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Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Big Conservatism’

Coronavirus Hysteria and Big Conservatism: Corona Cons, the Dead Party – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on April 11, 2020

The Big Con has failed to bring to the public’s attention that no more than a month or so ago, Dr. Fauci revealed a very different face when he didn’t have remotely as large an audience (i.e. remotely as many people to scare).

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/04/jack-kerwick/coronavirus-hysteria-and-big-conservatism-corona-cons-the-dead-party/

By

This [Northern Conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation.

“What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.

“American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted?

“Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip.”

                                                                                                                              –Robert Lewis Dabney

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Dabney’s characterization from a century ago of “Northern conservatism” remains unsurpassed in both eloquence and accuracy as a description of that contemporary phenomenon that styles itself, “conservatism.”

This is what I refer to as Big Conservatism, the Big Con, or the Conservative-Industrial-Complex.

A curious, or perhaps not so curious, thing that has unfolded before our eyes during The Great Panic of 2020 is the readiness with which the Big Con has labored indefatigably to exacerbate it.

Indeed, Fox News and The New York Post are indistinguishable from CNN, MSNBC, and The Washington Post in their breathtaking, hyper-sensationalized coverage of…The Virus.

The Big Con, in other words, has been every bit as much a purveyor of Fake News and fear as has their leftist counterparts.

As of this writing, April 8, 2020, some in the Big Con have begun—even if, like the prisoner in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave who, with no small measure of reluctance, breaks free of his bonds to ascend into the blinding light of the sun—slowly, carefully note holes in the official narrative on The Virus.

Still, though, those in the Big Con who have gotten just this far are in a minority.  The Big Con will not dare say anything so much as remotely critical of Dr. Fauci, for example, or Dr. Birx. Hell, for that matter, I don’t recall them uttering a negative syllable even about Andrew Cuomo.

The Big Con, however, is behaving now as it always does: In order to maintain the illusion that it represents an opposition party to that of the left, it seeks to quarrel with the latter over differences in degree—never differences in kind.

Examples:

Race and “Racism” Read the rest of this entry »

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Why the Left Will Continue To Win – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on July 27, 2019

Thus, the left will continue to win the war as long as it is the only side that is intent upon fighting.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/07/jack-kerwick/why-the-left-will-continue-to-win-big-conservatism-and-the-failure-to-fight/

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One thing that is essential to victory is what Master Al calls, “ruthless intent.”

To prevail over the enemy, one must not only possess the capability to destroy him, but the willingness to do so.

Bearing this in mind, it should be painfully obvious that Big Conservatives, i.e. those in the so-called mainstream “conservative” media, or “the Big Con,” who are forever imploring the members of their audiences to “fight” the left so as to prevail in the “cultural wars,” or this “second Civil War,” are either dishonest or profoundly inept.

Big Conservatives at least speak as if they conceive of our contemporary politics as war by other means. We know that the left sees matters this way. Yet Big Conservatives, though they possess the ability—the resources in money and influence—to fight the left, their will for doing so is sorely lacking.

Anyone with any doubts about this should simply engage in the following thought-experiment.

Imagine that an alien from another planet, an alien, say, who knew nothing more than what “conservatives” and “liberals” claim to believe, came to Earth.  It’s inarguable that upon canvassing the scene for just the shortest periods of time, he would arrive at one of the following two conclusions:

(1)Self-identified conservatives cannot possibly believe what they claim to believe. The reason for this is quite simple: Between their talk—rhetoric regarding limited or Constitutional government; the sanctity of life; personal responsibility; equality before the law; equality of opportunity (as opposed to result); individual liberty; traditional marriage; revering the Founders, etc.—and their walk—the policies that they’ve either explicitly endorsed or permitted to be enacted—there lay an unbridgeable chasm.

(2)Second, self-identified conservatives are utterly ineffectual when it comes to arresting the advances of the left.

How could our alien draw any other inference?  Lip service to the Constitution notwithstanding, both Republican or “conservative” Presidents and Congresses, no less than their Democratic or “progressive” counterparts, have betrayed—repeatedly and dramatically betrayed—the vision of these United States that the men who ratified it originally intended for the Constitution to embody.

Consequently, given that the federal government has been divested of its federal character and made into precisely the sort of national behemoth that the Founders dreaded, the Constitution is, today, all but a dead letter, murdered by leftist ideologues, yes, but by self-avowed “conservatives” too.

Whether it is the income tax, fiat money, socialized medicine and health care (Medicare, Medicaid, etc.), or any number of the legions of government-subsidized agencies, programs and sectors that exist, Big Conservatives are as responsible as their ostensible opponents for, if not always necessarily the creation, then at least the preservation and expansion of these.

“Conservative” politicians, by way of the power with which their offices have endowed them, have directly subverted the Constitutional design, but the scribblers and chatterers in Big Conservatism have aided and abetted them at every turn.

So-called “affirmative action,” race and gender-based preferential treatment policies favoring non-white minorities and women over whites and white men, are endemic, and filicide in the womb (“abortion”) has been the law of the land since 1973.  Big Conservatives have indeed voiced their objection to such things, but their resistance has been about as timid and effective as their resistance to “same-sex marriage” became after a handful of lawyers on the Supreme Court “discovered” that homosexuals have a right to marry one another.

This is to say, Big Conservatives have done nothing more than proclaim their opposition to these things.  But even here, they articulate their positions only and always in their enemies’ terms.  For example, “affirmative action” is wrong because it is “racist” and “sexist,” but not toward the qualified whites, Asians, and men who are discriminated against in favor of less qualified non-whites and women, but toward the underqualified blacks and women who are its intended beneficiaries. Or Big Conservatives will object to filicide, but not, ultimately, because it consists in the destruction of an innocent human being in its mother’s womb, but because it irrevocably traumatizes the mother who kills her child, or because, insofar as black babies are disproportionately aborted, it is “racist.”

Big Conservatives not only stopped objecting to “same-sex marriage” as soon as the Supreme Court issued its ruling.  They say remarkably little about such implications of trans-genderism as the abolition, in some quarters, of gender-exclusive bathrooms.  As one popular blogger recently said, it’s laughable to think that conservatives can conserve Western Civilization; they can’t even conserve something as rudimentary as the ladies’ room.

We could continue endlessly. ..

The left bullies and pummels upon the right as much as it does because they know that they can.  Big Con radio and cable news hosts may derive a sense of self-satisfaction whenever they pat themselves on their collective shoulder for categorically refusing, on behalf of all conservatives, to exercise their right to self-defense when attacked by leftist thugs. But unless one is a pacifist—which, given their readiness to send young Americans off to wars in foreign lands, none of these Big Conservatives seems to be—this is nothing of which to be proud.  And it is certainly not the path to victory in this “second Civil War” that Big Conservatives insist we are engaged.

The “ruthless intention” to which Master Al speaks is a matter of being in it to win it, so to speak. Big Conservatives, inasmuch as they do nothing but essentially whine that the left dislikes them and favors itself by way of its “double standards”—all of the while accusing leftists of being the snowflakes—give no indication that they are interested in doing anything other than enriching themselves.

Big Conservatism has the ability to genuinely fight the left.  It lacks the will.

Thus, the left will continue to win the war as long as it is the only side that is intent upon fighting.

Be seeing you

So, tell me, where should I go? To the left, where nothing ...

 

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