Do Conservatives Have Principles?

The disarray of the Right continues...

When trying to explain the ascent of the far Left to almost unchallenged political power in the United States during the last 3+ years, many instinctively blame “RINO” Republicans and other perfidious pseudo-conservatives, who allegedly colluded But the larger question is whether the professional conservative political class has any fixed principles at all, other than acquiring power. 

The question is more than a rhetorical slur. It may explain why the Left won: why right-wing political operatives surrendered abjectly as the far Left took power and now flail helplessly, unable to dislodge the leftist junta.

Conservatives themselves seem to have little confidence in any principles they might profess. Rather than articulating and defending them with conviction, the professional conservative leadership wheels leftists on stage, where they express their dissatisfaction with their own increasingly extremist tendencies. Professional conservatives seem more comfortable having leftists speak for them than speaking for themselves.

There is only one reason for doing this: to gain power. It is a tactical manoeuver to outflank the far Left by allying with their internal enemies.

Otensibly, they are saying, “See, the Left is so extreme that even other leftists are dissenting.” But this could be pointed out in a sentence or two, while still keeping control of the conversation and prioritizing larger principles. The power brokerers of conservatism are doing much more. They are promoting leftists to prominence in the hope of sharing their limelight — and their power.

The effect is to ratchet everything ever-further to the left. But even worse, it shifts the standard for measuring right-and-wrong from morality to ideology.

So impotent and frightened are conservative leaders that they surrender their independent voices and reduce themselves to taking sides in the Left’s internal sectarian squabbles rather than staking out decisive and principled positions.  That some “transgender” men gain access to feminist bastions like women’s sports elicits enormous indignation, because that threatens feminist power, and feminists (rather inconsistent and unprincipled ones, Janice Fiamengo observes) can be brought on stage to denounce it.  (She points out that it was the feminists who pioneered the whole sexual radicalism thing in the first place, including the notion that sex or “gender” is artificial and fluid.)  Meanwhile, the hideous mutilation of children in the name of that same transgenderism, which seems to have become mainstream liberal-left policy, is long ignored and at best a secondary concern.  Denouncing that would risk allowing decency to take precedence over feminist ideology.

The result is that basic moral principles atrophy and are discarded and replaced by fashionable ideological correctness.  One need only observe the zeal with which conservative pundits abandon old-fashioned stigmas against quaint concepts like adultery or fornication and adopt sexualized agitprop jargon, whose full implications they do not understand, when they opportunistically accuse President Bill Clinton of “sexual harassment” or Muslims of “homophobia.”

This is how radical ideology wheedles its way into our collective consciousness, displacing moral principles, herding us into collective mentalities, acculturating the public discourse to ever-greater extremism, and rendering us all impotent to resist and too intimidated even to try.

The leftists’ sleight-of-hand is subtle and difficult to perceive. When given the microphone, they criticize one another in the name, not of basic human decency, but of leftist orthodoxy. Always striving to be lefter-than-thou, they are now enticing conservatives into the game.

Enjoying an extended platform in the conservative Epoch Times, feminist Naomi Wolf accuses left extremists of “misogyny”. (She also loses no opportunity to lambast everyone else’s “sexism”, “racism”, “sexual harassment”, and the rest.) The Epoch Times apparently endorses this assessment and expects the rest of us to nod in agreement. Yes, misogyny. That is the problem.

Ms Wolf resents losing her status as official “feminist”, with which she still identifies, and being “exiled from the progressive campfires” of the Georgetown dinner party circuit. This is punishment for associating with Tucker Carlson, but she assures us that he is not really “transphobic” after all. That is comforting to know.

Wolf has become the poster child for conservative capitulation to leftist orthodoxy. In a two-hour interview with Jordan Peterson, targeted at conservatives (and presumably ordinary Americans) with the title, “The Demise of the Left,” she spends most of the interview expounding the same radical left ideology that is supposedly in its “demise”, adopting the standard buzzwords: “misogyny” is rife; men are all rapists; women are innocent victims; a “culture of impunity” justifies removing the few remaining protections for civil liberties; and more, replete with the usual discredited statistics.

Peterson is unequipped to push back or challenge any of this, so he encourages it, his head nodding.

In the latest instance of conservative capitulation to the feminist Left, we now hear about “the Left’s War on Women.”  But there is no “war on women”.  There is an internal power struggle between feminists and more extreme “transgender” radicals who covet the power the feminists have procured and know that the way to share it is to adopt a quasi-feminine persona.  Conservatives have allied themselves with the feminists to help them fight off the challenge from the homosexualists and transgenderists because they too understand that the real power is with the feminists.  So the conservatives too become feminized. The only “war” in all this is a multilateral war against masculinity.

This provides one explanation (there are others) for why the Right always loses. When the rest of us take our talking points from the power brokers of the professional Right, we lose too.