During
a recent exchange with some essentially like-minded friends, someone—a
Republican voter who is typically and appropriately critical of the
conservative movement, or what I call the Big Con—suggested that we would spend
our time more wisely if we reserved our harshest criticisms for the left.
After all, as Barack Hussein
Obama, in a rare moment of candor, revealed nearly a decade ago, it is the left that aims to achieve nothing less
than “the fundamental transformation” of America.
This
comment of my friend’s deserves a response. Fortunately, several are in
the coming.
First, thankfully, criticism of the Big
Con does not preclude criticism of the left. We can walk and chew gum at
the same time.
Second, while there are
admittedly some differences between the Big Con and the left, they are
differences in degree, not in kind. And herein lay the fundamental
misconception in which my friend’s objection is rooted, the misconception that
the resources spent on critiquing the Big Con are resources diverted from critiquing the left.
The truth of the matter is
that those of us on what Paul Gottfried calls “the unauthorized,”
“non-aligned,” or “independent” right—and what I prefer to call the unprofessional or non-careerist right—are
as critical as we are of the Big Con precisely because it is a species of the left.
In other words, the problem
that my friend identified, the problem of critiquing either the Big Con or the
left, is a false dichotomy. Ultimately, there is but a single target
here, and it is leftism, Political Correctness, “progressivism,” or whatever
else we choose to call it.
Thirdly, this last point
shouldn’t obscure the fact there is a difference
between the Big Con and garden variety leftism. Yet the difference is
that while the Obamas,
Pelosis, and CNN blabber- mouths of the world are unmistakably leftist, the
Bushes, Romneys, and Fox News blabber-mouths, though left-leaning, are
not unmistakably so.
And this is why it is at least
as important, and arguably more so, to expose
the Big Con than expend energy revisiting the same usual suspects on the hard
left.
Leftists are (for the most
part) recognized for who they are. Yet as long as tens of millions of
Americans continue to believe that talk radio hosts, Fox News all-stars,
and National Review, Commentary, and Weekly Standard writers are “conservative” or
“right-wing,” the left will continue to make the kinds of cultural and
political advances that it has been making for decades.
In other words, the Big Con right is in reality the stealth left.
Consider
this point in light of an analogy:
If a
person wants to avoid contracting a lethal disease, or if he has already
contracted it but wants to eradicate it, he will need to know all that he can
know about it—its causes and symptoms, certainly, but also the treatments to
which he’ll have recourse in combatting it.
Now,
suppose that the “experts” in the medical and pharmaceutical industries, for
whatever reasons, present as an antidote this disease a drug that, while
decelerating the rate at which the disease advances, nevertheless enables it to
proceed along its fatal trajectory. Three things should be apparent:
(a)The
drug would be preferable to no drug at all. However, inasmuch as it posed
no insurmountable obstacle to the disease, it would clearly be mortally
dishonest for the experts to depict it as if it did, to depict it as if it was
something fundamentally different than what it is in fact.
(b)Moreover,
it would be the height of recklessness and injustice for those of who
recognized both the terminal disease for what it is and the fake remedy not to
call attention to these facts.
(c)The
whole reason that we should scream from the rooftops that the public and
patients are being scammed is that the authorities are abetting this terminal
illness by presenting a fake as a cure.
To
repeat, the choice faced by the whistleblowers is not a choice between calling
attention to the terminal nature of the disease and calling attention to the
pseudo-cure promoted by the experts. In the last analysis, there is but
one problem, one target, on which critics’ attention focuses: the terminal
illness. The drug is newsworthy only because it is promoted as if it
poses real opposition to the disease when it does no such thing.
Similarly, it is imperative
that those who want to prevent the fundamental transformation—the death—of
their country to focus on the leftist illness that threatens to bring it
about. To this end, they have neither the moral nor the logical option to
remain silent on the fake drug of the Big Con or the Deputized Right, a controlled opposition permitted by
the left but which is promoted as an antidote to leftism by “the experts,” the
agents and peddlers of the Big Con themselves.
