01/21/2022
Happy 2022, people.
Part of the issue with modern conservatism lies right there in the name: “conserve”. The issue is, of course, that conservation is a stationary idea. It’s all about keeping things right where they are. It’s static. “Conservatives”, for a long time, up to and including now, seek to maintain a status quo. This leads to a major issue with conservatism in its current state: A nearly all-consuming lack of vision encompasses the Right. Simply, there is no goal for the Right.
Of course, this did not occur in a vacuum. For decades at this point, a right-winger with an grand-scheme vision was branded a reactionary, and the liberals controlling the media made that a bad thing on par with Satan himself. So here we stand in 2022, and any conservative who isn’t a limp-dick bitch-dog laser-focused on tax cuts and Northrop Grumman military-spending handouts is not automatically branded as a sexist/racist/transphobic/misogynist/whatever bad guy. It’s the most ingenious form of controlled opposition: make any part of the opposition who wants to do something an automatic bad guy for the sole reason of having a vision of what he wants to do! Someone calls out “Whaddawe want!?” and the Right just collectively shrugs. What do we want?
This goes a long way to explaining how Trump won and generated such fervor in 2016. Even if it wasn’t all that much, the wall was a tangible vision, a great project. The whole campaign was spent talking about how we’re gonna go back and “Make America GREAT, again”! It wasn’t much, but it was something. Then, in 2020, he’s talking about Keeping America great. The status quo. The vision of 2016 wasn’t really there in 2020, and Trump gave up the one huge thing no one else in his party had.
Ask a committed liberal about his vision for the future, and he’ll give you a full spiel about how much he wants a world free from all or the -isms, or free from inequity or income inequality. There won’t be policy specifics, but there doesn’t have to be any, because it’s a broad goal to work towards, not a micromanaged 5-year plan. Do the same for a standard committed conservative, and you won’t get much. The Left is a lot better than the Right at having a vision.
And it pays off for them. One great advantage of having a broad goal is that you have something to work towards at all times. It’s a more general North Star to guide you, even if it’s a vague goal. How this left/right dichotomy plays out can be illustrated best with a simple allegory.
Imagine a large boulder with a large group on each side. The side pushing it leftward does exactly that: It tries to move it to the left. The other side, instead of trying to push, tries to keep the boulder where it is. It’s very hard for the group pushing left to make progress, but once in a while, they’ll move it a few feet.
What this means is that every time the leftward group wins a victory, it’s a permanent victory. The little wins here and there add up, and under everyone’s nose, “photographs of tranny dicks in 4th-grade textbooks” is a legitimate issue with defenders on both sides. And it’s exponential. People will see the giant progress the leftward group makes and decide to join the group that’s culturally and socially winning over the defenders who fail to defend and don’t quite know what they’re working towards. The only way to have a fighting chance against a side that pushes is to push, yourself.
Recent panic over voting rights and CRT bans is what you’ll see if conservatives ever decide to start pushing. In their own words,
For decades at this point, pushing has been a special privilege afforded to liberals. If a conservative ever wanted to push right, he automatically becomes the bad guy. And now that conservatives are making even the smallest pushes, the liberals feel the terror in the air. The idea that their political privilege would be allowed to non-Left-wingers is horrifying to liberals. The old trope of “conservatives just advocate for what liberals wanted 10 years ago” is certainly true. Liberalism has evolved in a space with no natural predators, and not even any competitors. The idea that it now has a real enemy is borderline apocalyptic to a mainstream liberal in the modern day.
The liberals will do their thing and keep pushing, as they have for over half a century (by the way, Fear & Loathing is almost 51 years old. Crazy, right?). They feel threatened, so they will do it fiercer and harder than ever before. Expect organizational mole-hunts for the quiet types who nevertheless don’t tow the line such as myself. No matter how good we are at whatever we do, activists, governmental or not, will rapidly make us prospective liabilities to be weeded out and defenestrated.
But Trump gave us a big opportunity. He was the first to push onstage, and this may not come around again for a long time. Conservatives can push now. Push, shove, tackle, use a forklift, or a tow-truck. Do what you need to. But no matter how you do it or what you do it for, just remember the goal:
MOVE THAT GODDAMN BOULDER TO THE RIGHT!
Ramon, 01/21/2022