“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Edmund Burke’s chestnut is no less true for the fact of being quoted so often. Yet, despite Burke being acknowledged as the father of conservatism, it’s astonishing how few conservatives seem to take any notice of his most famous dictum.
Even as conservatives whine and moan that the Western world is going to hell in handcart pushed by a violent leftist rabble, few of them seem prepared to do anything about it. When any brash conservative, be it Milo Yiannopoulous or Donald Trump, dares speak up and stand out, establishment conservatives waggle their beards and tut and generally seem more than a bit happy to see such firebrands torn down by the leftist freikorps.
And in the face of the blatantly obvious fact that the left are determinedly waging an organised cultural revolution – in the most heinous sense of the phrase – establishment conservatives hunker down in their mahogany-panelled clubrooms and mutter that it will all blow over and just ignore that Molotov cocktail that just came crashing through window. After all, they say, most Americans agree with them.
Most Americans don’t favor defunding police or instituting race quotas; they are wary of the costs connected with the Green New Deal and of allowing Washington to control local zoning. Many are already voting with their feet, fleeing places that promote these ideas and seeking out areas aligned with more recognizable American values. Over the past 20 years, virtually all the most progressive large states—New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California—have suffered massive outmigration, while red or purplish states like Florida, Texas, the Carolinas, or Arizona welcome more and more Americans to resettle there. On the metropolitan level, even before Covid-19 accelerated the trend, a steady, largely unacknowledged, movement from the deep-blue core to the less progressive suburbs or exurbs has been underway.
Such “white flight” is nothing new, but just because the affluent whites who tend to be the most fervent spouters of progressive nostrums end up fleeing the consequences of their rhetoric doesn’t mean that they learn a damn thing from it. Just because they flee California for Texas doesn’t mean they’ll stop voting for exactly the same garbage policies whose consequences they left behind.
Political correctness—the secular religion of elite liberal society—turns out to be enormously unpopular, something President Trump has exploited politically. Some 80 percent of Americans, notes one recent survey, including most millennials and minorities, see political correctness as “a problem,” not a solution for the future. Progressive social activists, a survey by the liberal research organization More in Common found, account for barely 8 percent of the adult population, less than a third of the number who identify as traditional conservatives.
None of that means that they’ll stop kowtowing before the altar of political correctness. Even if they hadn’t already internalised such bullshit – how many Americans would ever dare say the “n-word”, even in an editorial sense? They might say they believe in free speech, but they haven’t the guts to practise it. Especially not when they know they will almost certainly be “cancelled” by leftist zealots.
The media epitomize the gap between the public and the nation’s dominant institutions.
Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? They’re the dominant institutions. Numbers be damned, the left have got the power and influence out of all proportion to their number and they’re more than prepared to wield it with brutal force, even as conservatives try to perch on their increasingly shaky moral high ground of “civility”.
In a key scene of Citizen Kane, Kane’s financier reminds the new-minted media baron that his flagship paper is losing a million dollars a year. Kane chortles that he expects it to keep losing a million dollars a year, until he’s broke – in 67 years.
This is the long game the gettin’-woke-goin’-broke media are playing. They know they’re losing audiences and money – and they don’t care. Because they’ve always got more money. And they’re more than willing to keep losing it so long as they’re “on the right side of history”.
It would be overly optimistic to imagine that the cultural revolution will fade away of its own accord. A taste for authoritarian solutions, Right or Left, is usually acquired. This is not a liberal or conservative struggle; it is a civilizational one. If nearly 40 percent of young Americans think that the country lacks “a history to be proud of,” they won’t see anything precious to protect. A civilization can survive only if its members, particularly those with the greatest influence, believe in its basic values.
Unfortunately, we can’t count on our elites in the academy, the media, the corporate hierarchy, or even the clergy to support the core values of American democracy. Not anymore. Only stubborn resistance from the middle and working classes can push back against an assault being largely directed from above.
As novelist Lionel Shriver has written recently, the left are winning because they’re convinced that the consequences of their revolution won’t apply to them. They can, they think, overthrow capitalism but keep getting their new iPhones. If their policies turn their neighourhoods into violent, crime-ridden shitholes, well, they can always move to Texas or some other “deplorable” state, and start the revolution anew.
Remember: socialism will always work next time.
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