The Godfather of “respectable” conservatism, William F. Buckley, Jr.
1,633 words
Many on the Dissident Right these days like to deride conservatives. Conservatives are seen as the boobs who have been at least nominally in charge of the Republican Party since the end of the Cold War. We all know the names: Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, John McCain, John Boehner, Mitt Romney, Mitch O’Connell, Paul Ryan, and many others.
Behind them all, pulling their ideological strings, was the Godfather of modern conservatism William F. Buckley and Jewish neocon writers such as William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer. As representatives of the Right, these men were charged with resisting the leftward lurch of Western Civilization. Of course, they failed, and it wasn’t for lack of money, influence, or opportunity, either. Despite their rhetoric and promises, many of these men were never comfortable with the Right despite calling themselves ‘conservatives’ all along. So, when the chips were down they offered at best lukewarm resistance to Left. Or, as in the case of Kristol, they had been secretly on the Left all along. We know this because when a viable Republican candidate appeared who was to the Right of them all (i.e., Donald Trump) they, for the most part, resisted him. They resisted him even when he was winning.
After twenty-five years of this, the conservative/right-wing base has every right to feel cheated. The West is more liberal today than it has been since…when? The Spanish Civil War? The French Revolution? Certainly in the United States we’d have to go back to the Great Depression and FDR’s primarily-Jewish Brain Trust to find liberalism as deep as it is today. And even then, with Soviet spies abounding in government, and the Frankfurt School in its heyday, and a boisterous and well-funded American Communist Party causing trouble everywhere it went, people weren’t agitating for transgender rights, and inserting x’s into pronouns, and calling for men to use ladies bathrooms. The Left really has gone crazy these days. And they have power. Aside from commandeering the Democratic Party, they run Hollywood, the media, the universities, and pretty much have the muscle to control what gets said in public and who gets to say it.
Essentially, liberals accept the Left, while conservatives reject the Right. The Left fights to win. Conservatives fight for ideals. The Left embraces race. Conservatives rise above race. This is essentially why the Left has won almost every important cultural battle in the post-Cold War era: their imperatives are closer to the biological exigencies of their base. Meanwhile, conservatives try to keep their base packed into a closet while pretending that everyone cares about budget deficits and the Laffer Curve.
Obviously we have an imbalance here. In the political arena, conservatism has no chance against the Left since the former is a social construct and the latter a political construct. Conservatism is a way of life: the clothes you wear, the friends you keep, the music you listen to, your religion, your habits. Further, it’s relative. What could be considered conservative today, such as blasting classic rock and wearing your hair long in the Ted Nugent mold would have been scandalously liberal fifty years ago. The lines between what’s conservative and what isn’t are quite nebulous. This is why people on the Right correctly claim that conservatives conserve nothing.
Liberalism is also a social construct, but by shamelessly arming itself with Leftist weapons and following the Leftist playbook, it makes everything political…church, office, schools, family barbecues, whatever. This is how the Left can occasionally lose at the ballot box and still win where it counts, that is, in having the exclusive right to set the boundaries of the nation’s Overton Window. Everything is political to these people. They are known as Social Justice Warriors, and Vox Day’s SJWs Always Lie provides an excellent rundown of how these people behave and how truly insidious they are. This book also represents an attempt on the Right to beat the Left at its own game, with or without the help of conservatives.
This last part is crucial to understanding the character of the current political struggles in the West. Conservative vs. Liberal is not the same as Right vs. Left, despite considerable overlap. A person can be conservative and vote Left. Two great examples are American blacks and Arab-American Muslims. These groups on the whole are serious about religion and have little time for liberal pieties such as women’s rights, gay pride, et cetera. Yet over ninety percent of them vote Democrat. On the other hand, a person can be a liberal and vote Right. Milo Yiannopoulos, a flamboyant homosexual and race mixer, is the obvious example here. Although conservatives overlap with the Right more often than not, we should not take that to be a given. There is a deep divide between conservatives and right-wingers that has no counterpart between liberals and left-wingers. Further, as mentioned above, some conservatives are really part of the Left.
Then again, there is nothing wrong with conservatism per se. Once you divorce it from politics, its virtues begin to appear. God-fearing, church-going, patriotic people who follow centuries-old traditions and live by the Gospels and the US Constitution tend to live orderly lives and make great citizens. What’s the point of any nation if it has nothing to conserve? Without a conservative populace, nothing that makes a nation unique or exceptional can last for long. Conservatism within its proper context, therefore, is a good thing. But in politics, it’s tantamount to leading with your shield rather than your sword. It’s no coincidence that a thrice-married, playboy tycoon and reality television star such as Donald Trump is hardly a bastion of conservatism but remains a man of the Right, at least more so than any of his predecessors since Ronald Reagan. This is because he fights. The goal of the Right, quite plainly, is to beat the Left.
Let’s repeat that. The goal of the Right is to beat the Left. It is every bit as political as the Left is.
In politics, there is no honor in coming in second place. Unlike the list of Republican men above, however, Trump understands this. That day in 2016 when the Drudge Report prominently featured what was purported to be the red-headed black love child of President Clinton, I finally understood it as well. This is what fighting looked like, and I was thrilled it was a man of the Right actually doing it for a change.
But winning entails more than going after one’s opponents. It also involves conveying a positive vision of what the winner has to offer after he wins. This is where conservatism comes in. Conservatism, for the most part, is what the Right fights for. In a white society, Right and Left will not only sling mud at each other, but they will look to the past and current events to determine who is in a better position to lead. Jimmy Carter, after four years of stagflation and malaise and military embarrassment, had little with which to argue in 1980 when faced with a dynamic and charismatic candidate in Ronald Reagan. In a democracy, Right and Left have to sell their positions to the public, with the assumption that the majority of voters will gladly switch parties if the other side has more to offer. This is essentially how Donald Trump won in 2016. He campaigned furiously in places like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other Rust Belt states where Barack Obama had won easily in 2012 and convinced white working class people that he was their man. This is how democracy is supposed to work: politicians persuading open-minded, non-partisan voters of what’s best for them.
