It must be a conservative thing to willfully embrace the most pessimistic possible outcome with a sense of smug satisfaction in the hopelessness of it all. It’s not universal, though. Ronald Reagan didn’t do that – his sunny optimism revolutionized conservatism in America. But the right’s tendency to always look on the dank side of life has not been thoroughly exorcised. It’s still there, right now, demoralizing and demotivating our people just when morale and motivation are exactly what we need.
It's understandable why Republicans often doom. After all, conservatives do not believe in the perfectibility of man, but rather that man is fallen. This often leads us into believing that whatever bad can happen is definitely going to happen. But the reality is that the worst case scenario rarely happens. It can, but it’s rare. A defeat is rarely total, a set-back is usually just that instead of a permanent failure. Dooming fetishizes the inability to succeed. It repeats exactly what our enemies want to hear from us. Yet its practitioners often consider themselves edgy, posturing themselves as the only ones willing to make the hard choice for cynicism.
Baloney. Dooming is tiresome. It gets exhausting to hear people willfully ignoring and downplaying any hint of success so that no gleam of hope pierces the darkness of the hopeless future they anticipate. Yes, in any operation you always have to count on things going to hell and be ready to deal with that. But the fact is that things don’t always go to hell. In almost every case, things are not as bad as they seem.
Dooming makes you forget about the fact that the other side in this cultural struggle has its own problems. We conservatives are not facing geniuses. We are facing a bunch of narcissistic halfwits who are not a tenth as brilliant as they believe they are, and who inherited their cultural positions instead of creating them. We’re not fighting a bunch of cunning Darth Vaders. We’re fighting a bunch of pronoun-obsessed dorks, many of whom can’t even do a push-up. And all the while, we got 400 million guns.
My money is on us, no matter how this insanity plays out.
But if you look at social media, and you should never look at social media, what you were going to see from conservatives is, to a disturbing extent, just a wail of hopelessness. They’ll tell you that the ruling class has got us outmaneuvered. There’s no way we can prevail. Why, they’re going to cheat and lie and steal, and they won’t let us win. We can’t win. We’re doomed. Doomed, I say!
Oh, come on.
Let’s look at one of the most popular nightmare scenarios, which is that the Democrats are going to cheat their way to victory in 2024 and there’s nothing we can do about it. Now we do need to understand that the last election was fundamentally unfair, but more importantly, we need to understand why. Yeah, there was some fraud in 2020, though the evidence is unclear how much of an effect it had, but the bigger problems were the unlawful manipulation of voting laws and the informal rigging that came from institutions weighing in on the outcome in an unprecedented manner. But this does not mean we can never win. It means nothing like that. It just means that we need to incorporate the perfidy of our opponents into every operational planning assumption we make. We need to beat them regardless.
Is there going to be some fraud? Yes. But, unlike the nonsense of the nimrods with their kraken promises and kooky accusations, fraud is not about millions and millions of votes suddenly appearing from nowhere and swinging the election. Where fraud plays a part is in very, very tight races in very densely blue areas. You can get away with cheating at the margins, but it is hard to massively cheat and not get caught. Maybe we should focus on a little more on beating the margin of fraud than on trying to just barely make it, since that is when fraud comes into play.
As for the legal shenanigans, well, I would’ve preferred that the GOP decided not to reinstall a Republican National Committee Chair who botched the last few elections, but Donald Trump decided he wanted her, and he got her – and don’t tell me he didn’t, because I watched his staff personally whipping votes for her at the convention. Of course, I do understand the suspicion about conservative organizations, with their track record of failing to conserve anything. But there are a lot of smart people out there doing a lot of smart things, and while the heads of our organizations haven’t performed, there are a lot of outside organizations that are trying to. These folks want to win, while it’s not clear that some of the DC crowd really does.
As for the cultural actors, yeah, the regime media is always going to be against us, but the regime media has about as much credibility left among Americans as a magic beans salesman. We have our own media now. And we have the power to hurt institutions who hurt us. Bud Light, anyone?
There’s also plenty of doom about the Republican Party, which often seems to do everything possible to encourage doom. But let’s look on the bright side here, and there is a very bright side. The corruption investigators have done a great job. We’ve got a House Oversight Committee that is drip, drip, dripping, all sorts of evidence against President Crusty and his scumbag crime family. Some people will whine that Biden hasn’t been impeached yet. Have a little patience! Impeachment will come when the time is right, when it is most beneficial for us, and when we’ve got them in our sights. Just because the House hasn’t rushed into something before setting the conditions of victory is not a failure – it’s a rare success that ought to be encouraged.
So, are we doomed to inevitable defeat? No. We will have to work harder than is fair, but arguments about fairness are for children. Life is unfair. Suck it up and bring in the win.
That doesn’t mean there are no reasons for concern. I make no secret of the fact that I think Donald Trump is almost certain to lose the general election if we nominate him. And if we lose that, we’re probably going to lose a lot of down-ballot races, and we may lose control of every part of the government. The mischief Democrats could do is almost unlimited and unbelievably dangerous in light of their terrifying combination of greed, stupidity, and malice.
But I’m not ready to give up. I’m not ready to give in. I’m not going to tell everyone there’s nothing we can do and that we are doomed and that it’s all over and blah blah blah blah blah. Nothing is over. Nothing is written.
Dooming is weak. It is a cop-out, a means to relieve oneself of the reasonability for success or failure, and to opt out of the hard work of victory. If you can not win, you need not try. So, the doomer sits comfortably with what he sees as two possible, pleasing outcomes. Either he is proven right, or he is proven wrong and still enjoys the fruits of other people’s success.
We do not need doom talk. Yes, we have to be clear about the outcomes of potential courses of action, but that is not the same. Avoiding defeat is how you win. Crying that you can never win is how you help the enemy win.
Conservatives Must Fight Back Against the Radical Left. Join Townhall VIP And Support Our Reporting. Check Out Last Friday's Stream of Kurtiousness and my podcast, Unredacted. Use Promo Code SAVEAMERICA to Receive a 50% Discount on Your Membership!
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, as well as his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member