John Slaughter understands what Rod Dreher and his fellow conservatives in the Republican Party and the Trump administration do not. The very last thing that America needs is conservatives attempting to “reform” the United States of 2025:
As America accelerates toward a minority–majority reality, politics will reveal itself for what it has always been in pluralistic societies: ethnic politics. This reality was long obscured because, for most of the nation’s history, the population was overwhelmingly White. Only after the 1960s did the ethnic reality of democratic competition begin to surface at the national level. In a multiethnic state composed of numerous rival peoples, every bloc becomes political capital, and parties exist to serve those blocs. The left understands this and has organized itself accordingly. The right, if it remains imprisoned in the conservative fantasy of an abstraction-based nation, will be defeated. You cannot win an ethnic game by refusing to play it.
Conservatism cannot supply a common enemy, cannot supply a shared nation, cannot supply a unified faith. It cannot define what an American is, cannot name who belongs, cannot name who does not. All it can do is administer decline.
He’s underlining what John Red Eagle and I were the first to point out ten years ago. Being neither a political philosophy nor an ideology, and having no principles of any kind, conservatism is a literal guarantee of eventual failure.
That was as true in 1980 as it is now. The difference is that now, the observation is inescapable.
