You would think that by now, even the more dandified blue bloods of Conservative Inc. would have learned something from the Trump uprising about the power of populist and culture war issues. But increasingly it seems like even some of those that didn’t develop full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome objected not only to Trump’s style, but his actual substance. They seem more afraid of alienating liberal MSM and Hollywood friends over culture war issues than paying attention to outrage among actual voters.
That’s why this Twitter thread is fire.
There are different reasons why some conservatives gravitate to this way of thinking. Some are paid grifters. Some live deep inside the left-wing information sphere and inherit its prejudices, such as the notion cultural combat is toxic for conservatives but OK for lefties.
— John Hayward (@Doc_0) April 8, 2022
Some believe they can win ideological struggles without sullying themselves with filthy politics. If they just hold their principles high and visibly disdain effective political strategy, people will someday realize the Right has been right all along, and rally to its banner.
— John Hayward (@Doc_0) April 8, 2022
I’m not sure that’s the case. I think a number of them are worried that they’ll be blocked from obtaining cushy corporate-funded sinecures at colleges and think-tanks if they ruffle too many feathers. They want their bread to stay well-buttered, and are willing to keep quiet in order to stay on as some sort of pet opposition as long as the left is willing to throw them occasional “strange new respect” bones and rub their furry bellies.
For these timid elements of conservatism, the worst offense of the Right is questioning the motives of the Left. Nothing makes them spring into action against other conservatives faster than insinuations of bad faith or sinister motives against the Left.
— John Hayward (@Doc_0) April 8, 2022
This attitude holds among timid conservatives even as the Left wages all-out war and loudly asserts there are no honest, sincere, good-faith arguments against its agenda. Is there a political argument on the Left that doesn't begin with denying the good intentions of opponents?
— John Hayward (@Doc_0) April 8, 2022
They'll tell you it's paranoia and slander to talk about the destructive agenda of the Left even as hyperventilating lefties are busy laying out their agenda with hundreds of social media videos and vowing to destroy anyone who gets in their way.
— John Hayward (@Doc_0) April 8, 2022
You don't want to fight an ugly culture war? Well, guess what? EVERYTHING is culture. Everything either feeds into culture, or is shaped by it. The Left gets that, and deployed legions of paid shock troops to capture institutions and corporations while you kept your hands clean.
— John Hayward (@Doc_0) April 8, 2022
Now we've arrived at the final destination, the fatal terrain, the fabled Hill to Die On: political and sexual indoctrination of goddamn FIVE YEAR OLDS using public money and state institutions – and it's STILL not time to take the gloves off, huh? Still time for tone policing?
— John Hayward (@Doc_0) April 8, 2022
It's as if some conservatives fear the Left's true agenda is so hideous – as carefully laid out by lefties themselves – that if we expose it and speak honestly about it, the public will turn against US for putting such ugliness into their Twitter feeds and Facebook pages.
— John Hayward (@Doc_0) April 8, 2022
What that grassroots army of parents needs right now is REPRESENTATION. They're looking for candidates to support at every level. And they need intellectual firepower, ideological support, a movement that understands their concerns and offers a philosophy to illuminate them.
— John Hayward (@Doc_0) April 8, 2022
That's where you're supposed to come in, conservatives – from activists to professional pundits. Or do we get another Tea Party debacle where the grassroots gets trashed by the establishment and left to the mercy of grifters because they threatened to rock the boat too hard? /end
— John Hayward (@Doc_0) April 8, 2022
The Social Justice Warrior-infected Democratic Party has moved so far, so fast, to such radical extremes, that it’s even woken up the normies. When a school board revolt breaks out in San Francisco, you would think that even the dullest blades in the Conservative Inc. silverware closet would sense the once-in-a-generation realignment opportunities, but no. They seem to be off daydreaming of their next Ahoy cruise or a Jeb! restoration rather than detecting the smell of blood.
The Biden Administration is all-in on slicing off your daughter’s breasts and cutting off your son’s dick. pic.twitter.com/lWrgwSUQeJ
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) April 8, 2022
The “moderate” Biden Administration is declaring that it may mutilate your children in the name of transgenderism without telling you. And that’s not a hill to die on? Is there any hill they’ll die on that doesn’t involve marginal tax rates?
These is a giant red wave building to sweep left-wing crazies from power almost everywhere that cuts across all previous demographic, geographic and class lines. Conservative Inc. can ride that wave, or be drowned by it.
Tags: Democrats, John Hayward, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, transexual
Yeah… Well, duh.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the long-term charade that there are really any such things as “conservatives” in politics is pretty much done with. They’re not what they’ve been saying they are, for decades now. It’s just that people like yourself are finally, y’know… Noticing. Some of the rest of us have had this “brilliant insight” since, oh, about the 1980s when we first noticed that while the crooked bastards talked a good game, they never actually did anything when they were given the power. Recent example? McCain’s campaigning on undoing the Obamacare debacle, and then his actually voting against any such thing, when given the opportunity.
