Let us posit that society is at point “X” on a particular issue.
The conservative position is to conserve X.
The liberal position is to ‘progress’ to X+10.
We can posit there are some hardcore conservatives that wish to conserve X-10, the society of a few years back.
We can also posit that some hardcore liberals wish to progress to X+20.
Now we posit an overton window is accepting of the range: hardcore conservative to hardcore liberal. There are some rightests who want x-50 and some leftists who want x+50, but these are radicals and fall outside the overton window, the debate is generally kept to the conservatives and liberals, with the hardcore of each allowed a voice but being outside the mainstream.
From this we now see the range of acceptable opinion is from X-10 to X+20, while the mainstream and centrists would be be in the range of X to X+10.
Any positive deviation from X is a liberal victory and a conservative defeat. The liberals might want X+10, but X+5 is still better for them, while X+5 is still farther away from the X conservatives are conserving.
Yet the moderate opinion is almost always X+Y, it is never X-Y, and only rarely just X. So, the vast majority of acceptable choices are conservative losses and liberal gains, while non-loss is the best a conservative can realistically hope for.
The conservative will almost always lose this game.
Of course, the game is never a single competition; in real life it always iterated. In an iterated game, the conservative will always lose eventually.
****
To make matters worse for the conservatives, is that after the conservatives have lost, the centre changes.
Let use say the game is played and a compromise was reached, neither the conservatives nor the liberals got everything they wanted and the decision to implement X+5 was reached. After a few years or a decade or two, point X+5 has become the new norm for society, point “Y”. A conservative is now conserving point Y.
The game is now being played over the territory of Y to Y+10.
If one more compromise results in a decision to implement Y+5, it has come to the point where where liberals have obtained X+10, while the conservatives have lost completely.
As more iterations occur, society will always move towards the liberal position, with only slight slowdowns and the rare win of hardcore conservatives.
****
So in any political body where conservatism and liberalism are the opposed choices, conservatism is always doomed.
To not lose the conservatives have to win completely every single time. Compromise is always a long-term liberal gain and conservative loss. Any liberal win is almost always permanent, while any conservative win will likely be lost after a few more iterations.
The only way for society to not become perpetually more liberal is to make conservatism the centre. If conservatism is not the political centre, the game is always rigged in the favour of liberals.
Conservatism is always doomed.
For any society to not inevitably become increasingly liberal, reaction must always be posed against liberalism, with conservativism as the centre.
Any conservative who opposes reaction is setting himself up for a loss. Reaction is the proper opposition to liberalism, conservatism is not.
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* All numbers used are arbitrary and meaningless, useful for only for illustrative purposes.
Liberalism is the process by which (white) civilization’s success leads to (progressively) weaker men outnumbering and slowly overtaking the stronger.
Any liberal trend you can think of has it’s origins in this.
Feminism happens because the men become too weak to control their women.
http://seanmaccloud.blogspot.com/2009/10/how-and-why-feminism-happened.html
The civil rights era is actually just the white man becoming too weak (and outnumbered) to control the (imported) savages anymore.
Multi-cult is in reality just stronger men (from more spartan third world lands) moving in on the weaker man’s territory.
The gay agenda happens because of a loss of machismo that comes with men getting weaker and because of feminist emasculation.
Animal rights activism and veganism are part and parcel of ‘sensitive’ people (i.e. pussies) taking over the discourse (the meats most bad for you are from the animals most kin to humans, gee who’d a thought!)
You name it.
And yes every conservative thinks that what they were raised by is the natural order of the cosmos thoroughly oblivious to the fact that not only is this patently untrue but in fact their ‘conservative’ values that they hold dear were at one time long ago on the cutting edge of ‘progressivist’ thought! (i.e. conservatism = classical liberalism).
And yes if it continues posterity will eventually regard even the likes of David Fatrell as misogynist a-holes just cuz they believed in men not having to wear chastity devices if they didn’t want to.
Good post. Many conservatives’ fallacy is the belief that X (the norm) has always been X. So when we reach the point of polyamorous-zoophilic-whatever “marriage”, conservatives will argue that this is all wrong, but homosexual “marriage” is a-okay because it is grounded in the Constitution. Case in point: universal suffrage. Conservatives don’t just conserve, they also rationalize retroactively the current state of affairs; this is the root of the problem, because then all “Progress” done till now is overlooked (or rather, justified) and assumed to be the natural order of things, e.g: “we support voting rights for women; therefore we’ve always supported voting rights for women.”
Agreed. Yesterday’s liberal viewpoint is tomorrows bigotted reaction.
The inability to gain intellectual distance from the current norm is particularly bad in the case of Christians. For the vast majority of Christians this looks like…”I have belief X. I understand myself to be a Christian. Therefore, belief X must be the Christian belief, thus the will of God, an must not be questioned.” These people never stop to think that the vast majority of what they think comes from the culture around them and mostly from television. In this way successive progressive waves (classic liberalism, anti-racism, pan-social justice) become Christian doctrine.
