Conservatism is Dead; Long Live Conservatism

American Thinker ^ | February 14, 2008 | Selwyn Duke

[neverdem]

It seems like just yesterday that many were reading liberalism's epitaph.  After the Reagan years, Republican Revolution of 1994, retreat of the gun-control hordes after Al Gore's 2000 defeat and George W. Bush's two successful presidential runs, many thought conservatism was carrying the day.

Ah, if only.

We might ask: With conservatives like President Bush and many of the other Republicans, who needs liberals?

While the media has successfully portrayed the Republicans as the party of snake handlers and moonshine, the difference between image and reality is profound.  Bush has just spun the odometer, proposing the nation's first ever $3 trillion budget.  On matters pertaining to the very survival of our culture -- the primacy of English, multiculturalism, the denuding of our public square of historically present Christian symbols and sentiments -- Republicans are found wanting.  As for illegal immigration, both the president and presumptive Republican nominee support a form of amnesty.

Yet many would paint America as under the sway of rightist politics, and some of the reasons for this are obvious.  Some liberals know that the best way to ensure constant movement toward the left is by portraying the status quo as dangerously far right.  If you repeatedly warn that we teeter on the brink of rightist hegemony, people will assume that to achieve "balance" we must tack further left toward your mythical center.  Then we have conservatives influenced by the natural desire to view the world as the happy place they'd like to inhabit.  Ingenuous sorts, they confuse Republican with conservative, party with principles, and electoral wars with the cultural one.  But there's another factor: One can confuse conservative with correct.

When is the right not right, you ask?  When it has been defined by the left. 

The definition of "conservative" is fluid, changing from time to time and place to place.  Some "conservatives" embrace an ideology prescribing limited government -- one remaining within the boundaries established by the Constitution -- and low taxation.  They favor nationalism over internationalism; prefer markets mostly unfettered by regulation; eschew multiculturalism, feminism and radical environmentalism; and take pride in our history and traditions.   

But there have been other kinds of conservatives.  In the Soviet Union, a conservative was quite the opposite, a communist.  Then, when Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002, BBC News ran the headline, "Dutch far-right leader shot dead."  "Far-right" indeed.  Fortuyn was quite liberal by our standards; he was a pro-abortion, openly-homosexual ex-sociology professor branded a rightist mainly because he wished to stem Moslem immigration into Holland.  Moreover, his fear was that zealous Moslems posed a threat to the nation's liberal social structure. 

So here's the question: What definition of conservative would a communist or European statist conform to?  That which states, "One who favors maintenance of the status quo."  This brings us to a central point: 

As society is successfully transformed by those who detest the status quo, the status quo changes.  This means that the great defender ideology of the status quo, conservatism, will change with it.

"Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision." -- G.K. Chesterton

Both liberals and conservatives have shape-shifting visions.  This is because the definitions of conservative and liberal are determined by the "position" of the given society ‘s political spectrum.  Shift that spectrum left or right by altering the collective ideology of a nation, and the definitions of those two words will change commensurate with the degree of that shift.  This is why a Pim Fortuyn is viewed as conservative in Western Europe. 

This isn't to say there is no difference between liberal and conservative visions.  Liberals construct their vision based on opposition to the conservative one; conservatives' vision is a product of the now accepted, decades-old vision of the left.  Thus, liberals promote today's liberal vision; conservatives defend yesterday's liberal vision.

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." -- G.K. Chesterton

Perhaps one reason we're losing the culture war is that it's easier to convince people to try new liberal mistakes than retain old liberal mistakes that have been tried and found wanting.  Regardless, we will continue losing unless we change our thinking radically. 

Wars are not won by being defensive.  Yet conservatives are seldom anything but, because they've been trained to mistake defense for offense.  When 13 states voted to ban faux marriage in 2004, some proclaimed it a great victory for conservatism.  But it only was so if the conservatism you subscribe to merely involves maintenance of a liberal status quo, for it was a successful defensive action, not an offensive one.  Who was proposing the societal change to which the vote was a response?  The left was.  What kind of change was it?  One that would move us in the liberal direction.

So it is always.  We play defense when, instead of striving to eliminate hate-crime laws, we merely fight proposals to make "transgendered" a protected category; when we accept the Federal Department of Education and simply use it to effect "conservative" education reform (read: No Child Left Behind Act); when we simply try to ensure that the separation of church and state ruling is applied in "conservative" ways; when we combat the tax-and-spend crowd by not taxing but then spending; and when we preach against illegal immigration while accepting a culture-rending legal immigration regime.    

