Steel Yourselves, Conservatives... The American Right is in for a hell of a ride. Patriots need to promote and focus within themselves the habits of resistance.
The Democratic Party’s remarkable midterm election performance—arguably the best for a first-term president since FDR in 1934—despite Joe Biden’s declining popularity, economic headwinds, and growing social and political divisions, portends a dim future for the Republican Party.
In the lead up to 2022, Democrats not only refused to moderate their support for unlimited abortion up to the moment of birth, transgender surgery for minors, critical race theory, criminal justice reform, and illegal immigration, they doubled-down. Voters rewarded them with additional governorships, four flipped state legislatures, an increased Senate majority, and minimal losses in the House.
The Left has zero reason to take the foot off the gas. Elections, legitimate or not, have consequences.
The most likely outcome of the 2024 election is that Democrats retake the House, keep the Senate, and retain the presidency, regardless of who they run or what the economy looks like. As Joe Biden and Jon Fetterman proved in 2020 and 2022, respectively, Democrats don’t need to actually campaign in order to win political office. Nor do they need to be able to string together a coherent sentence.
In the wake of the Trump presidency, the Left has reached a new fever pitch of political intensity. The Left’s access to nearly unlimited money, total control over the media narrative, and an unparalleled national vote-harvesting operation make campaigning and candidate quality of only tertiary importance.
A recession likely won’t change these dynamics either. The economy boomed under Trump and experienced severe dislocations and inflation under Biden. But Democrats won big in both 2020 and 2022. Taking the state of the economy as a useful metric for political prognostication is largely a thing of the past. Liberal voters’ religious commitment to abortion and anti-racism is infinitely more important to understanding their political habits than measuring their material self-interest.
So, is it simply over? Should conservatives pack it in and go home? Jump off the nearest bridge?
No to all three.
That the Right has lost (or may soon lose) the ability to win national elections is not an end but a beginning. It requires a fresh view of our true political reality.
In thinking about our current political position, the American Right should recall that the vast majority of successful political movements in human history have not come to power through electoral majorities. America’s current ruling class certainly did not. The Left didn’t seize power in the media, Hollywood, or Wall Street by holding a vote! Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates didn’t gain the ability to censor tens of millions of Americans and make COVID policy because they had popular backing.
It doesn’t matter how hard the Right wants to fight on cultural issues like gay marriage, abortion, and gender ideology. Even if conservatives could win on these issues today, they will lose tomorrow if nothing is done to push back against the destruction of the nation. We cannot fight the culture war without a country.
We are living through our own cultural revolution. We have our own Red Guard, made up of students, professors, and journalists who “cancel” those who violate the woke orthodoxies. We have our own leftwing paramilitary organization, Antifa, that terrorizes the regime’s enemies. We have our own struggle sessions where ordinary Americans must confess their white privilege as oppressors of the new and improved BIPOC proletariat.
The new American Left, in short, is communist in its thrust and direction. Instead of the old material dialectic, however, the new Left weaponizes a racial dialectic. Leftists replaced the struggle between capitalists and workers with a new struggle between oppressors and oppressed in which a coalition of “BIPOC,” women, and gays aligns itself against the exploitive white heteronormative patriarchy. This is why the Left tears down statues, drenches our children’s schools in anti-American propaganda, and commands the fealty of every corporation in America preaching a commitment to “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”
The liberal goal is a universal, homogenous, anti-racist world state in which all peoples live in perfect harmony and equality. It is supposed to be a world without exploitation, colonization, or bigotry. The ideal liberal regime is John Lennon’s “Imagine” come to life: “Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion, too / Imagine all the people / Livin’ life in peace.” After all of this is achieved, the “world will live as one.”
“Imagine” is the right title to the song because that is all this vision will amount to—a dream. But it, like all utopian dreams, is dangerous precisely because it is unrealizable. Once the reality sets in for liberals that some human beings actually cherish their faiths, families, and countries—no matter how much propaganda they spew—that realization will flare into an all-consuming spiteful rage. If the Left cannot have its perfect world, then it will deny the rest of us our imperfect but decent one.
We live, unfortunately, already in the midst of this last, true “Great Awokening.”
Leftist hegemony isn’t guaranteed, however. For one, despite the American Left’s power, it lacks the hard-edged character of its Soviet predecessors. Stalin and Lenin were tough—more than willing to slaughter their political and class enemies in cold blood. Modern leftists are soft in comparison. They aim to perpetuate their cultural revolution through their control of Human Resources departments. This isn’t exactly intimidating. What good is a vaccine mandate if you won’t back it up with real force?
The Right’s response to the Left’s demand to submit should be, “come and make me.”
The true test of a regime’s staying power is this: Does it have the strength of will, and the capacity, to kill its existential enemies in order to preserve itself? One need look only at the legacy of Louis XIV and Czar Nicholas II for examples of what happens to rulers who lack these qualities.
We may also ask: Does Biden command this loyalty? Will the military and federal law enforcement gun down civilians en masse for our current, senile, leadership class of corrupt gerontocrats? I harbor a growing suspicion the answer to that question is “no.”
This opens up a wide field of political possibilities for the Right. Instead of relentlessly focusing energy on winning elections, conservative political leaders should concentrate on developing other forms of power. The mass rally, general strike, and paralyzing public protest are all powerful tools the Right could leverage against our current regime. Our rulers cannot tamp down on societal distress forever. In the right moment of weakness, bringing the American supply chain to a screeching halt could cause a leftist government to capitulate.
The looming electoral annihilation of the Republican Party is not cause for despair. For a long time, the GOP has been unserious about politics and the interests of its voters. It took Donald Trump’s comet blazing across the political sky in 2016 to focus the party, if only—continued
——-it’s a long article. I’ve abridged it here. Some is pretty inflammatory. Some I say HELL NO! Some I say HELL YES! I find it interesting that some on the conservative side are beginning to wake up to the harsh political realities they are facing.
