Is American Conservatism Possible? By the Z-Man.
In America, Right and Left are relative terms in that the Right is defined by its relationship with the Left. While the Left flits from novelty to novelty, the Right shouts, “please slow down” while following it around. …
The people trying to form up a new conservatism love waving around the Declaration of Independence, but that was the most radical document produced to that point.
Very radical for its day
In fact, the entire founding of the United States was a great experiment in radical politics. It is not an accident that America is often called an experiment. The very basis of America is the praxis of radical thought and it continues to this day. …
In his time, Lincoln was a radical and not just the bourgeois coffee house variety. He was willing to kill as many of his fellow citizens as needed to impose his radical vision on the country. The “new right” would no doubt dispute that characterization of Lincoln, but you cannot place Lincoln on the Right during his age. Abolitionism was a radical idea, one that the radicals of the founding generation rejected. …
A radical in his day
The truth is America has never had much to work with for anyone trying to create a genuine conservatism, because America lacks the history and traditions that would naturally anchor conservatism.
Compounding it is that the limited history and traditions that are available are nothing but a long journal of one radical experiment after another in the vain hope of creating that city on a hill John Winthrop imagined when he and his fellow fanatics landed in the New World.
This lack of necessary ingredients with which to fashion a genuine conservatism in America is probably why conservatism has been a failure. …
What can be produced from the materials at hand to create something that can resist the acid of liberalism? The answer cannot lie within the liberal tradition. To go back to 1950, 1850 or 1750 looking for answers to the problems created in those times inevitably means explaining away the defects of liberalism in order to preserve it.
The place to start with fashioning an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy is not in 1950, 1850 or 1750, but in 2050. Given the current demographic trends, imagine a continent filled with versions of Orania and then contemplate the ideology of a people who can maintain it.
Everyone is so pessimistic nowadays. Well obviously. The leftist elite — who increasingly run society unopposed — are in a virtue-signaling spiral of increasing craziness. Historically, such spirals have always ended badly.