You can add Neo-Con utopian military intervention to that list as well.
Democracy is like a ball rolling down a ramp. Liberals want a steep ramp and conservatives want a mild one.
Perhaps the solution is to reframe “progress” as moving from X to X-10. Better yet, reframe X+10 in terms of conservative (I prefer traditionally liberal) positions – liberty, autonomy, self-ownership, etc.
So when we reach the point of polyamorous-zoophilic-whatever “marriage”, conservatives will argue that this is all wrong, but homosexual “marriage” is a-okay because it is grounded in the Constitution.
Good point. It is particularly painful as a reactionary to hear some conservative politician use the liberalism of yesteryear to defend the conservatism of today. For the longest time, gay marriage was opposed by many on the mere grounds of universal suffrage democracy disapproving of it here in the USA. As soon as one state managed to get a legislative majority for it, entire waves of “conservative” punditry threw up their hands on the issue, as if majority vote somehow alters moral principle. Now, it is a constitutional right according to some (most?) of the GOP punditry. They act not only as if we ought to forget yesterday, but like it never even happened! The hicks made them do it!
It’s all part of mainstream “conservatism’s” attempt to out-liberal the leftists. When the left finally wins on an issue, they act as if it was their idea in the first place, and everybody should support them because they’ll implement the policy better than those nutty leftists.
A losing game this is for sure, at least if you have any principles. It’s only a win for career politicians and bureaucrats who can get more power by getting us right-wingers to support them in their attempt at wooing the slightly-less leftist moderates in general elections.
Perfect summation.
Conservatives want to stay still. Liberals want to move forward. They’ll compromise by moving forward just a little, and then conservatives will want to stay in their new position. Then they’ll compromise by moving forward a little more…
The opposition to liberals who want to move forward is not conservatism which posits staying still but reaction which posits moving backwards. Only then can they cancel each other out.
The real question is why it’s so hard to find large groups of reactionaries who can cancel out liberals.
“The real question is why it’s so hard to find large groups of reactionaries who can cancel out liberals.”
——————————————–
Simple.
Lack of awareness.
This level of awareness requires a scope of abstract thinking that most of them are simply incapable of.
By contrast the liberals are headed mostly by Ashkenazi Jews who’s IQs are well above average.
They manipulate the dummies to marginalize us.
For example consider how nobody can speak of shadow governments without them trotting out the reptile alien strawman to ridicule people into silence.
Kinda like a serial killer that lives next door that tries to make you out to be a vampire hunter when you tell the police you saw him dispose of a body.
One of the reason why I am a Southern Nationalist is our people are inherently more conservative then yankees. Yes we have our liberals but even then they tend to be pro gun, understand the realities of race,.sex and immigration and oppose things like queers marrying.
Which should not be confused with liberals born here of yankee stock.
Conservatism is doomed because we’re even having this discussion at all. Why should change of any kind be on the table? The very fact that there is a debate about staying at X versus moving to X-10 or X+15 dooms any status quo X. In a genuinely conservative society, upsetting the status quo X would be overwhelmingly disadvantaged. Any society where arguing about what the status quo SHOULD be is one where conservatism has already lost. The issues don’t matter. There mere fact that we have issues is the issue that matters.
R.L Dabney from “Women’s Rights Women”:
Can there be any reaction apart from exit (still an option on a micro level) or complete collapse and renewal? What are our historical models?
One can argue against gay marriage from the position of its pointlessness. The expected connection between form and function. That’s an ahistorical perspective.
The first big step to forwarding Reaction as a political deadly force to the left, is the discrediting of Conservatism.
Conservatism is cowardly, it will be accused of racism, homophobia, sexism and any other bogeymen traits and desperately try to defend itself. Reactionaries do not try to defend themselves from these allegations, and instead call the leftists out by admitted the truth. Reactionaries, put simply, do not fear radicalism for radicalism in the face of evil is virtuous.
Liberal: What do you think should be done with Dan Savage over his Ben Carson comments?
Conservative: Well, he should be taken off the air for his language.
Liberal: Ah ha! So you don’t support free speech! You aren’t a follower of the Constitution!
Conservative: no… I… well, the Constitution doesn’t mention gay people
Liberal: It does! In the 14th Amendment!
Conservative: but….
Liberal wins whatever.
Liberal: What do you think should be done with Dan Savage over his Ben Carson comments?
Reactionary: To be perfectly honest? For degenerates like that, sending him gift wrapped to ISIS wouldn’t be a bad start.