In the lead up to 2022, Democrats not only refused to moderate their support for unlimited abortion up to the moment of birth, transgender surgery for minors, critical race theory, criminal justice reform, and illegal immigration, they doubled-down. Voters rewarded them with additional governorships, four flipped state legislatures, an increased Senate majority, and minimal losses in the House.
The Left has zero reason to take the foot off the gas. Elections, legitimate or not, have consequences.
The most likely outcome of the 2024 election is that Democrats retake the House, keep the Senate, and retain the presidency, regardless of who they run or what the economy looks like. As Joe Biden and Jon Fetterman proved in 2020 and 2022, respectively, Democrats don’t need to actually campaign in order to win political office. Nor do they need to be able to string together a coherent sentence.
In the wake of the Trump presidency, the Left has reached a new fever pitch of political intensity. The Left’s access to nearly unlimited money, total control over the media narrative, and an unparalleled national vote-harvesting operation make campaigning and candidate quality of only tertiary importance.
A recession likely won’t change these dynamics either. The economy boomed under Trump and experienced severe dislocations and inflation under Biden. But Democrats won big in both 2020 and 2022. Taking the state of the economy as a useful metric for political prognostication is largely a thing of the past. Liberal voters’ religious commitment to abortion and anti-racism is infinitely more important to understanding their political habits than measuring their material self-interest.
So, is it simply over? Should conservatives pack it in and go home? Jump off the nearest bridge?
No to all three.
That the Right has lost (or may soon lose) the ability to win national elections is not an end but a beginning. It requires a fresh view of our true political reality.
In thinking about our current political position, the American Right should recall that the vast majority of successful political movements in human history have not come to power through electoral majorities. America’s current ruling class certainly did not. The Left didn’t seize power in the media, Hollywood, or Wall Street by holding a vote! Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates didn’t gain the ability to censor tens of millions of Americans and make COVID policy because they had popular backing.
It doesn’t matter how hard the Right wants to fight on cultural issues like gay marriage, abortion, and gender ideology. Even if conservatives could win on these issues today, they will lose tomorrow if nothing is done to push back against the destruction of the nation. We cannot fight the culture war without a country.
We are living through our own cultural revolution. We have our own Red Guard, made up of students, professors, and journalists who “cancel” those who violate the woke orthodoxies. We have our own leftwing paramilitary organization, Antifa, that terrorizes the regime’s enemies. We have our own struggle sessions where ordinary Americans must confess their white privilege as oppressors of the new and improved BIPOC proletariat.
The new American Left, in short, is communist in its thrust and direction. Instead of the old material dialectic, however, the new Left weaponizes a racial dialectic. Leftists replaced the struggle between capitalists and workers with a new struggle between oppressors and oppressed in which a coalition of “BIPOC,” women, and gays aligns itself against the exploitive white heteronormative patriarchy. This is why the Left tears down statues, drenches our children’s schools in anti-American propaganda, and commands the fealty of every corporation in America preaching a commitment to “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”
The liberal goal is a universal, homogenous, anti-racist world state in which all peoples live in perfect harmony and equality. It is supposed to be a world without exploitation, colonization, or bigotry. The ideal liberal regime is John Lennon’s “Imagine” come to life: “Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion, too / Imagine all the people / Livin’ life in peace.” After all of this is achieved, the “world will live as one.”
“Imagine” is the right title to the song because that is all this vision will amount to—a dream. But it, like all utopian dreams, is dangerous precisely because it is unrealizable. Once the reality sets in for liberals that some human beings actually cherish their faiths, families, and countries—no matter how much propaganda they spew—that realization will flare into an all-consuming spiteful rage. If the Left cannot have its perfect world, then it will deny the rest of us our imperfect but decent one.
We live, unfortunately, already in the midst of this last, true “Great Awokening.”
Leftist hegemony isn’t guaranteed, however. For one, despite the American Left’s power, it lacks the hard-edged character of its Soviet predecessors. Stalin and Lenin were tough—more than willing to slaughter their political and class enemies in cold blood. Modern leftists are soft in comparison. They aim to perpetuate their cultural revolution through their control of Human Resources departments. This isn’t exactly intimidating. What good is a vaccine mandate if you won’t back it up with real force?
The Right’s response to the Left’s demand to submit should be, “come and make me.”
The true test of a regime’s staying power is this: Does it have the strength of will, and the capacity, to kill its existential enemies in order to preserve itself? One need look only at the legacy of Louis XIV and Czar Nicholas II for examples of what happens to rulers who lack these qualities.
We may also ask: Does Biden command this loyalty? Will the military and federal law enforcement gun down civilians en masse for our current, senile, leadership class of corrupt gerontocrats? I harbor a growing suspicion the answer to that question is “no.”
This opens up a wide field of political possibilities for the Right. Instead of relentlessly focusing energy on winning elections, conservative political leaders should concentrate on developing other forms of power. The mass rally, general strike, and paralyzing public protest are all powerful tools the Right could leverage against our current regime. Our rulers cannot tamp down on societal distress forever. In the right moment of weakness, bringing the American supply chain to a screeching halt could cause a leftist government to capitulate.
The looming electoral annihilation of the Republican Party is not cause for despair. For a long time, the GOP has been unserious about politics and the interests of its voters. It took Donald Trump’s comet blazing across the political sky in 2016 to focus the party, if only—continued
——-it’s a long article. I’ve abridged it here. Some is pretty inflammatory. Some I say HELL NO! Some I say HELL YES! I find it interesting that some on the conservative side are beginning to wake up to the harsh political realities they are facing.
prepare
be watchful