John Slaughter understands what Rod Dreher and his fellow conservatives in the Republican Party and the Trump administration do not. The very last thing that America needs is conservatives attempting to “reform” the United States of 2025:
Conservatism now finds itself wedged between the left and a resurgent right, and like any cornered animal it lashes out with full intensity. We have already seen this in its readiness to destroy anyone even mildly skeptical of the Israel lobby. Conservatives have fervently used opposition to Isreal as a way to discredit emerging right-wing voices, partly because they are tied to Israel ideologically and financially, but also because it provides a useful pretext to rid themselves of right-wing voices.
The left, notably, has its own internal split over Israel–Palestine, yet it does not use that this as a tool to destroy its coalition. Conservatism does…because at the end of the day it is closer to the left than to the right. It accepts the progressive project and merely wishes to slow it, and so it views an actual right as the true threat. It also knows that if a real right ever took power, the professional conservative class be exiled. A genuine right would reverse the revolution: it would say “no more,” it would define who belongs and who does not, it would close the gates, it would revitalize heritage Americans. Conservatism cannot permit that, so it will strike the right long before it risks open conflict with the left.
This is why we must step past conservatism. If we don’t, it will persist forever as a placebo, an aspirin for civilizational cancer. It will keep saying, “We’re not the left,” and a certain portion of Americans, terrified of what the left is doing, will keep taking that sugar pill and thinking something is being done, and sit quietly while their country is looted.
As America accelerates toward a minority–majority reality, politics will reveal itself for what it has always been in pluralistic societies: ethnic politics. This reality was long obscured because, for most of the nation’s history, the population was overwhelmingly White. Only after the 1960s did the ethnic reality of democratic competition begin to surface at the national level. In a multiethnic state composed of numerous rival peoples, every bloc becomes political capital, and parties exist to serve those blocs. The left understands this and has organized itself accordingly. The right, if it remains imprisoned in the conservative fantasy of an abstraction-based nation, will be defeated. You cannot win an ethnic game by refusing to play it.
Conservatism cannot supply a common enemy, cannot supply a shared nation, cannot supply a unified faith. It cannot define what an American is, cannot name who belongs, cannot name who does not. All it can do is administer decline.
He’s underlining what John Red Eagle and I were the first to point out ten years ago. Being neither a political philosophy nor an ideology, and having no principles of any kind, conservatism is a literal guarantee of eventual failure.
That was as true in 1980 as it is now. The difference is that now, the observation is inescapable.