You are, I fear, framing this entire question improperly. This is not a question of Democrat vs. Republican, or even of Liberal vs. Conservative. This is a question of “system insider vs. system outsider”. Those supposed “conservatives” you’re decrying are no more than the other Janus face of the insider coin; their interests and values don’t align with yours, no matter what they say to you. They are of the system, for the system, and work unceasingly to forward the system’s interests in opposition to those who are outside the system. You wonder why they don’t decry the things done by the system? It’s because they’re of the system, and to question those things would be to attack their own identity. These people merely mouth “conservative” values in order to play the game, as self-appointed “oppositional anodynes” for the rest of the system, and they’re similarly rewarded. True outsiders like Trump and Palin are deplored and destroyed, because they might call into question the entire premise of the whole system, not just the supposed “liberal” bits of it all.
It’s a complex thing, this system. Do not be fooled by these people claiming to be on your side, working within it. If they’ve got the credentials from “inside”, they’re highly unlikely to be anything other than “system men”.
Ask yourself this: If there is true opposition to the “liberal agenda” inside the world of Conservatives, Incorporated…? Why is it that there are so few times where they’ve managed to prevail in anything, or even effectively fought back? Why do they fail, time after time after time, in putting an end to the liberal plays? That doesn’t happen accidentally; it happens because they’re actually playing for the other side, exactly how you find nothing but consistency in the disastrous foreign policies of the Foggy Bottom boys. The real root problem is that people unthinkingly trust these credentialed dolts, and then put them in charge of things like occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. They shouldn’t be trusted, and should, in fact, be put on trial for high treason and imprisoned at hard labor somewhere really unpleasant, like Death Valley, and then worked to death in expiation of all the lives they’ve ruined and destroyed over the years. You can be a very proficient mass-murdering creep, and never leave your desk in Virginia.
Or you can use Occam’s Razor and think that the Republican Party was idealogically destroyed by William F Buckley; an East Coast elitist who hated the People in the John Birch Society. When the Rockefeller Rinos went after AuH2O, it set the Republicans back 60 years. It’s taken that long to recreate the tip of the spear. Everything you said in your long post is just a logical outcome of that schism.
Kirk,
Johan Goldberg and David French are not insiders. Neither are any of the “conservative” commentators who suck up to them. They have no power, no influence, no company will eve hire a family member of theirs in order to use their influence.
They are cheap whores who realize the only thing of value they have to offer is being a fake “conservative” punching bag
That is different from the McCains and McConnells of the world.
Lawrence is talking about the former, you’re talking about the later. It’s not a useful conversation
Go back to the “before times”. When was the Republican Party ever effective, when it came to fighting Progressivism? Was it when Teddy Roosevelt was doing his thing? Remember how his splitting the ticket handed the country over to Woodrow Wilson?
The whole thing is one long, long con job by the connected. They set up a situation wherein they could trade back and forth between the Liberal and the Conservative points of view, but the never-ending ratchet effect has one beneficiary: The connected statist, the educated-yet-idiot apparatchiks who run things. How is it, pray tell, that the various and sundry intelligence organizations, hand-in-hand with the “law enforcement” agencies, are singularly so incompetent when it comes to discovery and enforcement against the connected, yet handily so capable when focused on the normies? Do you think you could get away with the things Hunter Biden has done? Would the FBI ignore your laptop, with that evidence on it, were you not a connected member of the club? Do you not note the way that Epstein was treated? All the other scions of the connected, when they commit heinous crimes? Ever wonder how it was that Mueller was selected for investigating Trump, the man who was involved in letting the FBI put innocent men in jail in Boston? Why did no “Republican” question that assignment? How could they ever consider him an unbiased individual, worthy of trust? After all, it was the Mueller FBI that Flynn dared to sign an affidavit against, corroborating an agent’s complaint of sexual harassment…
Mueller was selected and approved precisely because the insiders, both putative Democrat and Republican, knew he could be trusted to reach the “right” conclusions–If he could find the evidence. Which, wonder of wonders, they could not, which either speaks to a mind-bending incompetence, or an equally mind-bending cleanliness on Trump’s part.
These people are not on “our” side; they are insiders doing inside things for the inside. We normal folk are perpetually on the outside; they will never, ever work on our behalf. Do not be conned by the so-called “Republicans”, because they’re manifestly not on our side of the divide. Doesn’t matter whether you’re talking state or Federal, they’re crooks at all levels, working with their Democrat peers. There may not be any meetings going on in smoke-filled rooms, but there don’t need to be: The collusion and cooperation is all out there in the open, right in front of us, as they blithely discuss “working across the aisle”.
The majority of our “professional” politicians need to be audited, and then dealt with for their malfeasance. There should be no damn way that any of them wind up with multi-million dollar portfolios, but they all do. Somehow. It’s all grift, all the time–Regardless of party affiliation. If there were any honest ones out there, they’d wind up like Nunez or Palin, driven out of public life via campaigns of harassment. The insiders simply cannot risk exposure, and that doesn’t matter whether or not they’ve got a (D) or an (R) next to their names. All that matters is that “insider” status, the knowledge that they’ll go along to get along, and be taken care of. How many of these people have lost anything through “public service”? They all wind up better off; the “servicing” they give the public is the same sort of self-satisfying servicing that a bull gives one of his cows.
