Conservatism is Dead; Long Live Conservatism?

By Selwyn Duke

It seems like just yesterday that many were reading liberalism’s epitaph. After the Reagan years, Republican Revolution of 1994, retreat of the gun-control hordes after Al Gore’s 2000 defeat and George W. Bush’s two successful presidential runs, many thought conservatism was carrying the day. 

Ah, if only.

We might ask: With conservatives like President Bush and many of the other Republicans, who needs liberals?

While the media has successfully portrayed the Republicans as the party of snake handlers and moonshine, the difference between image and reality is profound. Bush has just spun the odometer, proposing the nation’s first ever $3 trillion budget. On matters pertaining to the very survival of our culture – the primacy of English, multiculturalism, the denuding of our public square of historically present Christian symbols and sentiments – Republicans are found wanting. As for illegal immigration, both the president and presumptive Republican nominee support a form of amnesty.

Yet many would paint America as under the sway of rightist politics, and some of the reasons for this are obvious. Some liberals know that the best way to ensure constant movement toward the left is by portraying the status quo as dangerously far right. If you repeatedly warn that we teeter on the brink of rightist hegemony, people will assume that to achieve “balance” we must tack further left toward your mythical center. Then we have conservatives influenced by the natural desire to view the world as the happy place they’d like to inhabit. Ingenuous sorts, they confuse Republican with conservative, party with principles, and electoral wars with the cultural one. But there’s another factor: One can confuse conservative with correct.

When is the right not right, you ask? When it has been defined by the left. 

The definition of “conservative” is fluid, changing from time to time and place to place. Some “conservatives” embrace an ideology prescribing limited government – one remaining within the boundaries established by the Constitution – and low taxation. They favor nationalism over internationalism; prefer markets mostly unfettered by regulation; eschew multiculturalism, feminism and radical environmentalism; and take pride in our history and traditions.  

But there have been other kinds of conservatives. In the Soviet Union, a conservative was quite the opposite, a communist. Then, when Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002, BBC News ran the headline, “Dutch far-right leader shot dead.” “Far-right” indeed. Fortuyn was quite liberal by our standards; he was a pro-abortion, openly-homosexual ex-sociology professor branded a rightist mainly because he wished to stem Moslem immigration into Holland. Moreover, his fear was that zealous Moslems posed a threat to the nation’s liberal social structure. 

So here’s the question: What definition of conservative would a communist or European statist conform to? Answer: That which states, “One who favors maintenance of the status quo.” This brings us to a central point: 

As society is successfully transformed by those who detest the status quo, the status quo changes. This means that the great defender ideology of the status quo, conservatism, will change with it.

“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.” -- G.K. Chesterton

Both liberals and conservatives have shape-shifting visions. This is because the definitions of conservative and liberal are determined by the “position” of the given society ‘s political spectrum. Shift that spectrum left or right by altering the collective ideology of a nation, and the definitions of those two words will change commensurate with the degree of that shift. This is why a Pim Fortuyn is viewed as conservative in Western Europe. In a land of Lilliputians, even Robert Reich seems like a giant.

This isn’t to say there is no difference between liberal and conservative visions. Liberals construct their vision based on opposition to the conservative one; conservatives’ vision is a product of the now accepted, decades-old vision of the left. Thus, liberals promote today’s liberal vision; conservatives defend yesterday’s liberal vision.

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” -- G.K. Chesterton

Perhaps one reason we’re losing the culture war is that it’s easier to convince people to try new liberal mistakes than retain old liberal mistakes that have been tried and found wanting. Regardless, we will continue losing unless we change our thinking radically. 

Wars are not won by being defensive. Yet conservatives are seldom anything but, because they’ve been trained to mistake defense for offense. When 13 states voted to ban faux marriage in 2004, some proclaimed it a great victory for conservatism. But it only was so if the conservatism you subscribe to merely involves maintenance of a liberal status quo, for it was a successful defensive action, not an offensive one. Who was proposing the societal change to which the vote was a response? The left was. What kind of change was it? One that would move us in the liberal direction.

So it is always. We play defense when, instead of striving to eliminate hate-crime laws, we merely fight proposals to make “transgendered” a protected category; when we accept the Federal Department of Education and simply use it to effect “conservative” education reform (read: No Child Left Behind Act); when we simply try to ensure that the separation of church and state ruling is applied in “conservative” ways; when we combat the tax-and-spend crowd by not taxing but then spending; and when we preach against illegal immigration while accepting a culture-rending legal immigration regime. 

In contrast, the left is as steadfastly offensive as it is dreadfully offensive. If its minions’ scheme to legally redefine marriage fails today, they’ll try again tomorrow. If a socialized medicine plan doesn’t pass congressional muster, it will reappear five or ten years hence. If a new tax is too rich for present tastes, they’ll wait for a more gluttonous palate. Or they’ll sneak a different new tax into an innocuous sounding bill or accept a slight increase to an old tax, then another, and another, and another . . . . They simply have to wait for the political spectrum to shift a bit further left.

