A few weeks ago, the main headline on Drudge was a report that Facebook was censoring conservative news sources. In response, Senator John Thune of South Dakota wrote a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to clarify the company’s policy. This horrified certain conservatives, who argued that, as a private company, Facebook could do whatever it wanted. After meeting with Zuckerberg, Glenn Beck begged his fellow conservatives to leave Facebook alone. Charles C.W. Cooke warned that going after the corporation could come back to haunt conservatives in the long run:

By demanding that Facebook account for itself, Senator Thune is ultimately claiming the power to investigate any online service that is even tangentially involved with the dissemination of news. In addition to representing a clear violation of the First Amendment, this sets a dangerous and undesirable precedent — one that conservatives would usually avoid at all costs.

This argument makes perfect sense . . . if you think that politics operates according to laws of logical consistency.

Liberals rarely hold such illusions. I have yet to hear one make any of the following arguments.

1. We can’t have affirmative action because once the government is allowed to discriminate based on race for the common good, they could bring back Jim Crow.
2. We can’t force Christians to bake gay wedding cakes. If so, we’ll set a precedent where a Black business will be forced to cater a dinner for the KKK.
3. We can’t have anti-discrimination laws, because if we do, then they’ll eventually come for historically Black colleges and racial set-asides.

Why don’t liberals have such worries? Because deep down, they understand that principles can be shaped and molded depending on the needs of the moment. Of course, anti-discrimination laws won’t lead to the abolition of Black-only scholarships, because no liberal judge would follow the principle of non-discrimination to its logical conclusion.

The Left is logically consistent, in its way, but its principles have nothing to do with freedom, fairness, or even equality. Rather, leftists use whatever tools are at their disposal to favor non-Whites and sexual non-conformists.

Conservatives, in contrast, cling to their universalism, regardless of consequences. Freedom of association means that corporations can do as they please, whether that means that the Koch brothers fund Republicans or that Facebook and Twitter can censor conservatives. But while Charles Cooke and others like him demand that Republican Senators leave Mark Zuckerberg alone, every single Democrat wants to stop the Koch brothers from participating in the political process through campaign finance reform. Similarly, although few conservatives actually want to use government to target corporations pushing the transsexual agenda, nobody on the Left thinks twice about destroying small businesses for their refusal to participate in homosexual weddings.

While this may give conservatives a sense of moral superiority, it’s also a way to ensure that they will be forever be losers. Sticking to universalist principles in politics is like a nation unilaterally declaring itself pacifist and disarming. Such a position makes sense only if your enemies do the same.

As Sam Francis and others have observed, big business leans to the Left. Yet polling data shows that Republicans get a substantial chunk of the vote of people making business decisions in this country, and sometimes even a majority. In 2012, Romney received 51 percent of the votes of people who had no more than a college degree. He did a bit worse with those who had postgraduate degrees, but still won a sizeable 42 percent. If so many people, even among those who are most influential, clearly identify with the Right, why, then, would we expect corporations to overwhelmingly support Black Lives Matter, transgenderism, affirmative action, and diversity, with practically no businesses publicly coming down on the other side?

The answer is that corporations, the mass media, and other nongovernmental actors have learned that there is a cost to supporting conservative causes, but there is none for pushing the agenda of the Left. Recently, Google’s front page honored Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese-American woman who praised the Maoist organization Shining Path and, in her later days, even Osama bin Laden. Most likely, some Asian engineers were jealous of all the glory heaped upon black and Hispanic agitators and wanted to feel proud of their race by the SJW standards of our time. Rest assured, there will be no political repercussions. Compare this to what happened when the chief operating officer of Chik-fil-A spoke out against homosexual marriage, at a time when at least half the country agreed with him. The restaurant was banned from universities and even cities across the country. Whether these kinds of actions can hold up in court is besides the point; even the costs of litigation are enough to deter companies from taking stances considered too right wing. In an era where government passes more business regulations than it can possibly ever enforce and bureaucrats have discretion with regards to whose lives they ruin, a reputation for coming down on the politically incorrect side on a sensitive issue is something every responsible business is desperate to avoid.

Contrary to what Charles Cooke believes, whether or not liberals come for the conservative media has nothing to do with whether Republicans set a precedent by going after Facebook. Everything that’s happened since the 1960s indicates that if they win enough elections and appoint enough judges, liberals will be able to find justification for doing whatever they please. Yet many on the Right are doing what they can to put Hillary Clinton into office for the sake of their “principles.”

Conservatives have won elections for decades yet despair as the country moves further and further left and every generation seems more insane than the last. Actually doing anything to confront the power of Hollywood, the mass media, or leftist corporations remains unthinkable, as doing so would clash with principles such as freedom of speech and limited government. Meanwhile, the Left presses on, destroying every last vestige of “racism,” “sexism,” or “homophobia,” even among private clubs and associations.

This is perhaps why Donald Trump has struck a chord with so many Republicans. Whatever his faults, at least he fights. Trump, for example, is not going to sit there and let the wife of a serial rapist tell him that he’s the commanding general in a “war on women.” For three-quarters of a century, conservatives have stuck to their principles as they have done nothing to challenge the power of those seeking to destroy all they hold dear. The results are clear, and more are waking up to the true nature of the modern Left. This is bad news for liberals, but even worse for their Potemkin opposition.