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The Americans I know are fond of explaining conservative failures via the thesis of controlled opposition. The US Republican Party and also many nominally right-wing mouthpieces, so the line goes, have been co-opted either by the leftist establishment or by related special interests, and function merely as conduits to direct ideological energies towards ineffective or counter-productive ends. This thesis is not so much wrong as it is incomplete: The success of empty, transparent strategies like these itself requires explanation, as does the continued inability of many right-leaning politicians to develop a clear critique of the left or even defend the most moderate of their own positions. Instead, conservatives repeatedly embrace the principles of their opponents, while rejecting nationalists and traditionalists to their right as filthy populists, in chorus with leftist activists themselves.
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The leftist critique of traditional institutions, meanwhile, undermines the functioning of traditional society. By destroying solidarity and common-feeling, these tactics come to reinforce, perversely, the leftist critique itself. As natural social and cultural structures are destroyed by leftist propaganda and social engineering, churches, schools and governments indeed come to seem – as the left has always told us – “non-existent, irrelevant, repressive, reactionary”
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The problem is that we live in an inverted order. The leftist opposition has taken charge; the conservative conformists have been driven into the opposition.
The left sustains this inversion through its permanent revolution, its constant and ever-renewed assaults on the stability of society. The conservative, who remembers only his former position in the ruling class and remains fixated on returning to the halls of power, neglects populist solutions and seeks only to ingratiate himself with the leftists who hold the keys.
Neglect is too mild a word, in fact. The conservative only truly opposes the populists to his right. In denouncing right-wing populist opposition, the conservative both distances himself from the plebeian movements he considers beneath him, and hopes to ingratiate himself with the leftists in power.
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To begin with, leftists got into power by playing to the sense of fairness that prevailed within the twentieth-century liberal establishment. This older guard of elites were prepared to concede access and even power to their political opponents; in their minds this largesse confirmed their own legitimacy. The left knows no such fairness; as soon as they took charge, they set about bricking up all the passages via which they came to power themselves. Today, the establishment left demands nothing so much as absolute conformity to its views, and admits mostly yes-men and careerists to its circles. There will be no equivalent institutional march for the right.
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The conservative’s belief that he can adopt some leftist principles for pragmatic purposes, or in a spirit of compromise, are therefore mistaken. The system he opposes demands absolute submission; anything less makes him an enemy regardless.
For centuries, liberal European polities fended off all manner of political opponents, and if the states themselves did not always survive, liberalism itself demonstrated remarkable stability. It was a great filter that excluded all rivals, until it found one it could not sort out. Marxism and its successor movements proliferated as the one disease that liberalism could not defeat, in much the same way that antibiotic-resistant MRSA emerges from the antiseptic environments of hospitals. It is an opposition politics uniquely suited to liberalism, for it exploits the liberal impulses for equality and freedom in favour of a quite different, and far more terrible, project. In Western countries, the leftists took aim at the traditional institutions and culture of the European middle classes. There, they still struggle to impose not a socialist utopia, but a never-ending industrial and financial serfdom.
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The leftist system is not meant to produce political stability or prosperity, and it feels a lot like it’s entering a death spiral. Getting these lunatics out of power, before they crash the entire West with no survivors, is the most urgent problem we face. Here MKH has the right idea: Respectable conservative politicians have failed above all, in neglecting those people who have suffered the most at the hands of globalisation, renewable energy, immigration, lockdowns and all the rest of it. We must defeat the leftist elite, not win them over; and to do this we must deprive them steadily of popular support, beginning among the lower classes and at the periphery, where the greatest gains are to be made, and working inwards. From the hysterical, crazed opposition men like Trump, Orbán and Salvini have inspired, you can measure the power of this approach.
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More:
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/on-the-f...nservatives-to
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https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/05/...-upon-mankind/
