Is "Conservatism" Done?

or is this just business as usual

The recent flap in conservative-dom over Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and the Heritage Foundation resignations and the associated attempts at deplatforming and censorship have all made me think. At least, I hope so!

In my intellectual bubble, purges and censorship and reading people out of the movement are a “tell” that the movement is in serious trouble.

Of course, back in the day, William F. Buckley Jr. was famous for reading people like Robert Welch and the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement. Also Ayn Rand. Also John T. Flynn, author of The Roosevelt Myth.

The idea, I suspect, was to keep conservatism “respectable” when the only really respectable intellectuals in the US were liberal Democrats. In those days, still in the afterglow of the glorious New Deal that saved America and the magnificent World War II that saved the world, Democrats owned the public square.

After all, then as now, conservatives were always in danger of some liberal playing the game-ending Race Card or the Nazi Card. They still are, but somehow they don’t seem like trump cards any more.

I’ve said for a while that Liberation Day for non-liberals is the day that you get the courage to tell some darn liberal: “you can take that Race Card and put it where the sun don’t shine.”

Or, alternatively: “you can call me a Nazi, but I don’t really care.” I think that JD Vance got that meme going, Margaret.

I suppose that back in the day Bill Buckley, rich kid and proprietor of the flagship conservative magazine, had the power to run the table on lesser-light conservatives. For him, I’d say, it was just takin’ care of bidness. He got to control the public space for conservatives, and also make his magazine the center of the conservative world.

But my guess is that nobody has the power to deplatform naughty conservatives any more. Not as long as independent “influencers” can do their thing on YouTube and internet podcasts and earn a living thereby. Not as long as Tucker Carlson can run his subscriber-based website and interview everyone from Darryl Cooper to Nick Fuentes.

Back in the day, National Review really was conservatism in the US. If you didn’t exist for Bill Buckley you didn’t exist, because you sure wouldn’t get any traction from the mainstream media. And even Tucker Carlson, we are told, was restrained by management when he worked at Fox News.

But now, the rules have changed. Is this a problem? Yes, it is for you if your interest is in maintaining the status quo and not risking blowback from scandalous podcasters like Nick Fuentes. But for the rest of us? I guess that I take the venture capitalist tactic: try a bunch of good ideas and go with the good idea that works.

Don’t think that emerging chaos is just a problem on the right. I’ll bet that the old-school Democrats are beside themselves as DSA crazies are getting elected in deep-blue states. But what can they do about it?

It’s useful to look at the situation in Democrat-ville, as we right-wing nutcases don’t have a horse in that race. It seems clear that all the energy in the Democratic party is with the far-left DSA commies, and that shifts the whole party leftwards. If you are a Democrat big-wig there’s a real danger that the DSA commies will reduce the size of the Democratic Party’s big tent, and, worst of all, sideline today’s big-wigs in the Democratic Party.

And remember, the only thing that matters to an elected politician is that he gets reelected.

Some people, like Sundance, think that the “Sea Island” group is deliberately trying to divide Republicans. Maybe he is right, although my prejudice is the old aphorism of never attributing to malice what can be explained by stupidity. I think that almost all political combinations are less smart than the individual members. And there is the basic point that elected politicians are experts at getting elected. Everything else, not so much.

So, going forward, expect the players, from DSA commies to media personalities to Deep State functionaries to Conservatism Inc. to Groyper crazies, to do what seems to benefit them today. And expect that none of them really appreciate the consequence of their actions.

After all, who among the credentialed experts that gave us the Treaty of Versailles imagined that they were creating a lane for Literally Hitler to become the Führer of Germany?