There will always be victims of government regulation, baffled casualties of the culture wars mourning their lost children and men and women who woke up one day from their routine of work and parenting to find out that the country had been stolen from them. There will always be mugging and terror victims who suddenly begin thinking about the big issues that they never really thought about before. And those people will be their base, will sign their checks, buy their books and come to hear them speak.
As long as the Left does its work, the moderate conservative leaders will always have a place, if not in the sun, than in the comfortable shade. They have no real enemies to the Left. Their enemies are to the right.
The Left can raise their taxes, make them jump through regulatory hoops and turn their children into idiots. But the right can take away their positions. The left turns them into dinosaurs every twenty years, but the resurgence of the right can do that in two years. Their job, the job they take on to protect their job, isn’t to keep down the Left, but to keep down the right so that it doesn’t embarrass them in front of the left or break apart the comfortable conservatism that they have built up.
A revolutionary right would not be conservative. It would be a revolutionary movement that is less concerned with talking about how much better things were X years ago and more concerned with forcing a return to the way things were. It would not do this in the name of conserving anything, because it recognizes that there is hardly anything left to conserve, it would do this because it is natural and good, but more so it would do it because it is the only way out of the long fall.
When such movements or figures emerge, often unready for the spotlight, it is the mainstream leaders who gang up and destroy them. In liberal societies where fighting the left is a dangerous sport, an activity constrained by the image concerns imposed by media overlords and social media meme mobs, right on right violence is the one safe sport. It is where they can unleash their full range of attacks, destroying those whose crime is the courage to seek real change, rather than their idyllic urban technocracy of skyscrapers and dot coms.
When the bloody work is done, and the mainstream conservatives have their scalp, a political figure whom they can use to prove that the right is completely unready for mainstream politics and should leave the hard business of running for office to the experts, then the experts waddle out to the face the left, lose or break even, and then formulate a plan for winning by going to the left.
It’s a sad state of affairs that repeats itself time and time again. The names changes, the issues change, but the battles remain the same. While the Left becomes radicalized, the right becomes marginalized. Even when the moderate conservatives win, their triumph rests in managing a system and a culture that serves the left, more than it does them. And toward the end, they become what they have hated, drifting slowly into liberalism, denouncing in angry fits of rage the resurgence of the Right.
Thus conservative movements and parties cannibalize themselves. The Left believes that there are no enemies to the Left. And so do the leaders of the Right. And when they are through fighting each other, then often the left wins by default.
This article was originally published at Sultan Knish under the title No Enemies to the Left.