Conservatism, Inc. is more confused about its identity than Bruce Jenner. One day it’s “Judeo-Christian” values, the next cosmopolitan libertarianism, tomorrow it’s liable to be penning a defense of furries (laugh now). But what remains constant is its inability to defend America’s historic European majority as Europeans.
Over at The Nation, erm, I mean the National Review, Kevin “the Cuck” Williamson is here to inform us once again what “True” Conservatism™, is all about.
He starts with a negative, telling us what conservatism is not, and that is white males. In particular, working class white males who voted for Pat Buchanan. Such men have probably never even been to a theater, much less read one of Kevin’s banal theater “reviews” (Exhibit A in bourgeois conservatism’s class insecurities).
Per Kevin:
The Buchanan boys are economically and socially frustrated white men who wish to be economically supported by the federal government without enduring the stigma of welfare dependency. So they construct for themselves a story in which they have been victimized by elites and a political system based on interest-group politics that serves everyone except them.
Yes Kevin, it’s not as if whites are dying at alarming rates while their dispossession is celebrated in the elite quarters that you so desperately want to impress. After all, it’s not like their children are growing up in an America vastly changed from their own. They don’t have legions of academics who study ending “whiteness”, and they obviously don’t see themselves being taken out of ever more places in our media/linguistic matrix.
No Kevin, these men must be suffering from false consiousness. Way to Marx, bro.
After all, if it wasn’t for the siren call of “big government,” all of these hicks would just get back to work and sing paens to the glorious free market utopia of Chairman “Lao”wry at NR. You see, for Kevin, and the broader “conservative” movement in general, it’s not about fighting for a particular people. Rather, it is in Kevin’s words, “rooted in classical liberalism, and…is universalist.” (Exhibit B: pretentious signaling about the “real” liberalism.)
He is right though. Conservatism, as undertood by the luminaries over at NR and filtered through “classical liberalism,” is univeraslist. In fact, it’s just yesterday’s model of today’s liberal orthodoxy. (Exhibit C: adopting ideological positions long after they ceased to be “radical” in any meaningful sense.) But, if it’s a politcal philosophy for all, then it will be for none.
Kevin notes that conservatism, at least as he understands it, “provides them no Them”, which negates having a political philosophy altogether. The inability to draw a friend/enemy distinction in political discourse is worse than dumb. It’s dangerous.
This sort of half-cocked reasoning is intelligible once one understands what it is American “conservatism” has failed to do. That is: defend and protect the people that founded this country. The “Republic” or the “Constitution” are worthless without the particular people that gave birth to them. Our people.
So, conservatism is in an intellectual crisis.
Will it continue to merely spout yesterday’s “universalist” platitudes, or will it actually realize that there is something worth conserving and that it is who we are?