Is Conservativism Radicalism Grown Old?
Scenes from the Twilight Zone episode ‘An Obsolete Man’ – posted in this space earlier — particularly those where the dystopian tyrants declare that books are obsolete and that the State has proved God does not exist — do seem notoriously conservative.
It strikes the modern ear as odd, considering that Rod Serling himself was the epitome of what was considered liberal or leftwing in postwar America.
It is commonly observed that the radicals of yore are the conservatives of today. After all, any idea, including political ideas, now revered as traditional was, at one time, new.
But this observation is an illusion, a trick of eyes.
To divide the world into conservative and radical merely divides the worldviews into old and new. This is bosh. The real division is the subjective versus objective, the expedient versus the principled, the temporary versus the eternal.
Positions once proudly promoted by postwar liberals, such an a reverence for freedom of speech and the equality of man, now seem conservative, only because the Left has abandoned those positions in favor of censorship and critical race theory.
Conservatives, or those who milk us for votes, have softened on a large number of issues, social, military, and economic in recent years.
Rare indeed is the conservative who even refers, for example, to sodomy, without using a leftwing-concocted euphemism, and few voices or none, from pulpit or editor’s desk publicly call for the homosexuality to be restored to its correct classification as a psychiatric disorder, and unnatural acts to be illegal as against the public good. Dismantling the welfare state is contemplated only by libertarians, or truly hoary paleoconservatives. Removing women from the armed forces is hardly ever discussed. Let us not mention the concept of returning to the Gold Standard.
So it is true that large segments of the conservative movement have been corrupted, and now work gaily for the enemy, opposing the Powers That Be in name only, or not at all. One advantage arising from the tumult of the recent rise of populism is that unmasking of many allegedly conservative figures as collaborators with the enemy.
At the same time, in recent years, we have seen what seems to be a bewildering reversal of longstanding liberal positions to modern leftist opposites.
Voice who long denounced capitalism and big business voice full-throated support of Big Tech Oligarchs strangling free speech on social media platforms, applaud international banks and manufacturers using their wealth to punish jurisdictions who support laws deterring voter fraud, and denounce attempts to investigate scandalous crimes, up to and including treason, committed by the CIA as compromising the integrity of our intelligence community against our dread and dreaded enemy Russia. Who could have ever believed prominent Leftwing outlets, in lockstep, would support the FBI?
So it seems, on the surface, that old school liberalism is new school conservativism, or its near twin.
This is an illusion, or, rather, a deception, based on three factors.
The first factor is the ever-evolving, ever-changing, rootless and anchorless nature of progressive philosophy. Leftism, from Marxism to Feminism to Race-hustling Diversity Inclusion Intersectionalism, is a political expression of Hegelian mysticism, which holds that no final truth will be found in history, but, rather, an ongoing dialectic of old principles giving way to new principles.
During the postwar years, the “liberals” were anti-fascist, and somewhat anti-communist, but not yet openly anti-Christian. Antichristianity did not rear its head until after 9/11, with figures like Dawkins and Hitchens.
Liberal softening toward communism started early on, promoting the idea that communism was an equal and opposite to capitalism, perhaps having certain good points, or, at least, good intentions. But no major politician in America openly called himself Socialist until Bernie Sanders.
Even now, few politicians and public figures oppose communism on the grounds that it is godless. And fewer still oppose godlessness on the grounds that life without God, or some abstract transcendental groundwork for ethics is nihilistic and law reduced merely to a Darwinian struggle for power.
One rough rule of thumb to track this change in the popular media is to see the change, for example, in Marvel comics. Compare the portrayal of communists in the early issues of Fantastic Four or Iron Man, where Red Ghost or Titanium Man were nothing but abominable villains, to sympathetic portrayals of such characters as Colossus in the X-Men, or the transformation of the Black Widow into a heroine.
In no later retelling of the origin story of the Fantastic Four, it must be noted, is the motive recited for Reed Richards to launch prematurely the spaceship which exposed his crewmates to the cosmic rays that granted them their superpowers. It was explicitly done to thwart the Commies. So says no lesser a figure than Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl.
The second factor is that Leftism inevitably, perhaps inadvertently, corrupts itself.
Rootlessness is built into Hegelianism at at a fundamental level, springing from the idea that the laws and principles of the past are unsuited for the present.
But rootlessness does not produce an endless evolution every upward into ever more pure, perfect, and heavenly expressions of ethical and legal thinking: without the anchor of hope in heaven, the human mind drifts ever deeper into self-indulgence, self-centeredness, which means, ever deeper into vice.
Such is human nature. We will yield to sin, especially to pride, even when there is a strong reason and continual reminder to oppose it. When unmoored from those reasons and reminders, pride is called self-esteem, and it awards itself participation trophies. Man calls himself the measure of all things. Pursuit of pleasure replaces the call to duty.
The delusion that man is god, and defines reality for himself by himself causes the unanchored to drift inevitably ever deeper into hell. Eventually sodomy and prenatal infanticide are upheld as Constitutional rights.