This brings me to another important point. We often talk of compromise, but does compromising with those who always advance but never retreat constitute fairness? The left proposes policy, “settles” for a half-measure, and we leave the table thinking it an equitable outcome. The problem is that since virtually all the changes suggested are liberal in nature, constant compromise and granting of concessions guarantees constant movement toward the left. So we see erstwhile secure territory that is now under attack and revel in victory when we repel a few of the enemy's charges. But we don’t realize that we are defining victory as a reduction in the rate of loss of our heartland, while the enemy defines it as the expansion of its empire. We compromise our way to tyranny.

It’s like a young boxer who never throws punches and, consequently, becomes quite adept at blocking vicious blows – and inured to taking them. He emerges from the ring with a twinkle in black and blue eyes, flashes a smile revealing two lost teeth, proudly shows off bruised forearms and says, “Look, Dad! I blocked ninety-percent of the punches today! This is my greatest victory ever!” 

Yes, perhaps it’s a figurative victory insofar as exhibition of defensive skill goes. As for real victory, thus engaging opponents time and again doesn’t even bring the Pyrrhic variety. It only guarantees slow, torturous losses, perpetual injury, and one day, perhaps, a knock-out. 

This places the current presidential race in perspective. When some Republicans lament the absence of good “conservative” primary contenders, they often act as if our statist front-runners are visited upon us by an invisible hand, as if their ascendancy was despite the culture and not because of it. In reality, these politicians are merely products of a society that has long been in the grip of Gramschian operatives in academia, the media and Hollywood, leftists who have been crafting their message, scheming, indoctrinating, and socially re-engineering the public for decades.

Besides, can we really say those candidates aren’t conservative? With the political spectrum having shifted so far left, perhaps people such as Bush, McCain and Huckabee really are today’s conservatives, defenders of a statist status quo. 

Perhaps, just maybe, we (me, and you if you’re in my camp) are something else. 

After all, I criticized Mitt Romney for forcing Massachusettsans to buy health insurance, but a recent poll indicates that a majority of Republicans support such coercion. And if some of these people are “conservatives,” I’m certainly am not one.

I’m a revolutionary.

I don’t want to preserve the status quo, I want to overthrow it. I want to pull the statist weeds up by the roots and burn them in freedom’s fire, just like our Founding Fathers did. Do you think they were conservatives? Conservatives don’t start revolutions; they simply make sure their shackles are made no heavier.

Political victory rests on cultural victory, and changing the culture starts with changing our mentality. We have only two choices: We can be revolutionary.

Or we can be wrong. 

Comments

[Shaun from UCA]

Excellent article Mr.Duke . Very encouraging to hear your words! May others be so brazen when the time comes.

Shaun from UCA

[Jason]

Very good, although a revolutionary would be the preferable route of a civilized man, I'd rather take the oath of extremism, and burn and cut my enemies.

[Infosaur]

Very good summation of what I've been witnessing for the past decade. Frankly, on the eve of the election of 'our lord and savior king Barak the first' I frankly don't know what to do anymore. I'm just hoping to lay low and not loose my job for the next 4 years (though I suppose I could become a ward of the state untill rational heads prevail in 2012)

Or I could gleefully await the civil war that will surely follow when Raul joins his brother Fidel on the ashheap of history.

Could 2020's Cuba be the next frontier in Western Democracy?

[A.B.]

Holy Crap!

Everything you said is exactly what I've been feeling. I'm sick of these SISSY CONSERVATIVES ALWAYS PLAYING DEFENSE! I've been screaming for years for the Right to ATTACK, SLICE, N' DICE the Left's Crazy Ideas.

The Democrat Party needs to change it's name to the Socialist Populist Communist Party. Why aren't we ATTACKING THE LEFTS RADICAL LEFTIST COMMUNIST IDEALS. They are always attacking Individualism, Privatization and Corporations all the time. Ok so there's good corporations and bad corporations. But so many YOUNG PEOPLE TODAY have been brainwashed by their socialist teachers to HATE RICH PEOPLE OR ANYBODY WHO MAKES A LIVING AS EEEEVIL! AND THAT THEY MUST BE STOPPED. How are they any different from the Communists of China who brainwashed their own children to turn in an kill Parents who were't Revolutionary.

The left even wants to TAKE OVER THE MEDIA! How is that FREE SPEECH? They are not for freedom of speech. Just freedome of THEIR SPEECH!

[Adam]

Excellent take on what so-called "conservatives" have become. I agree whole-heartedly with your suggestion that the right has become far too complacent and happy with just stemming the tide rather than reversing this trend that secular progressives have been fighting so vehemently for. I always viewed myself as a conservative, but have come to revile them and have re-defined myself as being a "revolutionary" or sorts. Only revolutionary because I see the long, hard struggle we have ahead of us in deconstructing this society that is being forced down our throats by the leftys and moronic sheeple in the media.