Doubtless,
there are several objections that apologists for the Big Con or the Deputized
Right will raise to this thesis. The most basic of them, the one objection of
which every other will prove to be a variant, is that my thesis is simply
wrong. Of course, the counter-objectors will exclaim, the Rush Limbaughs,
Sean Hannitys, and Laura Ingrahams of the conservative movement are not
left-wing!
Undoubtedly, many (though
certainly not all) Big Con celebrities genuinely think that they are the
conservative enemies of leftism that they style themselves as being.
This, though, is neither here nor there, for thinking one is
such-and-such isn’t the same as being such-and-such.
Furthermore,
the “conservatism” of the Big Cons is in effect a ramshackle construction, a
kaleidoscopic ala’ carte of views on topical issues that, if distinguishable at
all from those of their leftist counterparts, is distinguished on account of
its differing in details from those positions taken by leftists at the moment.
Examples of this abound.
Not all that long ago, it was
the “conservative” position to favor same-sex “unions,” but
oppose same-sex “marriage.” Now, as to how this was
uniquely or even distinctively conservative is anyone’s guess, for it was also
the Democratic left’s position as recently as seven years ago. But once
the Supreme Court discovered a Constitutional right to homosexual marriage, the
“conservative” position changed. Today, it is considered “conservative”
to either explicitly affirm same-sex “marriage” or implicitly affirm it by way
of such smokescreens as “States’ Rights” or deference to “the rule of law.”
In the case of abortion, most
Big Cons maintain that they’re pro-life. Yet they’re willing to allow for the
killing of the unborn if the child was conceived in rape or through incest,
hence militating decisively against the very ground—the innocence of the
prenatal human being—on which they profess their opposition to abortion.
Or Big Cons claim that less money than
that which leftists want to give it should be given to Planned Parenthood.
When it comes to immigration,
the “conservative” position has been that while illegal immigration
is bad, potentially limitless immigration—from anywhere in the world—is
good. In a good number of instances, the “conservative” position has
been amnesty—though always packaged under a different label
designed to conceal the fact that it’s amnesty that “conservatives” advocate.
We
could go on.
Nor should it be any surprise that Big Cons
abet the left in the latter’s long march through the institutions when it is
considered that both trade in the same sorts of abstractions within which they
couch their positions on contemporary issues.
The Deputized Right and the social
Democratic left regularly espouse the rhetoric of “human rights.”
They both speak as if America is
ahistorical, the first and only country in all of history to have been founded
on some universal abstraction. The Big Con/Deputized Right calls this the
doctrine of “American Exceptionalism.”
Both the Big Con and the left endorse the
Ellis Island/Melting Pot myth, the fiction that America had no founding stock
and that, from its inception, it has been and was always meant to be a rest
area for the planet.
And the Big Con specifically insists upon America’s “Judeo-Christian” heritage. Yet this is a term
that appeared nowhere in our political-cultural lexicon until quite recently,
as far as the life of America is measured.
In short, the Big Con and their leftist
sparring partners have labored tirelessly engaging in unabashed historical
revisionism and amateur philosophy regarding the origins and character of
America.
I have no doubts that at least
some of the Big Cons are unaware of the consequences of their actions.
Nevertheless, there can be no denying that the Big Con, the Deputized Right,
functions as an accomplice to the left. The Big Con is as much, and
possibly even more, responsible for the leftward drift of America than is the
recognized left, and it most definitely is exponentially more responsible than
is the militant left that would have otherwise remained a
joke, a freak show, or a danger to be dealt with had it not been for the Big
Con’s capitulation to the left’s machinations.
So,
to my friend who questioned the utility of criticizing the Big Con, I
underscore the importance—the duty—of those of us on the unprofessional right
to expose the fake antidote of the Big Con for what it is. Only in doing
so can we hope to mount the resistance to the left that it warrants.
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.
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