Conservative film maker Dinesh D'Souza has a new documentary out.
Let's check out some clips from the trailer to get a sense of what it's about.
"Lincoln was selected to unite a country and stop slavery.
Democrats smeared him, went to war against him, assassinated him.
Now their target is Trump.
Who are the real racist?
Who are the real fascists?"
"...Mussolini and Hitler set up and ran welfare states."
"This is done by the do-gooders, the liberals."
"Which party attacks our free speech?"
"How dare you speak against the Fuhrer!"
"A nation dies when its people are not free.
The stakes could not be higher".
Well, if that was somehow too subtle for you, let's spell it out: the message of the film is
'Democrats are the real racists', 'leftists are the real Nazis', 'Conservatives are the
real guardians of liberal values, democracy, equality, anti-racism blahblahblah...'.
And, safe to say, the argument goes beyond the moderately credible, but stale idea of
a 'bigotry of low expectations', going all the way to more absurdly implying that leftists
somehow are closet fascists, tracing a direct ideological line back to Hitler, Mussolini,
Slavery etc etc.
To a lot of you, I probably don't need to explain why this line of reasoning is faulty:
most people I suspect just look at something like this and intuitively know the argument
doesn't really make sense, unless you construe the whole thing as a cheap attempt to
'own' the democrats that's been taken a bit too far.
Apparently though, D'Souza has set out a convincing enough case that some people
actually do take this seriously.
So let's get into it and look at why this argument will NEVER win over many people on the left,
why conservatism just doesn't understand how politics operate in our present time,
and, maybe more importantly, look at why conservatism has failed to conserve anything at all
in the last half century or so.
On the surface of things, ideological conservatism makes a lot of quite dry and even technical
arguments as part of its political approach, but beneath that lies a bedrock of quite airy idealism.
For instance, conservative engagement with the public debate often centres around discussion
of this or that tax rate, the size of the private sector vs the size of the state, and so on.
Underpinning this though are civic ideals that treat all people as rational but atomised beings, who
operate primarily on the basis of individual interest, and who will more often than not
vote for the candidate or party that makes the best argument.
The modern conservative worldview holds that a sufficiently 'free' populace is one that
not only will make better decisions but is one that is closer to a morally 'good' state of being.
Part of this is the belief that everyone is inherently endowed with inalienable rights
that are transcendental and enshrined by semi-divine documents like the American Constitution,
Magna Carta and so on.
Too large a state is bad for 'freedom' and therefore is evil.
Citizenship constituted on the basis of anything other than a person's 'inalienable' humanity
is also treated as an evil.
Restricting the wealth of certain people or groups is in and of itself 'bad', even if
those groups wield disproportionate and disruptive influence on a society.
What passes as a jumble of practical, even a little bit pessimistic, approaches to policy,
begins to look murky when one notices the almost religious idealism
that it frequently falls back on.
In reality though, most people don't fit the idealistic mould of a citizen that conservatism
on some level envisages.
Most people don't always give their vote to the person who outlines the best ideas,
they don't always view themselves as atomised individuals but will often pick their political allegiance
based on tribal or other 'irrational' motives.
Ultimately, it boils down to the fact that conservatives just don't understand the modern political dynamic.
The reality of our contemporary political axis is that it doesn't rotate around principles,
ideas or the methodology of statecraft, but rather is about
the conflicting interests of different groups.
What The Left understands that conservatives don't, is that the real axis of modern, western politics
is the 'core' of society vs the 'fringes' - those who identify with the majority heritage,
majority ethnic and cultural group vs a coalition of groups who consider themselves outside of this.
Although The Left often uses similar language to conservatives about human rights, liberty,
freedom and equality, on an intuitive level, they seemingly understand that politics is
a much more concrete battle for control of resources and control of society itself.
This is why The Left can encompass radically different and even oppositional groups such
as gay rights organisations and traditional practitioners of Islam.
What they have in common is that they are all on the outside and they are all willing
to game the political system that conservatives defend.
Conservatives have been caught unawares by this dynamic - if their ideal of a rational
and civically engaged democracy ever existed it has most certainly been eroded over recent decades
as The Left has gained ground for its political objectives, by playing to win
and playing by a much more tribalistic strategy.
Conservatives (and so-called 'classical liberals'), are loathe to acknowledge that they implicitly
reflect the 'core' power group of society and thus as individuals are seen as belonging
to a larger ethnic and cultural group, but instead continue to uphold the atomising ideals
that The Left smartly exploit to their advantage.
