Ross Douthat is deeply confused about what conservatives should be conserving when the polls show that actually there is really no confusion about this among something like 85% of Republican voters. The message hasn’t trickled up yet to Yale University and the New York Times.
“But beneath this party crisis there is the deeper one, having to do with what conservatism under a liberal order exists to actually conserve. …
So the question, then, is what happens when the reasons for that investment weaken, when the things the right imagines itself conserving seem to slip away? …
This set of problems explains the mix of radicalism, factionalism, ferment and performance art that characterizes the contemporary right. What are we actually conserving anymore? is the question, and the answers range from the antiquarian (the Electoral College!) to the toxic (a white-identitarian conception of America) to the crudely partisan (the right to gerrymander) to the most basic and satisfying: Whatever the libs are against, we’re for.
On the center and the liberal center-right, meanwhile, there’s a sense that the way out of this mess is for decent conservatives to recommit to the liberal order — “to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side,” as my colleague David Brooks put it this week. …”
Republican voters are clearly responding to an existential threat.
These people aren’t voting on the basis of policy anymore. They are voting on the basis of sheer hatred and loathing of the political establishment. They want champions who will fight back against the other side. This is what is driving them. While it is true that these people hate “journalists” and want to “own the libs,” the voters have a correct battlefield assessment of the situation. The stakes of this zero sum fight really are this high. There is going to be a winner and a loser in this fight. They want to be on the winning side. They are sick of being represented by a bunch of worthless cucks who are too timid to push back.
What are Republican voters thinking right now?
We’re under attack by the political establishment for being White.
We’re under attack by the political establishment for being Christian.
The political establishment clearly wants to destroy our republican system of government. They want to trample on our rights and demographically replace us with an endless tidal wave of Third World immigrants to create a more pliable electorate. This is what Republican voters believe now. Guess what? They are right. It took the normies long enough to figure it out, but you know better late than never.
The voters are saying that they want to conserve the racial, ethnic and cultural demographic core of the United States which is under relentless attack by the political establishment. They want to conserve our republican form of government. They want to conserve the White race, Christianity and the Republic. In other words, they want to reassert what some social scientists have labeled American “dominant ethnicity” after a long period of dormancy that began sometime around the mid-20th century.
Mainstream conservatism has been conserving cultural degeneration, low taxes and low regulation for multinational corporations, the Pentagon’s bloated budgets and occupations of foreign countries, global free trade, legions of worthless consultants and our bloated oligarchy. This is not what the people want though. These things are not their priorities. There are some large number of Independents who feel the same way about this which is why immigration is Joe Biden’s biggest weakness in the polls.
There are two sides in this identity knife fight: our side which is populism and nationalism and traditionalism vs. the other side which is modernism and woke progressivism. It isn’t complicated. You’re either for “America As It Was” and ought to remain and be extended in the future, OR, you are roughly one of these people who wants to topple statues of George Washington, celebrate criminals, drive an electric car and give up meat eating while railing against the “police” and “white supremacy” and the “patriarchy” and demanding that society refer to you by your own ridiculous make believe pronoun.
How hard is it for Republicans to craft policies which are a response to this reality? There are two sexes and gender has a biological basis and the people who say otherwise are telling the Biggest Lie in the history of American politics. God created Adam and Eve, not 20,000 make believe genders. We need to restrict immigration because that is what our voters want to happen. It is their top priority. We need to defend the First Amendment and Second Amendment. We need to break up the monopolies which are crushing voters. We need to be breaking politically correct taboos and championing White identity and Christianity and masculinity and femininity and shoving back against the corrupt and degenerate political establishment which is attacking us on the basis of our identity.
Conservative elites could be saying this. If they won’t say it, we will say it for them and these mewling, sanctimonious cowards can be ignored, judged and replaced by their followers.
> “draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side”
But he doesn’t mean a bright line between Zionist Jews – like the ADL, quite illiberal and anti-free speech, nor Likud, extremely illiberal and openly pro-apartheid. The Republicans are 100% fine with that.
The Republican’s Number One issue is making sure that people racialized as “white but NOT Jewish” are never given the same status as Jews. So, people who are “white but not Jewish” are never allowed to be ethnocentric, like Jews, are never allowed to be Nationalist, like Jews, and are never even to be spoken of except to insult them as “racist.”
We aren’t even allowed to use the proper name for our ethnicity – “American” – and instead have to use the term “white but not Hispanic” because now EVERYONE is an “American” and in fact the less time you have even been in America the more American you are!