In contrast, the left is as steadfastly offensive as it is dreadfully offensive.  If its minions' scheme to legally redefine marriage fails today, they'll try again tomorrow.  If a socialized medicine plan doesn't pass congressional muster, it will reappear five or ten years hence.  If a new tax is too rich for present tastes, they'll wait for a more gluttonous palate.  Or they'll sneak a different new tax into an innocuous sounding bill or accept a slight increase to an old tax, then another, and another, and another....   They simply have to wait for the political spectrum to shift a bit further left.

This brings me to another important point.  We often talk of compromise, but does compromising with those who always advance but never retreat constitute fairness?  The left proposes policy, "settles" for a half-measure, and we leave the table thinking it an equitable outcome.  The problem is that since virtually all the changes suggested are liberal in nature, constant compromise and granting of concessions guarantees constant movement toward the left.  So we see erstwhile secure territory that is now under attack and revel in victory when we repel a few of the enemy's charges.  But we don't realize that we are defining victory as a reduction in the rate of loss of our heartland, while the enemy defines it as the expansion of its empire.  We compromise our way to tyranny.

It's like a young boxer who never throws punches and, consequently, becomes quite adept at blocking vicious blows -- and inured to taking them.  He emerges from the ring with a twinkle in black and blue eyes, flashes a smile revealing two lost teeth, proudly shows off bruised forearms and says, "Look, Dad!  I blocked ninety-percent of the punches today!  This is my greatest victory ever!" 

Yes, perhaps it's a figurative victory insofar as exhibition of defensive skill goes.  As for real victory, thus engaging opponents time and again doesn't even bring the Pyrrhic variety.  It only guarantees slow, torturous losses, perpetual injury, and one day, perhaps, a knock-out.  

This places the current presidential race in perspective.  When some Republicans lament the absence of good "conservative" primary contenders, they often act as if our statist front-runners are visited upon us by an invisible hand, as if their ascendancy was despite the culture and not because of it.  In reality, these politicians are merely products of a society that has long been in the grip of Gramscian operatives in academia, the media and Hollywood, leftists who have been crafting their message, scheming, indoctrinating, and socially re-engineering the public for decades.

Besides, can we really say those candidates aren't conservative?  With the political spectrum having shifted so far left, perhaps people such as Bush, McCain and Huckabee really are today's conservatives. 

Perhaps, just maybe, we (me, and you if you're in my camp) are something else. 

After all, I criticized Mitt Romney for forcing Massachusetts residents to buy health insurance, but a recent poll indicates that a majority of Republicans support such coercion.  And if some of these people are "conservatives," I'm certainly am not one. I'm a revolutionary. A cultural revolutionary.

I don't want to preserve the cultural status quo, I want to overthrow it.  Then we can pull the statist weeds up by the roots and burn them in freedom's fire, just like our Founding Fathers did.  Do you think they were conservatives?  Conservatives don't start revolutions; they simply make sure their shackles are made no heavier.

Political victory rests on cultural victory, and changing the culture starts with changing our mentality.  We have only two choices: We can be revolutionary.

Or we can be wrong.  

Contact Selwyn Duke

Page Printed from: at February 14, 2008 - 05:54:43 AM EST

[Lecie]

RE: Snake handling - Of course conservatives handle snakes and look at the results - hat bands, boots, belts, wallets, purses and some people even eat the damned things. RE Moonshine - We were way ahead of the curve on this one, too. Anyone who has seen the movie "Thunder Road" knows we were using "ethanol" before it became popular. I guess you could say - "We were ethanol before ethanol was cool".

[toddlintown]

And a third choice; You could watch Obama or Clinton sworn in next January while you nestle in your bed of principles.

[endthematrix]

Thank you Frankfurt School!

[ovrtaxt]

We might ask: With conservatives like President Bush and many of the other Republicans, who needs liberals?

Why, yes, we might.

[Rennes Templar]

We are a dying breed in a dying country.

[ovrtaxt]

You guys just won’t give up. Go ahead, keep cooperating with America’s destroyers, redefining the nation farther to the left every chance you get.

Some of us will remain over here with the Constitution and the Declaration, the plumblines of freedom. We will be judged by God and by history, remember.

[Cruz]

Excellent article

[Just mythoughts]

At this point it unless something else happens the majority of Americans will be voting for a SOSOS bought and paid for US President. There is no longer a distinction of ideologies we have finally become one.

[Just mythoughts]

At this point, unless something else happens the majority of Americans will be voting for a SOSOS bought and paid for US President. There is no longer a distinction of ideologies we have finally become one.

