“[Conservatism] never conserves anything.
“Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the
progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of
growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation.
“What was the resisted novelty
of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now
conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow
be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to
be denounced and then adopted in its turn.
“American conservatism is
merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards
perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near
its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it
be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless
because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle.
It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea
of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a
protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that
its ‘bark is worse than its bite,’ and that it only means to save its manners
by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it
now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to
keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having
nothing to whip.”
This
commentary by Robert Lewis Dabney is a century old, but it could easily have
been composed by any remotely attentive observer of the conservative movement
today.
The more things change, the more they
stay the same.
Recently,
during an email exchange with a friend, himself a veteran student of the
American conservative movement—or what I not so affectionately refer to as “Big
Conservatism,” or “the Big Con”—my interlocutor remarked that he was genuinely
skeptical that the United States would be any different than it is right now in
the absence of those Republican politicians and their apologists in the
so-called “conservative media” who style themselves opponents of the left.
I had no answer, for neither can I
discern the difference that it could make if the Big Con disappeared from the
scene tomorrow. The following thought-experiment should suffice to make
the point.
Suppose
an alien from another planet descends upon the Earth and enrolls in a course
that, for present purposes, we’ll just call “American Politics 2019.”
Here, our alien learns that in America there exists two national parties, the
Democratic Party and the Republican Party, the former representing the
interests of those citizens who tend to be more “liberal” or “left-leaning,”
the latter those who are “conservative” and more “right-leaning.”
And,
of course, our alien is fed all of the standard ideas associated with “the
left” and “the right,” ideas gathered mostly from the platforms of both
parties, but also from professional partisans in Washington D.C. and the
various national media.
Now, imagine our alien’s surprise when,
upon completion of his course, he spends some more time in America and realizes
the following:
(1)Not only have tens of
millions of preborn human beings been killed in their mothers’ wombs since the
Supreme Court of the United States declared decades ago that the country’s
Constitution affirms “a right” for a woman to “abort” her “unborn” child; Democrats—mainstream
Democratic politicians, including presidential candidates—now openly, happily,
insist that women have the right to commit infanticide, to
kill their babies after they have been born—even as
conservatives continue to insist that they are “pro-life.”
The
death rate, in other words, among the preborn climbs unabated as the rule
proscribing abortions after the first trimester is revealed to be the strategic
ploy that it had always been for leftists as they maneuvered to normalize
filicide.
(2)The
national government is more consolidated and centralized than it has ever been
at any time in American history. The Constitutional design ratified by
America’s Founders, one enacting a union of sovereign states with a federal
government, has been subverted with such frequency and shamelessness that it is
all but nonexistent.
The federal government envisioned by the men who
framed and ratified the Constitution is now a national government,
i.e. precisely the sort of centralized government that the Founders were at
pains to prevent from coming to fruition.
(3)
“Affirmative action,” along with “abortion,” is the law of the land: Not only
is it the case that the sorts of race-based preferential treatment policies
with which the label of “affirmative action” was originally associated remain
endemic; the nomenclature of “affirmative action” now extends as well to those
policies designed to advance the interests of, not only other non-whites, but
women, gays, and the trans-gendered.
(4)So-called
“same-sex marriage” has been declared as a Constitutional right.
(5)Trans-genderism
has been normalized. Gender is now “assigned” at birth, for gender is
“fluid,” and the idea, heretofore accepted by the human race, that there are
two and only two genders—male and female—is now regarded as a product of
“binary” thinking, which in turn is treated as bigotry.
(6)Silicon
Valley, i.e. “Big Tech,” routinely and with ever-greater frequency demonetizes
and de-platforms conservatives.
(7)Mainstream Democratic
politicians, and Democratic presidential candidates, call for reparations for American blacks.
(8)Mainstream
Democratic politicians, and Democratic presidential candidates, self-identify
as “socialists.”
(9)Conservative
speakers, irrespectively of how innocuous, indeed, insipid, their views, need a
strong security detail for when they attempt to speak on college
campuses. Intimidation and outright violence have become the standard
operating procedures of leftist student disruptors demanding a “safe space”
beyond the reach of the “white supremacists,” “fascists,” and “Nazis” invited
to campus by the Young Republicans Club.
(10)Despite having control
over both chambers of Congress and the White House, Republicans under President
Trump failed to repeal the “socialist” policy known as the Affordable Health
Care Act, or “Obamacare,” because they could not agree on a socialist policy of
their own with which to replace it.
(11)
“Antifa” has grown and as a matter of course engages in nothing less than urban
guerilla tactics against those who it demonizes as “fascist” non-persons.
In some instances, it has assumed control of whole cities (like Portland,
Oregon).
(12)Untold
numbers of peoples from other countries on a daily basis pour across our southern
border. Most of these are guilty of entering America illegally. But
it is now considered “racist” to insist that the government fulfill its
Constitutional duty and protect the integrity and sovereignty of the country by
enforcing its borders.
(13)Monuments
to white men, including members of the Founding generation, who, up until just
the last so many years, had been heralded as great American heroes have been
desecrated and razed for being monuments to “white supremacy.”
We can continue endlessly in this same vein. The point, by now, should be
obvious. Our hypothetical alien would suffer a dizzying case of
cognitive dissonance as the talking points that he imbibed in his crash course
clashed violently with the reality that he witnessed for himself, the
reality that, in this place called America, there is no genuine
conservative or right-wing party.
Our
alien would discover what Dabney noted long
ago, that Big Conservatism has not only resoundingly failed to conserve a
single thing of value but, because of this failure, it has aided and abetted
the left in the latter’s long march through the institutions that have defined
America and the West.
Our
alien would discover what my friend learned much earlier on in his career as a
scholar of the American conservative movement. He would learn that even if those in the Big Con admitted
tomorrow that they were leftists by any other name, even if they abandoned
altogether the pretense of being members of an opposition party, it wouldn’t
make a lick of difference, for things would be just as they in fact are at the
present moment.
Jack
Kerwick [send
him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple
University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He
is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey
and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith
& Culture.
