American Conservatism is Fiddling While Rome Burns

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What is conservatism in America today? It’s hundreds of millions of dollars a year spent fiddling while Rome burns. It’s ideas with little to no consequence. It’s getting trampled all over by History, but while yelling Stop! Conservatism is the seven cheers for capitalism and the deafening silence on demographic change, feminism, and corporate malfeasance. It’s the same tired cast of speakers blathering about limited government almost a century after the New Deal. It’s the platitudinous Reagan quotes and the worn-out Buckley anecdotes. It’s the mindless optimism and the childish exhortations—if something can’t go on forever, it won’t!

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If it were only that, conservatism would simply be a harmless persuasion for nostalgic Baby Boomers. Or to be more generous, one big Benedict Option to offer a semblance of an alternative to the pervasive progressivism of our age. But conservatism is also the endless wars, the nation-building, and the outdated alliances. It’s the free trade fetish. It’s the foolish libertarianism that hates the government more than it loves America. It’s the unconscionable refusal to clamp down on immigration. Worst of all, conservatism is the cowardice and accommodation in the face of leftist hegemony. It’s the long list of enemies to the Right. It’s the court eunuchs and other members of the controlled opposition who offer an echo, but never a choice. It’s the faux grandstanding while living in fear of being called a racist.

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If this is conservatism, then we may be inclined to say, let the conservatives keep it. Perhaps the time has come for patriotic Americans tired of the Left desecrating all they hold dear to go beyond conservatism?

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Conservatism must therefore overhaul itself. If it refuses, then it should be left to die with the passage of time. A new Right, in any case, is already overtaking it. This new right, which of yet has no name, is anchored in the realization that the conservative project in America today is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary one. We lost. They won. Painful as it is to admit, we no longer feel at home in our own country. In this progressive theocracy in which all must worship at the altar of Wokeness, conservatism, if one can still even call it that, is more about overthrowing than conserving. Burke’s edifying exhortation—“Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna”—must be altered to suit the times: Sparta was your inheritance, now reclaim her.

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Ours is obviously a non-libertarian Right. The common enemy that justified an alliance with the free market fundamentalists is long gone. Today, libertarians actively side with our enemies: they promote open borders and empty prisons, and strengthen China’s hand through their consumer-focused economic policies. Ours is primarily a conservatism of countries and borders, citizens and families, none of which can take root in the barren libertarian soil of atomized individuals and global markets.

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As for our priorities, they are clear. We must confront the great threats of our time: unsustainable immigration levels and rapid demographic change; cratering fertility rates and collapsing families; the corrosive acids of neoliberalism and identity politics (in all their manifestations, from tech censorship to racial preferences); pathological white guilt; a political system largely unmoored from the consent of the governed; fiscal irresponsibility; and the emasculation of men through feminized education and various forms of soma that sap spiritedness (in particular pornography). In short, the entirety of the ruling class’s ideology must be discredited.

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The task before us is daunting. It may be insurmountable. But this much we know: unless we succeed, we will eventually be reduced to second-class citizenship in a declining country whose only solace will be the distant memory of former greatness.

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