[Just mythoughts]

At this point, unless something else happens the majority of Americans will be voting for a SOSOS bought and paid for US President. There is no longer a distinction of ideologies we have finally become one.

[rodguy911]

Keep thinking like that its what the DBM/DNC is trying to get us to do, you fall right into their hands.

[rodguy911]

Keep thinking like that its what the DBM/DNC is trying to get us to do, you fall right into their hands.

[rodguy911]

Great post, many fall right into the DBM/DNC hands of its all our fault, but there are millions of us out there that do not and will not.

[Just mythoughts]

And a third choice; You could watch Obama or Clinton sworn in next January while you nestle in your bed of principles.

All three choices are SOROS bought and paid for candidates... We will be ONE come November.

[Just mythoughts]

Sorry ... proxy error ... was not my intent to post original two times... neither showed up on my screen so I tried again.

[ovrtaxt]

Some of us can still read and understand the words of our fathers, while others sell their own souls for thirty pieces of silver.

The globalists have maneuvered us into a lose/lose election. I’m waiting for the third choice to emerge.

[LowCountryJoe]

Then you have Newt Gingrigh out there saying the same thing and advocating a conservative separatist movement. The problem is, what Gingrich is proposing is really a plan to become more like populist Democrats -- Huckabee conservatives. I wrote the following in September on a different blog:

I took the opportunity to see Newt Gingrich (and some others) kick off his Solutions for America program which, for me, was moderately disappointing because of the large amount of populist drivel that was being pushed -- the largest applause lines were rhetoric concerning getting tough on illegal immigrants and allowing the teaching of God back in public schools while shrinking the size and scope of federal government and social security choice options garnered much less in comparison. This was in Atlanta, by the way.

Anyhow, just toward the tail end of the event, as Newt appeared as though his was wrapping up his speech, some guy from the audience in a suit (with clipboard and pen) stands up and says something that I couldn't quite hear. The gentleman repeats himself as the rest of the audience wonders just what in hell he's doing: "Mr. Speaker, will you be taking questions?". Newt, appearing not to have rehearsed this, basically tells the guy that, no, he's not going to be taking questions and that he's almost done with his speech. And then Newt says to the guy, after a short pause, "But I am going to be doing a book signing after the event, in the lobby, and you can catch up with me there."

I think that the guy was a plant, myself. I find myself susceptible to certain conspiracy theories whenever and wherever marketing is involved (and also at Vegas-style shows when weird 'random' events seem to happen with audience members being incorporated into the act somehow.

Will Newt run? I don't think so; he seems committed to bringing ordinary Democrats and ordinary Republicans (and everyone else, for that matter) to the table to propose solutions to America's biggest problems. I just have this feeling that the 'solutions' that people will come up with will rarely include allowing markets to facilitate optimal results.

No joke, at this event, the statements that garnered the least amount of applause...privatizing Social Security and limiting the size of government. What does that tell you about the state of conservatives? What does it tell you when the state of the Right has denigrated into perpetual pessimism; that people like Pat Buchanan can rail against capitalism being harmful and it gets traction; that somehow Romney and Huckabee (or, Coulter even sarcastically saying, Hillary) are more conservative than is McCain [Lord do I hate to defend McCain here but it is a legitimate gripe].

Conservatism, if really dead, is only dead because the people in the movement -- and not its leaders -- have embraced the idea of using government to achieve agendas and have instead rejected liberty.

When voters do this kind of thing, is it no wonder that the politicians will give the people what they want? Politicians pander and will deliver the goods that they believe their constituents want. And you know what, we're getting it! Republicans rejected Fred Thompson and Thompson believed he had to toughen his message on immigrants to make it as far as he did.

Nope, conservatism is not dead, classical liberalism is. If you doubt this and think that Reagan wasn't a classical liberal, then I really suggest you go and read (or re-read or listen to) his speeches. Liberty is what is dead. Conservatism lives...conservatism in its classical definition.

[LowCountryJoe]

I forgot the entire part about Gingrich sidling up to Democrats by soliciting their advice and having them give introduction and speeches at this event. Don’t forget, the ‘limited government’ Gingrich is one of the Medicare expansion’s biggest champions. What does that tell you?

[ovrtaxt]

Conservatism, if really dead, is only dead because the people in the movement -- and not its leaders -- have embraced the idea of using government to achieve agendas and have instead rejected liberty. When voters do this kind of thing, is it no wonder that the politicians will give the people what they want? Politicians pander and will deliver the goods that they believe their constituents want. And you know what, we're getting it!

Excellent post.