Milo thunders like the prophets of yore:
I have a message for the conservative establishment: you fucked up big time… The assorted, well-fed, burbling lunatics, idiots and losers of the conservative media establishment and in conservative circles in general… These useless, fat blubbering losers!
“You conservatives made all the right noises but you have no appetite whatsoever to fix anything. You allowed the Left to continue to gain ground and gain ground and gain ground until a point at which — and I don’t think this is an exaggeration to say — the fabric of western culture is now at risk. From immigration, from multiculturalism, from the lies the Left tells.
Trump and I represent something that scares the Left — the utter, wholesale rejection of political correctness. Total defiance. The idea you don’t back down, you double down. When somebody comes to my event and says they’re offended by a joke, I rack my brain for a more offensive one… Trump does the same thing.
He has shown the one thing that no conservative politician or pundit or anybody really on the political Right in American public life has done for some 30 years. He has shown fearlessness, he’s not afraid of the Left. And that inspires terror in their hearts and I’m the same, I like to think.
Regardless of what you think of Milo, he is absolutely and utterly correct to condemn the craven conservative establishment in this manner. Their spirit of fear is not God-given, and their vaunted ideological principles have proven to be entirely nonexistent.
As my co-author, Red Eagle, conclusively demonstrated in Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America, conservatism is not even an ideology per se, but rather, an attitude, or to be less kind, a pose.
The early new rightists were interested in discerning the deeper roots of historical American political thought, and in turning its various strains into a viable, coherent political tradition. Some of them looked so deeply that they found inspiration from decidedly non-American sources, such as British conservative political thought. The latter was a generally elitist tradition, openly contemptuous of American-style independent citizenry and the freewheeling style of American political discourse. Among the leaders of this Anglophile camp was Russell Kirk, who is generally credited with coining the American use of the term conservative as a distinct political label. His most famous work, The Conservative Mind, proved to be quickly and profoundly influential soon after its publication in 1953. Kirk’s book synthesized various ideas from diverse 18th- and 19th-century thinkers, most prominently Edmund Burke, into six canons, or principles, of this new conservatism:
- Belief in a transcendent order, or body, of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.
- Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.
- Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a “classless society.”
- Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked.
- Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power.
- Recognition that change may not be salutory reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations.
Whatever the left may say about them, Kirk’s principles are hardly the stuff of SS rallies. As a set of ideas, they’re not particularly systematic, particularly when compared with more radical philosophies like Marxism and its innumerable offshoots, or at the other extreme, the Objectivism of Ayn Rand. They are arguably more a set of generalized assertions and attitudes rather than principles per se. Even so, they do represent a particular worldview, though it is not the worldview of the Founding Fathers or of the early American political generations. Notice as well that several of these principles are primarily defined by that which they opposed: the dominant left-liberal worldview of the mid-20th century. From their very beginning the principles of conservatism were subordinate and defensive in nature, or less charitably, they were submissive and passive-aggressive in their relation to the left.
Conservatism cannot win. It cannot even conserve. If the West is to survive, it needs to abandon its consistent failures of the past and confidently embrace the pillars of its foundation: Christianity, the European nations, science, and capitalism. Any other strategy will fail. Any man who considers himself a Man of the West would do well to abandon the conservative establishment; it has already abandoned you.