Why Modern "Conservatives" Will Lose the Country

The essay from which I quote could be subtitled "Why the Catholic Church Had to Defeat Mohammedans"--which is to say, in brief, that cult is the antecedent of culture.  This will not be a happy read, folks.  It could also be subtitled "Why Donald Trump Won, (Even Though He Should Not Have.)"

...Conservatism, like contemporary Western civilization itself, seems to be in eclipse. But this is so only because its advocates cannot, or refuse to, speak on their own terms; instead, they accept the moral authority of leftist ideologues and thus handicap their own putative opposition to militant progressivism. Those on the so-called Dissident Right constantly remind their detractors that the present stewards of mainstream conservatism have repudiated their forefather’s legacy. These warnings are, however, almost universally dismissed in terms identical to the broader Left’s pejorative treatment of conservatism itself. Instead, mainstream conservatives declare that their fealty to liberal ends is more sincere than that of their explicitly leftist opponents....

In other words, modern "conservatives" such as GWBush, Paul Ryan, George Will, (etc.) have given up the 'high ground', conceding it to the Left.  That is why the Republican party fell to The Donald--who, in reality, is the uber-Modern Conservative:  dissolute, narcissistic, but most important, un-grounded.  There are no principles in his 'there,' but there is irony; while Trump represents no traditional Western values, he succeeded by mocking and flogging the larger camp of un-grounded 'conservatives:'  the Establishment.  The fact that he succeeded with only 35% of the (R) vote is significant--far more so than most understand.


The essay relates this to the Moslem threat by quoting Waleed Aly, a Left-leaning scholar/Muslim who reminds us that Mohammedanism, accurately described, actually IS 'fundamentalist.'  That is the cult which is antecedent to the culture of Islam.

The problem is that the modern 'conservative' (or neo-conservative) has given up the traditional Western cult in favor of 

....a post-Christian secular ideology, its technocratic and managerial theory of governance, and the liberal, universalist biases that accompany it. ...Aly reveals the ultimate folly of applying Western concepts to the historical experience of foreign cultures and the silliness of expecting similar sociological outcomes as a result. “This is, of course, perhaps the most well-worn and ill-informed cliché of Western discourse on Islam,” he writes. “The kind of thing people like to say when they want to sound serious but know almost exactly nothing about Islam, Muslim societies, or indeed the [Protestant] Reformation.”

He's speaking directly to the Bush-ite gang; that is even more clear in this passage:

...Abbott’s awkward foray into this debate illustrates a mindset almost identical to the secular liberal’s. The latter feels he is capable of declaiming what Islam really is, or ought to be — namely, a “religion of peace,” inherently humanitarian, tolerant, rational, and scientific. It is “betrayed” by its violent jihadi adherents who, despite their vehement claims to the contrary, have “nothing to do” with the explicit dictates of Mohammed or the unambiguous and disconcerting Koranic mandates regarding the treatment of, and relations with, kufars and dhimmis. Abbott’s call for a reformation within Islam likewise takes as a given the progressive, materialist, and therefore universal and egalitarian perspective wherefrom all cultures will, can, and must undergo the exact same historical development as they move toward globalized modernity. According to this view, any reluctance on their part is merely a failure to progress along an inevitable path toward a world where, as recent history has shown, the only belief system that merits public celebration is one centered on secular, technocratic, and scientific “values.”...

Jacobinism pure.

...the egalitarian, sentimentalist, and progressive utopia of the Left is equally as arrogant and dangerous as the no less egalitarian, rationalist, and determinist worldview of the contemporary Right....

Or, expanded:

...Aly is also correct in identifying establishment conservatism’s defects as a shallow commitment to the banal, which has cultivated a political rhetoric that, he writes, “has no traditional moral language; nothing that richly evokes concepts like empathy, courage, sacrifice, restraint, forgiveness, forbearance, humility.” The traditionalist might respond that, naturally, this is what happens when politics is replaced by a series of economic propositions whose fungible treatment of man differs from socialism only in nuance, emphasis, and degree — exactly the materialist reductionism that characterizes most Center-Right politics throughout the English-speaking world today. Ironically, the antithesis of conservatism has now come to define it...