Even a staunchly anti-Communist Leftist, after a decade or three, will find himself in a minority in his own party; any anti-abortion leftist will be ostracized.
Step by step, the Radicals progress from merely asking for a hearing, the right to speak their minds, to demanding authorities fill their quotas in hiring and representation, to using authorities to suppress opposition. When in power, the radicals enjoy hunting down and punishing thoughtcrime, including quips on social media, decades after the fact.
The shift by the Left from liberals from civilized if wrongheaded Wilsonian Constitutional-Revisionists to satanical black-hearted neo-Marxist barbarians was a slow process, masked beneath layers of self-deception and deception.
The Third Factor is deliberate deception.
Radicals from the beginning were liars and the sons of the Father of Lies, and their tactic of hiding their motives, and ascribing their sins to their opponents, has never changed.
Even if honest and well intentioned at first, the concept of progressivism is the concept that no ideal and no principle is eternal, but must change as times change. This means no law and no moral principle has divine sanction, for divinity implies eternity. This means there is no law higher than human law, and no principle on which to base law aside from utilitarianism: the ancient and satanic precept that the ends justify the means.
At that point, any means are licit, provided one can invent an goal of sufficient stature and magnitude to justify it. No enormity, no program of mass deception, mass expropriation, or mass extermination is out of reach.
Again, lying is built into human nature. No one need teach a child to fib. It is as natural as breathing, and surprisingly effective in the short term. Secularism can adduce no moral reason to avoid falsehood when it is effective, nor has his worldview any standards not subject to change without notice. If all laws are made by man at his will, no laws are immune to being unmade by man at his will.
Leftists, as George Orwell (himself a Man of the Left) warned us, put history in the memory hole, and rewrite it to suit the needs of the moment. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
In postwar America, the Democrats of the Northeast favored integration and civil rights for blacks. Communists also favored the civil rights movement on the remarkably prescient and cynical ground that it would lead to resentment and division in Western society.
And the Democrats of the Deep South were simply labeled as ‘conservative’ by their Northern brethren on the grounds that they were attempting to maintain a social institution of racial segregation from the antebellum days.
This is what is called a ‘word-fetish’ which is the rhetorical trick of using a term to conflate two opposites, or by reversing the meaning altogether. Calling the Lincoln’s pro-Constitutional party in America ‘conservatives’ because they favored the radical change of abolishing slavery is a definition by non-essentials.
Conservatives are most unwise to allow their enemies to set the terms to define themselves: but no attempt to substitute an honest terms seems likely to prevail against the inertia of longstanding use.
The word itself ‘conservative’ is an ad hominem, because it ascribes a false motive to those who promote Constitutional principles, as if we who love a civil order of liberty and equal protection under the laws uphold the Constitution only because the Constitution is old, not because it is right.
By that logic, conservatives would all be monarchists, because the English Crown is older than the American Constitution. But since the Roman Republic is older than the British Crown, so perhaps conservatism is Republican after all. Unless we support the policies of the Pharaoh, or the Priest-Kings of Sumer.
This simple trick allows the liars to use the same term to refer to us, who protect the self-evident truths named in the Declaration of Independence, to refer to any political idea as if it, too, is declared to be an old one, so that it then can be ascribed it to us.
The most obvious example of such a lie (which is ongoing) is to refer to the ideas of the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany, or the Fascists of Italy, as being in favor of the current social order, on the grounds that they oppose the radical changes proposed by communists, hence being “conservative” hence “rightwing.”
All this, even though, aside from the racism, not a single policy announced by the party platform of the Nazis in 1922, is one leftists traditionally oppose, from nationalization of industry to deterring profiteering to public welfare for the aged and infirm to land reform to public schooling.
The mere fact that both the German and Italians of these parties were socialist radicals, seeking dramatic changes to the Italian monarchy and the German republic, naturally, go unexplained.
In reality, communism represent the economic arrangements of the Neolithic, that is, tribal group ownership of all goods, and is, in that sense, more conservative than any possible civilized idea. Communism is literally an illiterate idea, since it issues from prehistoric times.
In the case of the Civil Right movement, the Leftists in the media promoted the pretense that the Civil Rights movement was leftwing, or progressive, and Jim Crowe was conservative, or rightwing, on the transparently stupid grounds that returning to the Constitutional principles of the Founders, which assure equality to all men, was social progress, and opposition to progress is defined as conservation or current conditions.
To this day, when asked about the past of their party, the parrots of political correctness will mutter the phrase “Southern Strategy” as a voodoo incantation against the ghosts of their own past.
This allows them to assert the absurdity that all the racists, each and every single one, left the Democrat party and joined the Republicans in a single evening during the 1964 Goldwater campaign, while meeting in Suite 3505 of the Chainin Building in New York.
Issues like the proposal to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority allegedly had nothing to do with the inability of the Democrats to retain control of their southern vote-plantations and machine politics.
In reality, the voting for the Civil Rights Act shows that it drew majority support from conservatives and the GOP, and that the Democrats generally opposed it.
