history, geography, culture, and laws that separate one nation from another. The spirit of a people and a nation resides in how these different dimensions of life interact.

The above misses the point of the founding of America: it took the people fleeing the dying of the most prosperous civilization ever created, Western Civilization, and filtered them for the hardy, self-directed, and realistic.

We need those people in order to exist. Without them, we cease to exist. With diversity, we lose them over time. For conservatives to conserve America, conservatives must oppose multiculturalism and other forms of equality.

Currently, conservatives feel great pressure to simply adopt a version of what is socially acceptable as a means of perpetuating conservatism, but as is the case of America, if you change what you are in order to exist, you self-destruct.

We need to confront the duality of equity and equality and see them as the same:

You might like the soothing strains of the word ‘equity’. The first definition in my dictionary says ‘equity’ is ‘the state, ideal, or quality of being just, impartial, or fair’. And that’s just what the Biden diktat says: ‘The term “equity” means the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals…’ But it then goes on to specify that by ‘all individuals’ it means some individuals (‘Black, Latino’, etc.). In other words, we’re going to pursue impartiality by being partial to certain groups and (just as important) by penalizing other groups.

You should not be surprised by this semantic sleight of hand. It is a staple in the armory of totalitarian enterprise. George Orwell gave classic expression to the gambit in Animal Farm. The comrades were used to seeing the slogan ‘All animals are equal’ emblazoned in large white letters on the side of the barn. But then one day they noticed the addition of a codicil: ‘All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.’

If you object ‘But that’s not what “equal” means!’ then you have a lot to learn about the logic of leftist redress. An element of reversal, of things turning into their opposites, is always at the heart of the program.

In current cuckspeak, repeated everywhere by people of weak will, “equity” means that everyone has a state of equal wealth, power, and status, where “equality” means that we all get treated the same way regardless of how that results in unequal levels of wealth, power, and status.

This sleight-of-hand ignores the fact that if you commit yourself to equality, but achieve unequal results, you have proven that “equality” as a concept is nonsense. Equality debunks itself with unequal results.

Recognizing this, the American founders referred to us as “created equal” meaning that creation was the limit imposed on equality. We all get life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but that is all we get.

Like the American Constitution, this statement attempted to limit equality much as our “checks and balances” tried to limit mob rule (the impolite but accurate term for democracy).

Democracy by definition rewards whoever can form a mob that gets powerful enough to seize 51% of the vote so that it can oppress the other 49%, usually by taxing, regulating, and legislating it into nonexistence.

We see this pattern many times through history. Societies adopt democracy, which replaces culture. Government then imports foreign labor, which promptly outbreeds and outvotes the natives, who then disappear from history.

Trumpian populism represents an intermediate step out of this ruin by reversing the decline, or in other words, redirecting us toward patriotism instead of equality, so that realism prevails through rewarding the good and demoting the bad:

Limbaugh had forever demanded, especially after Republicans lost presidential elections, that the party accommodate conservatives, not the other way around. Yet there he was, saying conservatives had to “mature” into their party. But it wasn’t the party establishment he was referring to this time; it was a “new party” of the same name but changing voters — blue-collar but also multiracial, nationalist, and consumerist.

For the time being, it can be multiracial in that people of all races recognize that socialism is an abyss and that killing off the ethnic Western European middle class means that everyone will be less prosperous, powerful, and important as America declines to third-world status.

In the long term, however, it means that we cannot be a place without a homogeneous ethnic group as its sole constituent. It means that we cannot be tolerant of behaviors which go against our ancestral ways.

We are Western Civilization, pioneer division West, and nothing can change that. Everything that we have added since has been a mistake, and removing those mistakes made in the name of equality represents our only path to “progress” and health.

As Roger Scruton opined long ago, we must love what we are and who we are:

I think that, in the end, there is something that unites all conservatives, which is that they are pursuing something they love. My view is that the Left is united by hatred, but we are united by love: love of our country, love of institutions, love of the law, love of family, and so on. And what makes us conservatives is the desire to protect those things, and we’re up against people who want to destroy them, and it’s very simple.

Conservatism preserves continuity of past through future. That means that we preserve our origins instead of erasing them, and avoid the tragedy of the commons by placing value first on our civilization and its continuity.

We face people who are not thinking about consequences, but themselves in the moment and the sensation of power they feel by seizing control. For them, occupying and conquering America is a sport not a question of leadership:

But it is also stark truth that cuts deeper almost two decades later: too many people still view geopolitics as sport, the consequences (mass death, propping up tyrants, terrorism, hunger, you name it) barely registering as important.

They think in terms of the present tense only. To them, gaining control through equality means that they have the power that they have always sought. And then what? They have no goals with their power, only the goal of power itself.

By considering them as legitimate contenders for power, the Right lost ground by ignoring the fact that these people are blight, not an alternative that brings great things. They consume what is, in a tragedy of the commons, and then move on.

For the Right to rise again, it must clarify its message to one of achieving a healthy civilization through history-honored order, and deny any attachment to Leftist ideals such as diversity, equality, mob rule, and socialism.

Tags: angelo codevilla, conservatism, democracy, diversity, equality, republicans, roger scruton, rush limbaugh, socialism