So, some pipsqueak at some ridiculous regime media outfit recently took exception on Twitter to my contention that we conservatives need to use our power to crush our enemies. Now, to us, this seems like something obvious.
The sky is blue.
Water is wet.
We should figuratively toss the communists out of choppers.
But apparently this isn’t “conservative,” and therefore I have no principles, according to the man-child who was not even a born by the time I had spent time in the desert leading a platoon of American soldiers in defense of the same principles this healthy, military-aged, non-serving male only runs his fool mouth about.
Putting aside that I will not be lectured to by Lil’ Mitt or any other bow-tied fussbudgets who aspire to sizzle with the same raw, sexy energy of George Will, we conservatives have a label problem. Our conservatism today is not the same as our conservatism of yesterday, at least on the policy level. We have changed, mostly because we got burned. For example, we used to be up for any war anywhere – and guys like Bow Tie Boy still are as long as someone else fights them. But we’ve learned that lesson. We used to be about corporate tax cuts, before we realized the corporations are trying to cut us. But after enduring the Bushes and McCains and Mitts, we now know what time it is. We refuse to play our assigned role as the guy who gets the pie in the face. That daughter-showering pervert pretending to be our president expressed the establishment’s frustration with the fact we no longer play nice during his Reichstag speech. We aren’t your father's GOP, thank goodness. We modern conservatives are different – we’re no longer supine sisses, for one thing.
But have we changed our ideas about the deeper principles of conservatism? Do we still want small government, individual rights, and national security. Yeah, we still want those. But that’s macro stuff.
What we don’t want is to be treated like serfs in our own country.
Yet that’s what the establishment wants. It wants to disenfranchise us and control us, and one of the ways it seeks to do that is by weaponizing language. It seeks to define “conservatism,” and define us out of it, presumably so we then conform ourselves to their definition. And inevitably, this leads to them winning – if we play along.
Here’s the thing. We are conservatives. But the label does not define who we are or what we think and do. If the label does not fit who we are, either get a new one or accept that the old one’s meaning has evolved.
Think of conservatism as like “the Living Constitution,” except it’s not made-up commie nonsense.
Now, back in my high school civics class decades ago before they became long struggle sessions where kids learn that slavery is their fault because of where grandpa came from, my public-school teacher explained the difference between conservatism and liberalism in the dumb way that was common in that era. Conservatives did not want change and liberals did.
That was a ridiculous construct then, but it’s actively the opposite now. Liberals desperately want to maintain the status quo, since they hold the reins of power over our institutions. We conservatives want to burn it all and start again with institutions that don’t suck.
The shackled conservatism of the hacks and the grifters is designed to keep us from doing that. Remember that Conservative Inc. has no desire to see change because those toads are as much creatures of the system as any Clinton, Biden, or Podesta. They may occupy the lower rungs of power as domesticated House Cons, but that position is all they have and they are going to defend their pitiful rice bowls to the death. They particularly took offense when we rejected them in favor of Donald Trump – they took it as a personal insult, which is the one thing they have gotten right in the last 20 years.
For 20 years – maybe more – the Official Licensed Conservatives conserved nothing, Instead, they collaborated with the liberal establishment to manage the decline.
But we are not interested in losing, which outrages the professional losers. Instead, we decided to use our power to protect our interests. That was where the labels come in. Somehow, conservatism became not a potent ideology for expanding human liberty but a straitjacket of unilateral rules and norms that prevent us from doing so.
Look at the blow-back from the David Frenches and the rest of Team Invertebrate when Governor Ron DeSantis took on Disney.
Disney is a private corporation – a huge and very liberal one that has political power (it donates to pols), economic power (it is rich), and cultural power (its kids show can define the culture) – but it decided to intervene in the culture wars on the side of the groomers. Now, I do not remember getting a vote on whether our society was going to embrace the groomer agenda. I would have voted “No.” So would you. But, while we had no say in it, Disney and other entities were able to start making that change in society with absolutely no input from us. We did not sign on for that. Why does Disney get a say and we get a “Shut up, semi-fascist?”
So, Ron DeSantis, on behalf of us and other normal people, used political power – our only real power (economic power in the form of boycotts is so marginal as to not be worth considering) – to push back by refusing special grants to Disney. Well, the Official Licensed Conservatives went nuts. How dare we use political power to counter the power being used against us!
Why, that’s not conservative.
Okay, then what power do we use? Well, none. We have no power to respond, under their construct of conservatism. We just have to take it. Having giant leftist corporations dictate how society will operate is one of those blessings of liberty the nimrods are always babbling about. We just have to accept that Disney is free to use all its massive power to change society into what its liberal overlords want, but we conservatives are constrained not to use our own power to resist because doing that is not “conservative.”
Okay, if “conservatism” is an ideology that requires you to sit back and accept whatever crap the left dishes out to you because using your own power to pursue your interests is bad for some reason, then hard pass.
I have said it before, and I will say It again: Any conservative principle that makes you less free is a bad principle and you should abandon it.
“But that’s not very conservative of you, Kurt.”
Oh well.
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