The political figures who stood in schoolhouse doors to prevent integration of public schools, for example, were Democrats; those who released dogs or turned firehoses on Civil Rights protestors were Democrats, Orval Faubus, George Wallace, Ross Barnett, Lestor Maddox, Bull Conner.
E.H. Hurst was a Mississippi politician who killed his neighbor, Herbert Lee, a founding member of the NAACP, for holding voter registration classes. The shooting took place in public, but Hurst was never charged with a crime. Hurst was a Democrat.
Wilson introduced racial segregation into the military; Roosevelt erected the internment camps for the Japanese.
It is little remembered that the suffragette movement was likewise: The Republicans were the first major party to advocate equal rights for women. When the 19th Amendment was submitted to the states, 26 of the 36 states that ratified it had Republican legislatures. Of the nine states that voted against ratification, eight were Democratic. Twelve states, all Republican, had given women full suffrage before the federal amendment was ratified.
There are matters of historic fact, not open to dispute, not to be wished away.
But at the same time, a postwar American leftist or progressive from Boston, New York or Hollywood would have no problem supporting the idea of the equality of rights as guaranteed by the Constitution. He would just deny that this idea was a fundamentally Constitutional, that is, a conservative idea.
He would regard equality in voting rights as a step of progress toward a future ideal, not an eternal principle based on timeless Biblical teaching, or timeless a self-evident truth of human nature.
Leftism operates, and has always operated, from shallow intellectual grounds, mistaking surface features for fundamentals, pretending motives opposite of what they are, and ascribing their own evils to the opponents.
The idea of timeless principle is alien to their worldview. Even the name, progressive, hints at the Hegelian evolutionary view underpinning their philosophy. Consistency is not a virtue found among them.
Political Correctness, for example, was the mere opposite of everything the Leftwingers of the 1960s and 1970s preached and promoted, which was a libertarian hatred of all forms of censorship.
I know of no one, no one, not one soul, on the Left in those days who did not scoff at the Hayes Code or the Comics Code or the television censors with righteous indignation.
I recall in my youth hearing a lecture by Gene Roddenberry whose highlights was mockery of the censorship he had to suffer while he was trying to stuff actresses playing space ladies into the most revealing outfits possible, or having psychic space Greeks force an unwanted Kirk kiss onto Uhura a clear case of white-on-black lip-rape.
As I recall, Roddenberry for his unsold pilot THE QUESTOR TAPES had to invent a new type of perversion, having a robot copulated with a living woman, but he boasted to the lecture audience that the censors had invented a new type of bigotry, miscegenation for machine-men.
The Left in that day all talked that way. They promoted Playboy in the name of reverence for the First Amendment.
Yet the same moment the phrase “Hate Speech” was coined, the Left were firmly on the side of censoring speech and print and prosecuting thoughtcrime with Orwellian zeal. Reverence for the First Amendment vanished like the light from a snuffed candle.
One of most famous phrases issuing from that period was Martin Luther King’s cry for colorblindness in society, to have men “judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Compare this to Critical Race Theory, where character is determined entirely by skin color, so much so that all Whites are known to be racists, and all Black to be victims of racism.
Or notice the about face between the postwar Leftist preaching and promoting toleration for all religions, and the current stance of promoting Islam or Witchcraft, verses the post-Millennial tearing down of war memorials that contain any Christian images, or removing the Ten Commandments from lawcourts, the cross from the Spanish Mission pictured in the quartering of the seal of the city of Los Angeles.
Leftism operates always in the same way, since the time of Napoleon onward: the radical elements in their own movement are hidden or downplayed, and the public face of the movement is masked in a plea for mutual tolerance, mutual understanding, merely for these allegedly new ideas to be given a hearing.
As soon as the Left gains a secure footing in a public institution, an abrupt about-face occurs.
The Left are always staunchly in favor of fraternity, egalitarianism and liberty, up until the moment Napoleon crowns himself emperor. So they have acted in every revolution and rebellion from that day to this.
Left and Right have not switched sides in some political version of the Polar Magnetic Reversal.
It is not an illusion that the old-school Liberal, who at least pretended to favor free speech, has been vampirized and replaced by an unholy doppelganger and twin called Leftism, who hate human nature and Western civilization and seek nothing but the ruin of both.
It is also not an illusion that a unified party composed of elements of the old Right and old Left have created a power base combining socialist politics with plutocratic economics, which is a form of Elitism with no convenient modern name: The word ‘fascism’ is technically correct but has misleading connotations.
The opposing party are Populists, albeit we still, for tradition’s sake, may call ourselves republics or conservatives for some time being.
That being said, less has changed than seems. Much of the change is illusion.
This is an illusion caused by three factors: First, Leftism by its nature is unanchored from any permanent or eternal principle of human nature or unchanging Biblical teaching; Second, their unanchored nature leads inevitably to corruption, secularism, selfishness and lunacy; Third, their secularism leads inevitably to the adoption of utilitarian ethics, that is, deception in the name of the greater good. Deception and hypocrisy is not an accidental side effect of Leftism, but its foundation.
Left are always staunchly anti-authoritarian, until the moment the iron scepter of authority comes to their hands.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
