Commenter JD Cowan asks,
So what does it say about the “conservatives” the stayed out of it [#GamerGate] and let the Ys fail while the “liberals” let their guys succeed?
This tapestry is weaved much tighter than I first thought.
My answer:
It’s simple. There are no Conservatives. There never were.
Dissident Ys too often hope for the right politician, the right movement, the right idea to sweep in and make it 1989 again. And this, too, is the nostalgia trap.
We’ve got to let go of the old era.
In retrospect, I’d be more precise in saying, “the old paradigm”–the Red vs. Blue shell game that only leads America closer to the cliff’s edge, though at varying speeds.
The matter must be on many people’s minds, because the redoubtable Z Man also addressed it in far more detail in a recent Z Blog post.
It’s not just that it is timid or disorganized. As the Canadian political theorist Ben Woodfinden notes, it is a reaction to the collectivist impulses of the Left. The Left seeks to use the state to reorganize society according to their current fads, so the Right opposes the state as a legitimate entity. Not just the state, but institutions in general, instead promoting radical individualism. Conservatism comes to be defined as something just as radical as what’s on offer from the Left.
What English speaking countries need is a conservatism that will transform the state into something that will strengthen and support traditional institutions. Instead they get a force that weakens those institutions. The conservative revolution of the 1980’s in America, unleashed rapacious global privateering in the name of free enterprise and entrepreneurial spirit. Instead of restoring the damage done by the radicals of the 60’s and 70’s, it created new mayhem.
You see that forming up in Britain and America in response to the rise of archaic socialism, in the form of Sanders and Corbyn. Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic are now working themselves raw about this new red menace. Instead of examining why these collectivist appeals, including the rise of populism, are attractive to the voters, they lurch further into radical individualism. This is every bit as destructive to the culture as the radicalism it claims to oppose.
The culture war is one side using the state to destroy tradition, while the other side makes it impossible to form a collective defense of the culture. The reason for this is that, at least in the Americas, there has never been an authentic conservatism. America has always been a radical bourgeois project. After the Civil War, that radicalism became the default of the political class and remains so today. This reformist impulse is the distinguishing feature of the American empire.
The old joke that being conservative means tenaciously conserving the Left’s progress isn’t quite right. First of all, it ascribes some degree of effectiveness to Conservatives. Second, it presumes a false dichotomy.
There have never been conservatives and liberals in America; there are only slow and fast Liberals.
Put another way, there has never been serious, organized opposition to the progressive ideology of making personal self-expression an absolute. So-called conservatives will readily declare their support for individualism. Their version is just slightly less radical.
And due to the constant leftward shift of the Overton window, “radical” is relative.
That reformist impulse has its roots in the founding. On the one hand, those people we call Puritans were collectivists reformers. They believed society was judged collectively, which gave them license to police the community for sinners. Advancing society, social progress, meant bringing the bottom up in a spiritual sense. On the other hand, a man’s relationship with God was his alone. Self-sufficiency was a sign of God’s grace, an indication that the person was in good standing with the Lord.
Both sides of this coin are quite radical, relative to Western tradition. In fact, it is fair to say the Puritans were anti-tradition. They stripped their houses of worship of all ornamentation and any reminders of past practice. They saw tradition and ritual as an excuse for not exercising the spirit through the regular study of Scripture. The collective impulse of the founding, as well as its individualism, are the result of a rejection of European traditionalism on spiritual grounds.
This is why reform in America has been impossible. The periods of radicalism in the name of collective reform have been followed by periods where the institutions are weakened in the name of individualism. These weakened institutions become vulnerable to a new round of radical reform. This cycle has locked the ruling class into a dance that always moves Left. No matter the response of the public at the ballot box, the direction is always Left, just with a different lead.
Ironically, this means that the only way a genuine conservatism can emerge, and in the case of Britain, reemerge, is by overthrowing the current order. This Progressive orthodoxy of radical reformers entangled with radical individualist will need to collapse into a single unified ideology, while something new arises to oppose it. That something new is the defense of traditional order, organic institutions and the popular will expressed through natural identity.
There’s a word for rejecting established political, cultural, and religious traditions suspected of being problematic: iconoclasm. America’s early Puritan settlers not only shunned religious imagery, they embraced anti-traditionalism in regard to Sacred Tradition.
We see this same suspicion of art and tradition in today’s Conservatives. It’s to be expected since those ingredients were baked into the cake.
The Death Cult represents individualism, iconoclasm, and anti-traditionalism taken to their logical extremes. They idolize personal preference as absolute. They seek to stamp out the very image of God through abortion, euthanasia, and sterilization. They hold the past in contempt and revile all truth as an external imposition on their license.
One can’t help but notice a stronger resistance to the Death Cult among certain Old World countries. Poland, Russia, Italy, and Hungary in particular are staging counterattacks with varying degrees of success.
The current order will not avail us. Those seeking to lay foundations for something new would do well to heed the example of the nations above.
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