Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Conservatism Has Failed

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/american-conservatism-is-fiddling-while-rome-burns/

What is conservatism in America today? It’s hundreds of millions of dollars a year spent fiddling while Rome burns. It’s ideas with little to no consequence. It’s getting trampled all over by History, but while yelling Stop!

  Conservatism has failed (as has liberalism).

And yet conservatism, in its dotage, cannot shake the nagging suspicion that it no longer speaks to the country it loves, in particular to those who have no living memory of the Cold War. This dawning realization could be amplified through probing questions: is America today more conservative than it was when the conservative movement began 70 or so years ago? Is conservatism itself as conservative as it was then? On the off chance that the conservative agenda were to be implemented, would it fundamentally transform the United States of America and lead to conservative hegemony (or would it simply save us money and buy us time)?
 
Across the board, the answer is a resounding no. Conservatism must therefore overhaul itself. If it refuses, then it should be left to die with the passage of time. A new Right, in any case, is already overtaking it. 
This new right, which of yet has no name, is anchored in the realization that the conservative project in America today is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary one. We lost. They won. Painful as it is to admit, we no longer feel at home in our own country. In this progressive theocracy in which all must worship at the altar of Wokeness, conservatism, if one can still even call it that, is more about overthrowing than conserving. Burke’s edifying exhortation—“Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna” [Sparta is Yours: Adorn It, and the more general, You Were Born With Talents: Develop Them. Author: Euripides].
—must be altered to suit the times: Sparta was your inheritance, now reclaim her. The "New Right" needs a name, some intellectual coherency, and some faces to represent it. 

Perhaps "Creedalism" would be a reasonable new name ? Webster defines creedealism  as "undue insistence upon traditional statements of belief". 

Who gets to define "undue"?  I suppose "there are two genders" would be and example of "undue insistence on traditional statements of belief". 

In the dogma of "progressivism" are there any "traditional statements" that can be invoked without the approbation "undue"? 

As the linked makes clear, "conservative" is a very imprecise term today. 

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