Whilst conservatives naively treat all people as interchangeable rational units, The Left
recognises that group identity is real and group loyalty matters, and so has gone about
changing the very demographics of western countries in the hope of shifting things culturally
and electorally permanently in their favour.
We see this in America, where for example, mainstream Republican strategists have described
Hispanics as 'natural conservatives' and aggressively tried to court their vote; meanwhile polling
data suggests that time and again Hispanics are unfazed by their efforts and continue
to vote with other minority and fringe groups for The Democratic Party - who then enact
policy that directly benefits those fringe groups, whether it be on matters of immigration,
speech laws, freedom of association, public spending, etc.
And this same pattern plays out no matter which minority group you look at,
whether it be African Americans, Asians, Jews, Muslims, LGBT people etc.
We see this also in the U.K., where despite repeated attempts to court more Muslim voters,
The Conservative Party continues to lag far behind in support from Muslims compared to
The Labour Party.
Arguably then the modern political dynamic is entirely conceivable in Darwinian terms -
different groups with irreconcilable survival interests competing with one another,
even if one of those groups refuses to openly acknowledge the fact.
Perhaps only the unprecedented material abundance of the age in which we live masks the fact
that different groups are in fact competing in the same space for the same resources.
All of this may sound cynical and even a little horrifying, but unfortunately it's just
the way the world seems to work.
When you understand this though, you see that quibbling over the type of state or details
of policy implementation are mostly secondary questions, and ultimately confuses the means
of the state with the end of securing resources for one's group.
We see this in how D'Souza notes similarities in policy between the Nazi party of the 1930s
and the modern American Democratic Party, but fails completely to see how this is irrelevant
to the real dynamic of contemporary American politics - and the Democratic Party's own
real objectives, which are actually about transferring resources from the core of society
to the fringes (arguably the opposite of what the Nazis claimed they were doing).
"Read the Nazi platform at the Democratic National Convention and most likely it would
provoke thunderous applause!
State controlled healthcare, Profit-sharing for workers and large corporations, state
control of education, state control of media, state control of banks and industries...This
reads like something jointly written by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders".
Arguably the rise of Donald Trump can be seen as a rejection of much of the conservative
status quo. By appealing directly to the concerns of a specific constituency - namely middle
and working class Americans of mostly white European background, Trump played politics
more like The Left does, and in the process embraced rhetoric that many considered dog-whistling
to illiberal, nationalistic currents.
Certainly, during his campaign the mainstream of American conservatism responded very negatively
to his attacks on their sacred cows, for example free markets and endless Middle Eastern wars
- nonetheless his approach proved wildly more successful than they predicted.
Trump aside though, conservatism in both the U.S and Europe has played politics in the
last number of decades by a losing strategy; that always meant even when they won electorally
they lost the bigger struggle.
For example, take the fact that between the end of World War 2 and the election of Donald
Trump, the U.S spent as much time under Republican Presidents as Democratic ones, yet despite
this the direction of the country's culture could only really be described in the long-term
as having gone in the direction that The Left wanted, and demographically further and further
away from retaining the ethnic composition the U.S had in 1945.
Take also the example of the U.K: where between the end of World War 2 and the present day the
country has spent much more time under Conservative Party rule than under Labour Party rule:
yet again the values of the country have crept only really in a leftward direction: whether
it be in terms of multiculturalism, tolerance of sexual minorities, abortion, family law
and so on.
In fact, some recent years under the Tory Party have given the U.K higher levels of
immigration than even Tony Blair's time as Prime Minister, and the introduction of flagship
left-wing social policies like gay marriage - which was bizarrely presented as a 'conservative' value
by then prime minister David Cameron.
Imagine going back in time and explaining that one to a conservative-minded voter even
ten or twenty years prior.
If we look at their record on matters of the economy and national sovereignty, we see the
Tories have a long and ignoble record there too: being the party that took the U.K into
the European Union and the party who famously privatised much of the country's energy and
industrial assets, weakening the U.K's self-sufficiency over the long term and destroying numerous
communities - in Northern England, Wales and Scotland in particular.
The present Tory administration are widely regarded as poor defenders of civil liberties
and free speech - both of which are supposedly conservative civic ideals, and the party are
enthusiastic supporters of multiculturalism - with the current Home Secretary, Sajid Javid,
a son of Pakistani Muslim immigrants, tipped to succeed Theresa May as leader of the party
and possible next Prime Minister.
Amusingly, this monumental act of diversity virtue signalling has not shielded the party
from allegations of 'Islamophobia' - with one of their own party members - Muslim peer,
Baroness Warsi, loudly leading calls recently for investigations into the party's 'poisonous'
attitudes to Islam.
