Dark Thoughts On Non-Left “Soft” and “Hard” Issues, by Paul Gottfried. Advocating the soft positions costs you little:
[Let’s start] with those positions taken by “cultural conservatives” that couldn’t hurt their careers because most Leftists don’t give a damn about them. Favoring the wider use of the Latin Mass, proposing more concentration in public education on classical languages, deploring the lack of “values” in the contemporary West, and mixing in the phrase “permanent things” during cocktail conversation all exemplify “soft” stands. …
Although one can certainly take some of these positions out of genuine conviction, they also provide an easy way out for someone who wants to be known as a genteel “conservative” but who doesn’t want to catch flak as a journalist or academic.
In the political sphere, one can easily recognize the advocates of soft positions, because they abound in Republican think-tanks and throughout Establishment Conservative journalism. … There’s the one-note “moderate feminists” whom I see on Fox News warning women who wish to be liberated not to vote for the Dems. The Republicans, we are told by these blond-haired adolescent deep thinkers, will do more for “moderate feminists.”
Another soft or safe position for “conservatives” to embrace: supporting the right of the Israeli government to build settlements on the West Bank until this area is made to look like a replica of Long Island. Indeed, being for the right of any Israeli Right to do anything it wants will not likely hurt any budding “conservative” career. Nor will denouncing Islamicist oppression, directed against women, gays, Jews and (oh yes!) Christians. …
Hard positions, the ones that cost you to put, are more important:
The “hard positions” that only the bold or foolhardy would dare to take are professionally harmful …. Allow me to cite examples of these positions in ascending order of toxicity for those who take them.
Let’s start with the once-harmless declaration that any government that claims to be derived from the popular will should not be allowed to flood its territory with a foreign population without the express consent of its citizens. Those who enter the country illegally should be forced to leave. Moreover, rights that are constitutionally accorded to citizens are not meant to be universally applied, and especially not to those who have broken the law by crossing the country’s border. ..
Let’s get on to something that may be even more perilous to say: native cognitive abilities vary for individuals — which some on the Left are willing to concede — but just as importantly these abilities seem to vary on average for ethnic groups. For simply entertaining the possibility that this might be true, I and others have been driven out of “conservative” organizations …
It will also hurt the speaker if he brings up the high crime rate in the disintegrating black community, especially if he attributes this problem to genetics. Personally, I don’t think this is necessarily a prudent position for us on the Right to take because we land up excusing or palliating what is morally reprehensible. We do have a duty to demand the same standards of social conduct from all residents in this country and are fully justified in punishing those who grossly violate them, whatever their race. But this doesn’t mean that those who think differently on this issue should be professionally ruined and subject to physical attack. …
Much of the “conservative” establishment has gone PC:
The plain fact is that Conservatism Inc, functionaries are now socially and culturally much closer to the rest of the political journalistic Establishment than they are to the real Right. They and their Leftist debating partners attended the same educational institutions, live in the same gentrified urban neighborhoods and frequent the same restaurants.
The Left, with an assist from Conservatism Inc. careerist apparatchiks has created exactly the “harmless persuasion” that it wants: a sock puppet Right that won’t venture outside an ever-more narrowly restricted circle of themes.