But this is not how the Left operates these days. The Left has become little more than a non-white grievance machine which takes into its purview non-whites of all colors regardless of how liberal or conservative they are, as long as they stand against the racial interests of white people. This is racial identity politics, and once it enters the equation, political arguments have competition of the kind that cannot be defeated through reasoned discourse. Putting your guy in office (with a little quid pro quo, of course) becomes more important than whether your guy can do better than the other guy. Remember, the Left is crazy and political about everything. They would rather have bad times with someone they like in power than have good times with someone they don’t like in power. Donald Trump illustrated this beautifully during his State of the Union address in 2018 when he called attention to the historically low black unemployment rate and received nothing but sullen glares from the black lawmakers in the audience. While tacks like this score points with disinterested members of the public and will boost Republican chances in upcoming elections, they are completely useless when the majority of the public is not disinterested. Right now, the majority of the Left is not disinterested, and will see good times generated by the Right only as an opportunity to gain influence and wealth with which they hope to ultimately defeat the Right. The good times themselves become irrelevant in the Left’s power calculus.
And that’s what you get with racial identity politics.
Across the board, this is how it is. Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ one standard deviation above average, and most of them engage in it. American blacks have an average IQ one standard deviation below average, and most of them engage in it as well. So isn’t it time we stop pretending that racial identity politics is bad? Maybe in a multiracial society it’s natural? Prudent, even? This is something more and more whites are going to realize as their majorities begin to evaporate in their own nations. And it won’t matter how conservative they are.
5 Comments
In US politics I see only two forces: The left that will use anything and everything to further their primeval goals (no principles involved) and the conservatives who act as a break, but never develop in incentive. Hence the slow slide into oblivion.
It remains to be seen if Trump can change the rep/dem stalemate.
It is so because the Christcuckery of American conservatism leaves them with no way in which to fight Nihilism of the Left. They can only lie down, accept the role given to them by the Left and die like their god. This is something that the author of this article fails to understand – that they are acting in accordance to their religion.
This is why the rise of anti-christian Right is so feared.
The American ‘Conservatives’ are not the Right. The American Conservatives are Liberals who differ from the Left only in what they see as the proper role of the State.
The American-Leftists (just as Soviet Communists) are happy to use the power (force and wealth) of the State and pass laws which break the traditional society (its structure, roles, and hierarchies) and foster equality and individualism. The Am-Conservatives agree with them, their ethics is the same (i.e., the absolute supremacy of the “individual rights”), that’s why it can not oppose the Left on moral grounds, but they want that “the market” and the freedom of contract to lead to this (the same) result.
For instance, the Left wants to use State’s money and affirmative action to support divorced/single women to achieve “liberation” and “equality” while the Conservatives only want that the Sate remain passive and let the market to decide. But that is not opposing the Left as a matter of moral principle (on the proper role of the woman in society) but only opposing Left’s direct state interventionism. It is a feeble, fake opposition (which deceive some voters) coming from people who share the same moral views as those whom they “oppose”.
Hindsight could be 20/20, but in this case, even with the benefit of hindsight, you still get it wrong.
Mr Buckley came of age at the end of WWII, and at a time when the Democratic Party was ascendant nationally and honest-to-God Communism was on the march world wide. As an officer in the US Army and an Irish Catholic, he saw the triumph of the United States in the War as an affirmation by the Divinity in the Rightness of the American Creed. Few in his time thought that turning to creeds we entertain today would have been the Right thing to do.
Mr Buckley was a proponent of a return to Normalcy worldwide, and to do that required selective resistance to the Left, as implacable resistance of the kind the Birchers wanted risked annihilation – world wide. One area not selected for resistance was white supremacy in favor of the sovereign individual. In the Cold War, had we stood on white supremacy against a Communism carrying the flag of racial equality, we would have been blown out world wide – conserving nothing, losing everything.
Mr Buckley lead a movement that turned the electoral situation around so that in the Presidency, the Courts, both houses of Congress and in most states the Democratic Party is on the back foot. That the Left is not also vanquished has to do with their ability to co-opt the Universalism of a dying Christianity and channel it into the struggle against the existing hierarchies – they define what is sin. Furthermore, if we look at the voting patterns of our nation (white America), the triumph of Buckley has reached super-majority status.
Not bad.
Mr Buckley’s efforts allowed we that follow him a chance to live to fight another day; thank him, perhaps by saying a private prayer for him, and get on with the fight. And ask yourself, in the fight for white survival, are you all that concerned with hypothetical problems that the future white nation, or future interstellar white republic might face? Of course not, those problems can be addressed by our descendants, but only if we win today.
As with Buckley then.
The conservatism of Buckley is what could be called “emergency brake” conservatism — that is, the Left goes forward relentlessly while conservatism hits the brakes every so often to slow down the juggernaut temporarily, but does nothing to reverse its course. This kind of conservatism is merely slow-motion suicide on the installment plan.
The fact that Buckley was instrumental in bringing the Jewish neocons to power, while marginalizing and dismissing hard-right persons like Revilo Oliver, Willi Schlamm, James Jackson Kilpatrick, Joseph Sobran, and several others, is by itself enough to make us question his intentions. And let’s never forget that Buckley was a passionate defender of the Lincoln-loving Harry Jaffa, and a promoter of the left-leaning Catholic Garry Wills.