Liberal: *Jaw drops… stares into space*
Shatter the liberal paradigm of fairness and constitutionality and tolerance and equality, any notion of demos-centered societal codes, and they turn into gibbering wrecks. The liberal has a system built in which he always triumphs over and humiliates conservatives. The Reactionary therefore does not view the liberal as someone he ‘disagrees with’. The liberal is identified as the enemy. The enemy is not to be reasoned with, it is to be gored.
When it comes to how our ancestors have believed for 2000 years, the Reactionary is unapologetic and the full force of history is behind him. Conservatives remain the liberal whipping boys.
Shatter the liberal paradigm of fairness and constitutionality and tolerance and equality, any notion of demos-centered societal codes, and they turn into gibbering wrecks.
Usually the only people left arguing with me when I drop all pretense of being in support of the Constitution (said in the most sarcastic voice possible) are the “conservatives.” Liberals don’t understand that there is opposition to the banality they believe. If you question “equality” or something like that, they just repeat the dogma the way a monk might repeat the Nicene Creed to an Arian.
Very good, F.N.. I see that P.B. has already put up the quote from Mr. Dabney but one from Mr. Robert “Bob” Whitaker is also quite good…
Conservative MEANS Failure!
Calling oneself a conservative means supporting the side which opposes change. It also means you claim to know what you are opposing, i.e., the changes that are GOING to take place. If you get your nose out of philosophy books and look at the basic logic, it is oxymoronic that a “conservative” is by definition holding on til he loses.
Ref: http://www.whitakeronline.org/blog/2013/03/25/conservative-means-failure/
Great writing both in the OP and the comments!
You remind me of some of the posts written by this guy, particularly the following posts: (yeah I am dumping a ton of links but they are well worth reading and dovetail nicely with what you guys have been saying).
http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2014/08/rot-britannia-conservative-failure.html
http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-paragraph-to-ponder.html
http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2011/12/conservative-tectonics.html
http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2011/08/whittaker-chambers-failure-of.html
http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-failure-of-conservatism.html
As one last bit consider this brilliant chesterton quote The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types–the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob.
Sorry, one more great link:
https://antidem.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/turn-on-tune-in-drop-out/
especially consider the following part, keeping in mind that the 1950’s is seen by many as the apogee of conservatism in the modern world:
The other thing it should’t be is an attempt to restore the pre-hippie “conservative” culture of 1950s America. I once heard Glenn Beck say that the world he wanted was “the 50s, but with civil rights”, and I daresay this captures the sentiments of most of mainstream conservatism. But (beyond the simple fact that Glenn Beck wanting it is a bad sign), there are a couple of fundamental things wrong with this vision. The first is that that world was neither truly traditional, nor did it have any real strength to it. It has been said that the hippies were pushing on an open door, and that was quite correct – the ease with which it crumbled when a few teenagers blew marijuana smoke in its face shows its essential weakness. It was a point along a path, and it is not possible that we shall tread that way again. And what made it unsustainable is that it, too, was an artifact of the Whig worldview. This worldview/philosophy, like all of them, has a logical endpoint; a destination that it cannot be halted from moving ever-closer toward (This is the true meaning of William F. Buckley’s remark that conservatives stand athwart history yelling “Stop!”, and of Spengler’s remark that time does not suffer itself to be halted). We cannot say that we didn’t like how the story ended, so we shall rewind the tape to a certain point in the tale that we did like, hit Play, and hope that it ends differently this time. That just won’t work. The honest truth is that the much-mythologized pre-hippie America was pure Whig/commercialist, and had much that was ugly about it, including the very lack of soul and a strong moral center that led to its easy demise. There was little to stir the soul in it.
@lozozlo – Precisely on point. The half-baked Glenn Beck really represents ‘conservatism’ well, as now he would add in civil rights for homosexuals, not just blacks, and tomorrow he’ll add in the pedophiles and other assorted ‘oppressed’ people. It is rather amusing to hear his petrified rants about Aleksandr Dugin and the rise of Anti-Modernism in Russia. I believe a recent quote of his was
“It’s fascism, it’s nationalism, it’s totalitarian… come to think of it, I don’t know what the hell it is.”
Perfectly sums up the conservative response to Reaction upon viewing it for the first time. These ideas are so old they have faded from Modernist memory. It’s totally alien to them. They know nothing of Tradition. American conservatives cannot actually conceptualize life any further back than the 1950s, as much as they like to lionize the era of the Founding Fathers. Because of this, they view the 1950s as some kind of apex, when in reality, this is just the limit of their cultural memory. The tape won’t rewind any further for them. Give it another decade, and they will forget the 50s and focus on the 80s. Eventually, if allowed to continue their fantasy, conservatives will be wistfully remembering the Obama years.
The more conservatism is exposed as a hollow and ever-transforming ideology, the more its adherents will be pushed to decide whether to be truly rightist, or give in to the liberal leviathan, roll up their sleeves for the needle, and bend over for a political correctness enema.
bend over for a political correctness enema.
