Ace went on quite the rant about the state of the GOP/Conservative side of the political aisle:
I’m also pretty depressed. Apparently, some in this party really do think they’re going to hand the election to Hillary, and, bizarrely, they think this will bully the rest of us into knuckling under to their agenda in 2020.
Rather than simply getting payback and tanking their candidate in return.
This party is on the verge of self-destructing. The upper class of the party is upset that the lower class has finally had its say, and they’re determined that should never be permitted to happen again…
Ace then goes on to conclude that perhaps he should become a Democrat for self-protection – you know, if we’re going to keep going with a weaponized bureaucracy in the hands of rather vindictive Progressives, maybe become a Progressive so they’ll leave you alone? Trouble is, that won’t work out, either, unless you are prepared to sell your soul. You see, Progressives insist upon public declarations in favor of their views…passive acceptance isn’t good enough. It’s why you have to bake the cake.
The real problem with Conservatism isn’t that Trump came along and killed it, but that it never amounted to anything to begin with. Name a moral value from 50 years ago that is still intact – meaning, that something held as absolutely morally true 50 years ago is still being held as absolutely morally true today. The only thing Conservatism has managed to conserve these past 50 years is Second Amendment rights – and that hangs by a thread. Just allow Hillary to replace Scalia and the Progressives in the court system will rush a case to the Supreme Court to undo the right to bear arms.
I think our problem – the reason for our failure – is that we in general accepted the Progressive agenda as the basis for argument. Rather than just reject it out of hand, accept the electoral defeat and just wait for the crash to elevate Conservatism to complete power, we tried to hedge…to make ourselves appear reasonable to Progressives so that we could be acceptable to them. Nothing, of course, is more bizarre than trying to be reasonable to Progressives who don’t even believe in Reason, as a thing. But, we tried it – and so just essentially went along with the continual Progressive alteration of society. Now we’re caught in a bind – the only person who can keep the government out of the hands of Progressive Hillary is Progressive Trump…who at least won’t direct government’s power directly against Conservatism (or, at least, we hope he won’t). It’s a lousy position to be in – but we got ourselves here because standing athwart History yelling, “stop!” is about the most useless thing a person can decide to do. Doing that is reactionary – doing what is Conservative, on the other hand, requires a clear idea of the massive changes which need to be enacted.
You see, the problem has been that we on the Conservative side never saw ourselves as Revolutionaries. But that is what we have to be if we want to be Conservative. A Conservative is not a reactionary – we do not just stand pat and hope to hold on to what we’ve got. We advance the cause – we seek to refurbish things and bring them renewed into the present. We say that such-and-such is good then, good now and always will be good and we insist that it be preserved as part of the common heritage of humanity.
To do this, we have to stake out our positions quite boldly and accept crushing, overwhelming defeat and then continue to stake out those exact, same positions. For example, Churchill never altered his views of Hitler once he decided that Hitler was a mortal threat to civilization – at times, his supporters in Parliament were no more than four or five. He was insulted and ridiculed – long time political associates didn’t want to be seen in public with him. But he just kept at it, saying exactly the same thing in 1938 as he said in 1934…and by the middle of 1939, after those who ridiculed him were proven wrong, people started to swing over to him…because he was right and he stuck by what was right no matter how bad it got. Churchill was a Revolutionary – in open and desperate revolt against the idea that Hitler was some sort of manifestation of deep, historical currents who could be managed…Churchill knew precisely what Hitler was: a bad man who wanted to do bad things for bad reasons. Bad people are to be opposed by good people even at the cost of spilling blood if that proves necessary; Churchill wasn’t proposing anything new; he was just trying to refurbish the correct moral view of conquering tyrants: they are to be opposed. They are to be opposed no matter if they are dressed in the panoply of an Emperor or a Totalitarian – whether their bogus slogan is Liberté, égalité, fraternité or Arbeit macht frei. It is true in the past, it is true today and it will always be true that no one has the right to wage offensive wars of conquest. If he had started to hem and haw and try to shift his position to match the prevailing view, then Britain might have been lost – there would have been no one for the British to turn to when the chips were down. Someone of courage and conviction that the people could trust because he had never wavered for a moment in his views.
Why should the American people in 2016 trust Conservatism? What have we actually stood for? Where is some battle for eternal truths that we have engaged in without wavering and carried through to absolute victory? As I’ve said, other than 2A, nowhere. No matter what battle you care to name, the Progressives have advanced and we have retreated…and now some of us are actually defending Progressive things simply because they’ve been around for a while (Big Corporations, most notably; but there are plenty of other Progressive innovations that we now defend tooth and nail…even if the Progressives who created them have moved on and decided to destroy them).
Hillary or Trump will be the next President – most recent polling shows Hillary once again with a slight advantage. It’ll probably shift back and forth several more times before November 8th. But neither of them victorious will be on the side of Conservatism. The only difference between them is that Hillary promises to be overtly hostile to Conservatism while Trump may, even if only by accident, advance some Conservative desire. But if we want to have a Conservative movement in 2017 and beyond, then we have to completely shift our world view. We are the outsiders – hated, feared and despised. But we are right – and eventually we will be proven right. Then, if we have stood firmly for our views, the people will come over to us, because we’ll be the only people out there they can trust to do the right thing.
This post has already gone on a little long, so I won’t attach to it a Conservative Manifesto – though I’m thinking of writing one, perhaps at book length. But it isn’t really all that hard to think of what a Conservative should want to Conserve – refurbish and make live again in the modern world. But when we say we want to defend the family, remember that means we also must oppose things like property taxes, fiat money, consumer debt, consumerism, the economic necessity of both parents working just to make ends meet…and probably a score or more other things which have worked against the family for many years. Positions, as I’ve said, have to be staked out – even, and especially, if when staked out 90% of the people oppose them. It is precisely the opposition to our views which will give us strength…provided we hold fast to them and allow reality to move people over to our side as time goes on. The world has been turned upside down – we now live in Progressive topsy-turverydom. It is they, the Progressives, who are the hide-bound, reactionary defenders of a dying order. We must become the Revolutionaries – the wild-eyed fanatics, as it were, demanding the impossible. As it was impossible in the past to imagine an America where taxpayer funds would go to support something like Planned Parenthood, so it is impossible to imagine today an America where taxpayer funds go to support a family home-schooling their children…but what is claimed to be impossible in human affairs is always possible, if people are willing to fight for it tenaciously and without apology. The Progressives did it, and won – we can do it, and win as well. If we but try.
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