The Z man has his latest podcast about this exact issue.
Pretty pessimistic.
How many R senators would you keep if you could replace all of them with random registered Republican voters?
Cotton, Cruz, Blackburn. Most are squishes or traitors to the Constitution.
It’s long past time for non-leftoids to wake up to the fact that there is ZERO money to be made in preventing the expansion of state power. The only money to be made is in supporting it or subverting its prevention, which explains why 90% of professional “Republicans” and “conservatives” are Manchurian double-agents whose real job it to always lose in the end. 90% grifting traitors.
American politics are high school. The Conservative, Inc. types are those kids who were just outside the Popular Kids circle who worshiped them and hoped that one day they’d get the nod and be allowed in.
Nevertrump – Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, etc, are the kid in highschool who desperately wanted to be one of the “cool” kids, but weren’t – so they leaned into being “uncool” intentionally, but they never actually cared about the “uncool” things they leaned into.
In the political pundit class they didn’t have what it took to stand out amongst liberal pundits – so they leaned into what they could to stand out. They could argue the conservative case convincingly, and FOX was willing to take on less telegenic pundits. Or, they couldn’t write well enough to get a byline in the Atlantic, but if they sure could if they pitched to the Weekly Standard.
But as soon as they could attack Trump and get plaudits from the cool kids they did so immediately, and in the most disgusting toady way possible.
Go look at the way Goldberg or Bill Kristol tweet to Liberal pundits – it’s always dripping with a desire of approval.
They spent their careers thinking they never had a shot at being on the inside with the in crowd, and so they were perfectly scream about how awful those vapid popular kids were, but the second they saw a chance they planted their nose in the cheeks of the left.
There isn’t a rational reason for their behavior. It’s completely emotional.
I’d be happy if the GOP would fight big government and uncontrolled bureaucracy!
As always great analysis of the problem. But what the H do we DO about it?
A nation and people is defined by its culture and deepest held beliefs. When the governing class/caste of that nation and people is opposed to and destroying that culture and those beliefs, there is in the end no form of compromise possible. And if the political means used in that nation and people are essentially rigged, then perforce deeper truths and methods innate in the nature of our species will come to the fore.
Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln.
1) A significant fraction of the American people, perhaps larger than the percentage of Patriots in 1776 [1/3], believe that the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats . . . with the help of the Republicans.
2) There has been no real effort to punish that theft or to prevent another in 2022 and 2024.
3) On this particular issue, the sexual grooming and molestation of our children; amongst the Nomenklatura regardless of party there has been no real opposition for the reasons listed in the article above.
4) Despite the ongoing and public attacks on the nation, people, culture, and Constitution there has been no real opposition either.
5) If, as is highly possible, the 2022 election is cancelled, postponed, OR STOLEN AGAIN, there is literally no rational reason for Americans to continue to pretend the Social and Political Contracts still hold, because they don’t.
6) The Nomenklatura is playing a very dangerous game, operating under the assumption that they are both immune from any consequences and that in any new Contract created that that immunity will continue.
Subotai Bahadur
Here’s the sad thing. There may be a huge red wave this November, but the swampified GOP won’t do a damned thing about the disease infecting this country. They’ll just go along like they always have, being palsie-walsie with their DNC counterparts… those counterparts who will smile to their faces and then turn around and stab them in the back.
NO PRISONERS! DESTROY THE SWAMP!
I am unsure that there is actually a solution to the situation we’re in, short of firing them all and starting over, which isn’t going to happen without a lot of dislocation.
The root of this isn’t the Democrat/Republican dichotomy; the real root is the fact that the insiders have taken over, and are running the show for their own benefit. It’d be fine, if they were half-way competent and working for everyone’s bests interests, but… That manifestly ain’t the case. The Inside Crew has been taken over by selfish ideologues who would rather see their fellow citizens starve or go bankrupt rather than act in the interests of everyone, rather than their coterie of insiders.
At some point, the system will have to reset itself, or crash. We’ve been here before, but nowhere near this bad. I think that the reason it’s gotten to this point is that there’s been so much prosperity that we’ve managed to build up a toxic level of BS in the system such that it’s going to take down everything when it goes bye-bye.
This is how/why Rome fell, in the end: Self-interested dumbassery running the show. The people in Rome ceased to act in the best interests of the majority across the Empire, and just did what their short-sighted selfish little minds thought was in their best interest. Over the long haul, all those “little decisions” led to a situation where the entire Western Roman Empire was no longer viable, and the long night descended. Of course, it wasn’t really a night, per se, because oftentimes, the new management was far less destructive than the Roman ones were. However, they did not see the point of maintaining all those lines of communications like the roads, so Europe’s trade and everything else went to hell in a handbasket for a few hundred years. Didn’t help that the weather was horrid, either.
[…] Can’t speak for anyone else, but it’s tough avoiding bad thoughts these days. The larger question isn’t having bad thoughts, but whether you can express them. John Hayward, a/k/a Doc Zero, notices something important — the calls are coming from inside the house: […]