Full text: https://fiddlersgreene.substack.com/p/how-conservatism-died-an-open-letter
Younger men need older men, like us, Rod, who are willing to struggle with them, to make their cause our own. They need a connection to a tradition and wise counsel from others who have gone before them. They need sober analysis that prioritizes what matters, as well as insightful thinkers who provide clarity amid the noisy distractions that drive algorithms and new cycles. Young men need leaders......
....However, that train you now see coming down the tracks isn’t the crisis of modernity; nor is it some specific bad actor like Nick Fuentes, or even some popular mass delusion. The train is just a reality. It is the inevitable consequence of the politics promoted over the last three decades by those weak men too cowed to face hard truths head-on.
And no one can stop this train from coming, because all the opportunities to slow it down have been sabotaged, more often than not, by the very conservatives who were busy lamenting the sorry state of their predicament.
But lament your predicament or not, the train is still approaching. You are all going to have to make an adjustment to how you approach politics, or the juggernaut will run you down where you stand, not because you stood on some principle, but because you didn’t acknowledge the machine hurling towards you, just in front of your nose.
But perhaps this is history’s well-known sense of irony. Because, in the wake of this tragedy, everyone will naturally look back at your careers and wonder.
How?
How, after everything, after all of the articles, after all of the books, after all of the histrionic predictions of collapse and societal decline repeated over and over again, how could you still be so unprepared to face the world that you saw coming decades ago?
It is an eternal mystery. It is the story of how conservatism died.