Conservatives¶
AoS two days in a row, which is a sign that I like the place. It’s far smarter than it attempts to appear, which is always attractive, and it’s among the wittiest blogs I know (by which I mean painfully funny, quite often). There are also writers at AoS that I almost agree with, but when they’re reaching the line, or threshold of escape, and are just about to cross over into the open country beyond, something catches them — and you know it’s going to pull them back in. Conservatism has them hooked.
Ace is a comparative squish in his own house. Some of his comrades are considerably meaner, so they get out further. It’s one of Ace’s own pieces that triggers this, though.
Writing about the attempt by Mozilla employees to purge CEO Brendan Eich from the company he built, he notes that the only ‘ground’ floated for this effort is private, discreet political speech, in the form of a small donation made to the successful (anti-gay marriage) Proposition 8 campaign, six years ago. Their attack on Eich — conducted through Twitter — is a contrary type of political speech, more attuned to the PC Zeitgeist, but in every other way less defensible. If anyone is going to be fired, why shouldn’t it be the twitterati lynch mob? Ace muses. (Good question.)
The post concludes with the lucid observation:
The left has laid down the rule that their political rights shall never been infringed by an economic penalty, because McCarthyism. While they meanwhile demand the exact same sort of McCarthyism for everyone else.
So what could possibly be objectionable about that, from the perspective of the outer right? What’s objectionable — and in fact even maddening — about this insight is its conservatism, which it to say that, even after recognizing the relentlessly steepening leftist gradient in the dominant culture, the implicit message is only: carry on.
If the sole point is to say “this isn’t fair” it might be even more pointless than saying nothing at all. Keeping people in the ‘fairness’ frame is part of the captivity, and it’s why conservatives are never going to do anything but lose. This whole situation isn’t ‘unfair’ — it’s disastrous. It’s ruin. There’s not any kind of game happening here that could somehow be made ‘fair’. There’s a civilizational calamity in process which is intrinsically tilted and leads, with accelerating glacial inevitability, only in one direction.
Conservatives — even atheist conservatives — could be minimally expected to have held onto that “hate the sin, not the sinner” recommendation from their collapsed religious tradition. Even if they’re not going to hate leftists, they have no excuse for avoiding icy hatred of leftism, and that means never giving it the benefit of the doubt by implying, even for a moment, that it can pursue anything other than the total destruction of its enemies, by any means necessary. Leftism isn’t going to be shamed out of winning. It isn’t going to be taught a lesson. It isn’t going to recognize its internal contradictions. The only thing it’s ever going to do, is continue pushing civilization down the slope.
Conservatism is congenitally incapable of recognizing the true malignancy of its foe. It’s always looking for the next tactical edge, the next opportunity to slow down the calamity just a little, the next disastrous deal. It’s conservatism that allowed the relentless collapse to happen, by presenting a self-defeating alternative to the one thing that’s really needed — counter-revolution.
So now the brain-washed idiots at Mozilla are trying to purge their boss in pursuit of Cathedral spiritual purity, and they’re getting away with it. The answer to that isn’t to point out their hypocrisy, or the sad state of society in general, while hoping the GOP wins one. It’s to destroy the GOP and get real about defeating the left. That’s going to require a social order in which the left doesn’t necessarily win, or at least the end of the social order in which it always does. Sooner or later, conservatism has to move on.
ADDED: Some lessons from the Eich affair (from Henry Dampier).
ADDED: Handlean magnificence.