[Cadence Storm]

Excellent writing!!!
We are not losing our identity as a nation... We're giving it away!!!

[Cadence Storm]

Just another thought... In Canada the democrat counterparts (liberals/ndp) constantly whine and wail that the Prime Minister (Stephen Harper)is just like George Bush. However, it is they who more closely mirror their American cousins. There is no other communal conduct that raises its collective voice so high as to defend our criminals and our nations’ enemies above its victims and citizenry louder than liberalism.

Liberalism with its self-perceived higher moral authority which has brought us up out of the darkness and has enlightened us with defeatism in war, empowering of the enemy, appeasement towards those who hate us, higher taxation, open border mentality and the prosecution and imprisonment of our soldiers and border guards to a higher and stricter standard than that of our enemies and illegals.

Take the Liberals down a notch... visit "The Conservative Storm" http://www.conservativestorm.com

[Hans]

Well said! I always put it this way-"Rupublicans will not write law,but will enforce every law that the liberals create-HW"

[Walt Holton]

When our Nation was founded it was founded by Statesman and not politicians. The difference is a Statesman has a belief and stands for it even if it means death. "Give me liberty or give me death" Patrick Henry 1775.

A politician is one who holds a belief and will compromise it in order to retain power.

We need more Statesmen.

In order to elect Statesmen we would need an informed, intelligent and invested electorate. Perhaps invested is the key word. When our nation (the great experiment) was founded, our founders had a very good grasp on the philosophical condition of man. Only the invested were to partake in the democratic system (property owners). That seems extreme today, perhaps ridiculous to some. I submit this is the key ingredient to our downfall. We let those who have no investment equal consideration in the process. I would not suggest only property owners vote, but how about only those in good standing with society (not at arrears). Those who are behind on taxes, collect welfare, food stamps, are late on child support, or are taking money from the gov't in any way (except SS, and those with a physical disability) should not vote! One of the most liberal companies in the nation (Microsoft) does not grant the un-invested an equal vote on company affairs...that would be obviously stupid! If all of the workers were allowed an equal vote they would vote themselves big raises and bankrupt the firm. There is America in a nutshell. National prosperity can not be expected if those who determine the direction are not invested.

I have lost all faith in the democratic side of our republic...and no hope on the horizon.

Walt

[Pvt]

Conservative-liberal bah humbug, these are just divisive political justification labels and nothing more. Western civilization was based in part on the King James version of Christadom the Holy Bible(a true way of life based on accountability). In the New Testament part of this Bible, Jesus the Christ even stated,"to him/her knowing to do good and do it not, to them it is blatent sin or dead wrong". This's whats wrong with America, take the 2 labels and break them down to their basics, Conservative you say??? is basically holding fast to tradition, what tradition may i ask???is this tradition right or wrong???not to mention the depth of Conservatism far right or left traditionalist lol??? And Liberalism in base is nothing more than than a pot of water(tolerance) boiling over with no heat control monitor or top to prevent spillage(pretty much anything concieved is allowed unbridled) therefore liberalism far left or right has no boundrys. Both sides of the political spectrum know whats right but again refuse rightiousness and accountibility. No America has blatently divided her identity as a nation with these labals(Conservative and Liberalist)it was once said that America(USA) could never be destroyed from without but from within herself. And so its true this country is on a societal crash landing with which she will never recover from. You say im a doomsayer huh? lets see what happens in the next say 15-20 years???(prove me wrong hopefully). Back to the Bible again in the New Testament in the book of Revelation many nations are mentioned in sybolism, during the plight of the so called End of Days. However the North American continent nor its western leadership is not mentioned any place???Ever wonder why???not me... self destructive tolerence and division. Our forefathers new all this and tried to establish a full proof document we call the US Constitution actually the best known doc. ever written for a people. However allowed TOLERENCE and Division creeped in from outside and used it against US. Conservative and Liberal leaders are both responsable for this debachle that America has gotten her self into. Another Bible parallel in the Old Testament this time using Sodom and Gomorrah and Roman Caliglia, both of these nations leaders had a few basic good people residing, but unforunately they wherent enough to hold back the tide of divisive self destruction. Lot begged and begged and begged the leaders of these two nations to do just basic rightiousness and for the mercy thereof but to no avail. And so it was they were undone, destroyed and utterly divided by there own devices. But has America learned anything from our humanist past history?? absolutly not!!we blatently bawk at, grit our teeth, and bite our tongues at anything remotely rightious. Does two wrongs make a right{Conservative or Liberalism) doubt it. Folks this thing is going south quik we need to bring home our military troops from abroad, shut down the boarders, abolish NAFTA, abolish the current tax code, revert or adopt to one foreign policy "Nukem or bust"(make an example first -talks later), and do some national internal soul searching, starting with me...but again it will never ever happen and the division will continue to escalate...