Therein lies another key to Trump's success--the economic propositions of the neo-con/"conservative" camp have stripped a large number of Americans of their prosperity.  Trump caught on to that and capitalized with his "wall" and "tariffs" chatter.

But Trump misses the larger and far more significant target:  the 'technocratic/managerial' Governments we have built which have raised the cost of doing business in the US to a level in which business can no longer be done at a profit.  That's because Trump enjoys the fruits of that Government--see, specifically, his endorsement of eminent domain abuse and his enjoyment of gerrymandered tax laws.

It ain't the cost of labor.  It's the cost of keeping the labor, and the plant, here.

...Aly is certainly aware of its “slow-motion death” within a “hollowed out culture” when he writes that “it’s hard to believe the market should be free to exploit and commodify whatever consumers will tolerate — sex, culture, children — and yet pretend we are bound together by inviolable, sacred values” (Sydney Morning Herald, Mar. 4, 2016). However, many of Aly’s above-mentioned virtues are expressed in communities that share strong organic bonds and, therefore, have high levels of in-group trust and solidarity. Government policies in the post-World War II era have favored a hyper-individualist and subscriptive model of citizenship, but the underlying transnationalist ideology involves a push toward deregulated international labor markets that are facilitated by a concurrent push toward effectively borderless mass migration, as well as the resulting consumerism, alienation, and societal balkanization that these entail....

Read again the red-highlighted sentence above; that tells you why I chose the subtitle about 'the Catholic Church'.  Then go a few words further to the part about 'underlying transnationalist ideology' and you understand why the Rockefeller Republicans--which includes John McCain's War Party pals--cannot win national elections, either.  

...Should a government assume a more genuinely communitarian sense of public policy — one firmly based on the imperative to maintain its constituents’ cultural and historical legacy — the result would be a reassertion of a particularly Occidental polis from which Aly and his co-religionists would, logically, have to be excluded. To put it differently, where conservatism loses its own sense of cultural particularism, it ceases to be preservationist in any meaningful sense; hence its usurpation by populism and nationalism within a disaffected lower middle class, just as Sam Francis predicted over two decades ago...

Oh, yah, Sam Francis--the guy who was read out of polite society for just that sort of prediction.  He could be laughing, but it would be a bitter laugh, indeed.

...multiculturalism per se militates against the formation of a “cultural consensus” that can “bind society,” unless that consensus is based on deracinated, ahistorical abstracts — in other words, unless all political dispositions on the Right, however defined, surrender to the essential worldview and value systems of contemporary cultural Marxism. That Center-Right politicians today celebrate subscription identity and civic patriotism as the foundational principles of the modern state indicates that such a capitulation has already occurred. Unfortunately, such a “cultural consensus” is as enigmatic as the workers’ paradise of the Old Marxist Left. Like Soviet economics, it simply does not work, and it is Europe again (this time west of the Oder-Neiße Line) that will reap the bitter fruit of this latest attempt at re-engineering man and society according to the dictates of spiritually dislocated, utopian malcontents....

We note that both Paul Ryan and the Marxist Obama remonstrate "..that's not who we are..." when faced with embarrassing questions about importing Muslims.*  In that light, re-read the red-highlighted section above again.  Yup.  That means that Paul Ryan (and his multitude of sycophant platitude-mouthers) HAVE surrendered to the essential value systems of contemporary Marxism.  Shall we say "Jacobin" again? 

Read the rest, HT  Pertinacious

*Since Angela Merkel is also a card-carrying Marxist from her days as a Party functionary in East Germany, she began the flood-the-zone game in Europe.  That's worked very well for young German women, ain'a??