Oh man I didn’t need that image in my head…
Anyway great post – in the end, even after all this analysis, I think the single greatest proof that conservatism is doomed is simply the results we have witnessed – conservatives have lost nearly every battle that they have ever fought, and certainly all of the wars. They are totally ineffectual and not only accomplish nothing, but actually make things worse.
I contend that modern conservatism is actually soviet-style controlled opposition.
Given that most people are intellectually shallow and the conservatards claim to be a ‘traditional’ group, people will associate the conservative’s idiocy with actual tradition and thus mar actual tradition in the public consciousness by false association.
A major point brought up in several of those linked articles is that conservatism has actually been a crucial factor in the rise of the left – basically they have been slowing down the left just enough to enable leftism to stay within the overton window just long enough to not cross that line, until the overton window can shift leftward, and then (like you said) the conservatives just recenter around this new further left median and the leftward march continues ever on.
Also – nearly everyone who actually wants to oppose the left has done so by joining with the conservatives – so the conservatives further cripple a real rightist opposition by essentially funneling all of the mental and financial resources that could have made a real opposing force and having them waste their time, energy, and money on a deliberate faux-rightist socio-political sponge.
Conservatism is like a ratchet that actually tightens the grip of leftism on our society. Liberalism is self-deauthenticating and beyond retarded – yet it wins since it’s controlled opposition does precisely those things which enable it to win. I cannot stress this enough – the entire reason that the mainstream right is even allowed to exist in the mainstream media and political process is that they actually serve as enablers to leftism and intentionally ineffective (downright countereffective) opposition.
It’s late so I’m off to bed but I’ll leave you fine folks with a few more quotes from the provided links:
In truth, contemporary conservatism really acts as a (likely needed) foil for the progressive/liberal/left in our political systems — it is kind of like the sugar that helps make the left’s medicine go down, because over the course of time, as you note, issues that were once championed by the left and opposed by the “right” morph into issues that are championed/accepted by the “right” as part of what is to be conserved. (Feminism and most of the sexual revolution are huge cases in point for this.) It’s almost the perfect political foil for the left, when viewed in this way.
Yep, conservative “reaction” needs to be seen as moderating force for the left, keeping “progressive” policy proposals within the Overton Window, all the while the Overton window is gradually moving left, a bit like a creeping box barrage.
Conservative moderation thus facilitates the incremental implementation of left wing policies slowly habituating the proles to radicalisation.
Only 30 years ago, the concept of Gay marriage would have been thought of as insane, yet, here we are.
Oops that anonymous was me, sorry.
“Only 30 years ago, the concept of Gay marriage would have been thought of as insane, yet, here we are.”
No, here you are. I haven’t lost my bearings.
Gay ‘marriage’ has never occurred in any jurisdiction because gay ‘marriage’ is a fiction. It lacks the essential elements and no amount of legislation and social reprogramming can change that.
The percentage of people who even claim to have gotten ‘gay married’ is extremely small. The union can’t make babies, and therefore doesn’t serve its function of providing legal protection to offspring, which is really the biggest point of marriage. And in any case, people are not interested unless their biological sexual attraction is malfuctioning, which is not a large percentage. Therefore few are actually buying that product even though everyone runs around trumpeting it. I recently took my kids to the National Zoo and did not see a single gay couple. Admittedly, that was probably a fluke, but if numbers of characters on TV had even a remote connection to reality (the show ‘Glee’ had something like 25 according the interwebz), I should have seen a hundred.
And thus one can see the hand of Gnon. Reality gently asserting itself and making modern shamans look ever more ridiculous. In some instances, the progressive victory was total in the realm of laws and politics, but Gnon mocks even this:
There are many examples:
The wealth gap and its growth in spite of (and because of) efforts to fight it.
The test gap politicians have railed against longer than most people are alive.
The utter failure of vegetarianism because ground up animal bodies are so delicious and nutritious.
The refusal of Islam to mold itself to western expectations in spite of our best efforts
The failure of the weather to obey climate models and the collapse of carbon credits exchanges worldwide.
The collapse of socialist economics happens wherever it is tried. Don’t look now, but the Norks just went capitalist. In a decade or two they’ll be lending us money.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/north-koreas-growing-economy-and-americas-misconceptions-about-it/2015/03/13/b551d2d0-c1a8-11e4-a188-8e4971d37a8d_story.html
Does conservatism serve a purpose? Yes, absolutely. The anti-reality excursions by the left are destructive and should be resisted. After a hurricane, the weather improves (and leftists having limited bandwidth move on to some other distraction), so it is foolish to give yourself over to death or hedonism because of things look bad right now.
Perhaps the solution is NOT to conserve. We just need to fashy dream big just like the revolutionaries dream liberal big. Tell the people in the middle where we want to *take* them and why.