A similar sort of story has played out with Republicans in the U.S , where even conservative
icon Ronald Reagan famously signed off on revolutionary family law in his time as Governor
of California that made it the first state to introduce 'no fault' divorce, and then
as President of the U.S approved amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants, precipitating
the demographic transformation of the country.
With these examples in mind and many more not explored here, it all begs the question:
what exactly has conservatism actually conserved?
what is the point of conservatism?
If it can't preserve the culture or demography of western countries,
and if it does a shabby job (at best) of preserving the civic ideals it claims to uphold:
what does it really exist to conserve?
"You call yourself a moral and social conservative, and unapologetically so, but you're not a Tory.
In fact you're very hostile to the modern Tories".
"Yeah". "Why?"
"Because it calls itself the 'Conservative' party; if it called itself the 'Socialist
Worker's Party' I wouldn't have anything against it."
"But it's not a left wing party..."
"It is a left wing party.
It's egalitarian.
It's got a lot more in common with the SWP than it has with conservatism."
"Do you think the, uh..."
"In fact I often hear David Cameron and George Osborne coming out with things that I used
to say when I was a Trot." "well let's think about..."
"The difference is that I knew when I said them that they were Trotskyist things to say,
they have no idea.
They are left wing, but they don't know they're left wing."
"But do you think..."
"Which is even more alarming in some ways, at least Jeremy Corbyn knows he's left wing."
Part of the impotence of modern conservatism stems from its inability to understand the
ideological and moral roots of both its own movement and the modern Left.
Both effectively are a product of the enlightenment, the French Revolution and the debates that
surrounded it.
To make a long story short, modern conservatism combines the relatively practical and reformist
outlook of Edmund Burke with the same idealised vision of individual rights
and egalitarian values that animated the French revolution and is exemplified by the writings of Thomas Paine.
Essentially, conservatism espouses the same core beliefs as what we'd characterise as
left wing ideology: opposition to aristocracy and tradition-centred systems, a belief in
the equality of all people, but a preference for overturning society at a slower pace.
Conservatism's roots are as radical as those of socialism, which makes it difficult for
it to launch an effective defence for either the culture or the very people that make up
European and European-descended nations.
As rudderless as conservatism may seem, The Left has long been animated by an opposite spirit:
a determined sense of its revolutionary nature and radical objectives.
From the Fabian Society, to the Frankfurt school, to New Labour: the left has maintained a cohesive
enough strategic outlook that it has been able to wage a long-term culture war
through the public education system and popular culture.
The Left has consistently framed the moral debate with its terms and its ideas for decades,
shaping the minds of people to the point where 'equality' is accepted near universally as
a good in itself - with The Left, naturally, positioned as the standard-bearers for 'equality'.
This is why The Left haven't necessarily needed to dominate electorally
to see their social vision implemented.
It's also why when Dinesh D'Souza reaches for a slur or analogy for 'bad people' on The Left,
he picks words that are implicitly associated with The Right: 'Nazi', 'fascist', 'racist';
rather than 'Communist', 'Stalinist' etc.
Thus, even when arguing AGAINST them, conservatives can't help but reinforce the moral framework
created by The Left.
And so we've come full circle, back to D'Souza and his newest film, although, really this
is hardly a new routine for him.
But as much as having a brown-skinned immigrant defend the Republican Party and call the Democrats
'the real racists' is a novelty, it's not really going to affect the fortunes
of either party in any significant way.
The Democratic Party is de facto the vehicle for the political aspirations of marginal groups.
The Republicans, along with conservatism more generally, are seen by the Left coalition
as an implicitly white thing.
But if all conservatism offers its support base is a more 'principled' version of leftism,
then it is worse than useless.
Conservatism's problems are twofold: Firstly, ideological conservatism only really appeals
to rootless individuals whose primary interest is in conserving their own wealth and the
wealth of an elite social strata that has minimal loyalty to country or community.
Most people don't think like this though; and Trump has proven not even most conservative-leaning
voters think like this.
Secondly, because the Left's voter base defines itself in oppositional, racial and cultural terms
it will never to any significant degree migrate its support to conservative politicians.
Further, as long as The Left continues to play to win whilst The Right blithely go along
with their moral framework, bending over backwards to prove how totally-not-racist-or-bigoted they are
and only ever getting animated about tax reform, then the political direction of history
will not change.
What's more, the demographics of western countries will continue to drift in a direction that
will eventually make it impossible for conservatives to ever wield political power.
Should conservatism as an ideology be sidelined by The Right,
then politics might actually get interesting again.
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