Look at his four things:
“The Electoral College” and “the right to gerrymander” – this simply means keeping the party alive in the face of mass immigration giving non-Americans the vote. If they can’t do that they may as well just close up shop and go home now.
The other two?
“a white-identitarian conception of America” – i.e., conservativing actual Americans is off the table.
But … “Whatever the libs are against, we’re for.” – that is what the GOP is trying to sell everyone so no one will notice the mass immigration giving non-Americans the vote. Don’t you hate those Greenhair SJW’s? Antifa Are The Real Racists!
I don’t think the Republican bullshit is working too well anymore, hence their panic. I think it’s great. GOP Delenda Est.
I remember almost 10 years ago, when I saw at my job, how people were categorized by the government. Hispanic or Non-hispanic.
Hispanics got everything free.
They aren’t even Hispanic, but someone from Spain is.
He’s sounding the gatekeeper alarm. Professional conservative gatekeepers have been desperately trying to corral voters back into the fold of the fake bipartisan center (the “liberal order” as he puts it). It isn’t working. The real electoral center is opposite to lib-cons like Douthat and their bipartisan center.
Agree. These wealthy at-the-top “conservatives” think they’re better than us. Most of us don’t care about them anymore. Conservative is far left of center now. I’m done with the GOP.
Last election, I thought, “There’s no one representing me.”
For a long time I’ve wondered how people running things get this far out of touch with reality, I’ve guessed they don’t ever communicate with anybody that isn’t just like they are. I’m not sure I buy that, because it isn’t that hard to use your imagination. I never seem to get much beyond the poor quality of public education, university and incredible amounts of group think.
I think they live in gated communities and go to country clubs. I don’t think any of them have to work with any diversity.
Where did this outcast view come from? In part, it can be traced to the Puritans and their coming to America as religious exiles. Another cause was an ethnic group/religion that came later. Hannah Arendt pointed out in some of her writings that the pariah(outcast) is one of the dominant self images of her fellow Jews. In this blackguard alliance against America’s understanding of itself, the West’s self image of the pioneer voluntarily trekking west and the South’s understanding of itself as cavalier derived have been denied and ignored to our common detriment.
The Altright was spearheaded and ultimately derailed by Upper middle class suburbanites like Weev, Ricky Vaughn, Enoch, Anglin and Spencer, Sven Jazzhands, none of whom have an intuitive grasp of that American identity. Enoch is the better of the three but still, he isn’t a heartland scots irish Appalachian, or midwest sod buster, no working man.
In any other time, they would have been on the other side gladly occupying managerial status with the rest of the Swpls. But they missed the boat to board the great American grift, and got spun off as chaff from the ass end of the elite overproduction mechanism.
Any real world organization or loosely affiliated movement headed by “intellectuals” from a disaffected suburban rump, is doomed to failure because its human capital is inherently nihilistic and self serving, or basically Libertarian.
Its no surprise they all pretty much were libertarians 10 years ago, as Libertarianism never required any responsibility on their part for anybody but themselves.
And that same selfishness drove their activism in the Altright. They wanted to be avant garde. Now they are just fringe.
We need to be distrustful of suburban scum.
BREAKING: Wimpy establishment conservatard (or Republicuck, take your pick) is too cowardly to directly address the race question — film at 11.
The problem with “Protestant” as a marker of American identity is that is has mutated so much in the last 50 years. In Iowa there is a Methodist “Reverend” who was born female and identified as Lesbian. She goes by the letter “M” for a name (I assume since it doesn’t specify gender). Her pronouns are “they/them”. But now she has decided that she is really Transgender so that make her sexual desire for women sort of heterosexual…right? In other words, she is using the institution of the Methodist Church to advance the Sexual Revolution (aka, cultural Marxism). Liberal Protestantism is just secular humanism dressed in church robes.
Just to show you I wasn’t lying with an earlier post about the “disorientation” in contemporary Protestantism, I just read this: “Isaac Simmons (He/Him/His) is a 23 year old Drag Queen named Ms. Penny Cost (She/Her/Hers). He is a certified candidate for ordination within the Illinois Great Rivers Conference of the United Methodist Church.”
https://rmnetwork.org/2021/03/16/why-i-don-my-drag-today-isaac-simmons/?fbclid=IwAR2bnqaP7MnqM3vqLYJb-ycqKmvJmQz23-WKvC9S_pLesZwibEuKi9EsgXA