[Super Nintendo]

A Revolutionary is what I have considered myself for, well as long as I can remember. It is reassuring to know that there are others in my country that understand the importance of retaining our national soveirgnty, and protecting the freedoms given to us by the leaders of the great American revolution. It is really sad that the politicians of today do not openly state their allegiance to the core principles as written in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Why dont more politicians when running for office talk about the founding fathers, and what they would think of todays America. My feeling is that the founding fathers would be probabley posting on this blog and plotting another American revolution anew. If only the founding fathers had known the realities of 20th century communism, then perhaps they could have added a few extra Amendments into the Bill of Rights to prevent people like Hillary from running for political office.

[Greg Rebuck]

I heard you read this on the Savage Nation last night. I am ashamed to say I hadn't heard of you previously but suffice it to say, you will be high on my list of voices to hear, from now on!

[ravis]

Conservatives have only one hope, and it's fading: localism. Any other expression of conservatism today is simply old liberalism, as Mr Duke so adroitly points out. Only local control, zealously guarded against encroachment, gives conservatism a foothold it can maintain, and then only in certain places. That's why liberals viciously oppose states' rights in any form. All conservative efforts should be focused on localizing power and control, period.

[Nancy Raye]

Fortunately conservatism is not dead but almost. If we do not find our voices and our action, it will be dead soon. I volunteer for the revolution but I don't know who to trust anymore. I don't think everyone needs to agree but one side should not be stifled more than the other. I don't care what Obama says, we can't make sure the world is not hungry. That is not our mission in life. I won't work to feed the world but I will work to feed my family. Responsibility for yourselves - the government is to protect its people and its borders not to dictate that I believe in gay marriage. I prefer chaos over this mamby pamby path we are on. I don't want to feed the world. I want everyone to feed themselves. It is possible and if we all took responsibility for ourselves, it would be probable. If you are a victim it is because you choose to be one. I could go on and on but who is listening? No one.

[Doug Moats]

I think the biggest problem conservitism has going is there is no conservative leadership. The Republican Party has been hijacked by Neo-Cons who are nothing but liberals who are only conservative on economic policies. Until we get leaders to step up we are stuck with the McCains or the Romneys or the Bushes who are more liberal than conservative. The last shot we had at a true conservative Presidential candidate was Pat Buchanon and he was so demonized by the REPUBLICANS that no true conservative in his right mind would want the job. The neocons have since hijacked the party and the public has a choice between liberal or liberal-light.

[democrat]

Most of you conservatives certainly have it wrong, such as this candace storm person. If you look at it, both Presidents who allowed the greatest events of amnesty as far as illegals have been Republicans ("Conservative" Reagan and both Bushes!). As a matter of fact, this President has maintained the fact that we need to secure our borders, but yet, hasn't done anything to actually make it happen. Also, let's not forget that NAFTA was a creation of Reagan, under a different name, and ushered through by H.W. Bush, and was inherited by Clinton to sign. So, the next time you all think about fiscal responsibility, foreign policy that is both effective and intelligent, and protection of all civil rights, look to your fellow Democrats who will provide an excellent lead for you to follow.

[mark peters]

Thanks for this incredible post, S-Duke. It encapsulates the uneasiness I've had of late in calling myself 'conservative'.

[Bill]

Democrat, I think you need to have your medication adjusted. Do you remember the amnesty bill of last year, the one that was defeated? Why was it defeated? Sure, Bush the dummy was for it, but . . . what? Do you know? The DEMOCRATS were for it as well. They were the ones who put it forth. It was the Republicans in congress who defeated it. FACT. Don't you follow politics at all?

[democrat]

FACT. It's obvious Mark Peters that you don't follow politics at all. The fact of the matter is, that REPUBLICANS were for it as well, as it would benefit their wealthy friends who owned corporations and large enough lawns to have a team of illegals working on. The only reason that it was defeated is because the politicians feared not having a job the second go round of their elections, and they pushed it back close time for their break and failed to come back to it, in turn defeating it by default. So the next time you have some similar remark to make to anyone who chooses to voice their opinions about any subject, how about doing your homework first!

[democrat]

I know that I wrote a comment to Mark Peters and I would like to apologize. It was actually intended for Bill.

[Chuck]

Savage: Take offensive.

Dear Mr. Duke:

Any books, sites recommended for ths taking offensive?

I'm thinking of church buildings and offices as embassies for King Jesus, with business cards listing member/ambassador, and an explanation of official corporate prayer as what runs the world.

Pax Christi,

Chuck

[Million Dagne]

it is interesting that to give information like that keep it up

[The Advocate]

Did "rational heads prevail in 2012?"