By Selwyn Duke

It’s often hard to accept the truth, especially when that
truth is scary, when reality seems to offer you no solutions, only poison from
which to pick.

It’s as with a man I once knew who insisted it couldn’t be
proven that smoking was bad for you. He knew better in his heart, but his
available choices — giving up cigarettes or accepting the danger of their use —were
both emotionally unpalatable to him. Enter the rationalization.

We’re seeing the same thing with Republicans in the wake of
Barack Obama’s re-election. Radio host Sean Hannity, citing changing American
demographics, stated a while back that his position on immigration has
“evolved”: we now must offer illegals some kind of pathway to citizenship
(a.k.a. amnesty). Other conservatives are warning that we must dispense with
social issues or the Republican Party will be dispensed with.

Of course, this isn’t always rationalization. Some conservatives,
and Hannity is likely among them, may truly believe that we can avoid electoral
hell if we have just one more dance with the Devil. Conservatives have always
responded to seemingly inevitable political changes by, slowly but surely, compromising
their way to tyranny. But rationalization is a huge factor, and what is the
scary truth here that conservatives dare not contemplate?

They are losing the culture.

Little by little.

Every day.

And as the culture goes, so go political fortunes.

Let’s spell it out:

1. To paraphrase Lincoln,
   “The teaching in the schools today will be the politics of tomorrow.” The
   left has long controlled academia.
2. The media, our conduit of
   information, is largely controlled by the left.
3. As Plato wrote, “When
   modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change
   with them.” Just imagine what he would have said about far more
   influential television and the Internet, two media through which popular
   culture — which the left controls — is imbibed.

Now, like a computer, people can only process the data they
are given. Thus, even when people function logically like a computer (which can
be rare), they’re operating within a leftist matrix of ideas forged by the Triumvirate
of Evil (TE): academia, the media, and popular culture. These data entry
specialists ensure that it is garbage in as leftist ideology, garbage out as
votes.

This brings us to the so-called culture war. The left is the establishment; it controls the above
branches of the pen-not-sword military. Conservatives have been reduced to
guerrilla warfare, with groups such as the ACLJ, Family Research Council, and
Christian Coalition drawing occasional blood; and citizen militia uprisings
such as the defense of Chik-fil-A. And while these actions are sometimes
successful, they’re always short-lived and are merely defenses that only serve to slow the loss of traditionalist
territory. The reality is that there is no culture war. What is occurring now
is a pacification effort.    

Some conservatives sense this, but the reality is often too
frightening to contemplate. You can vote liberals out of office, but how do you
control entities whose agents of change are unelected? Boycotts won’t do it
because, unlike elections, they require more than a run-up campaign and one
voting day of focus and effort; it’s often impossible to get enough people on
board, and in the aggregate most don’t have the discipline to persevere in a
boycott, anyway. And what of traditionalists reversing the Gramscian march
through the institutions by they themselves entering them? Good luck. Time is
short, and, besides, TE leftists are like The
Matrix’s sentient programs: they guard all the gates and hold all the keys.
     

In addition to this, add another element to my
eighth-paragraph list:  

4. You can supplement your
domestically produced leftist voters by importing some ready-made. Most all our
new immigrants are de
facto socialists.

This won’t be changed, either, because there no longer are the
votes to alter our dhimmi-gration model.

So the hear-see-speak-no-evil reality for conservatives is
this: politics will always reflect the culture, which is steadily drifting
“left.”

And there is no way to democratically reclaim the culture.

So many conservatives shunt this root-rot into their minds
recesses and instead focus on growing pretty leaves on the dying tree: they
immerse themselves in the political. Oh, perhaps if we fertilize the Hispanic
electorate with the manure of amnesty, it will bloom as a Republican rose. Just
one more concession!

Fantasy.

Or maybe we just need to stop the blinding sunshine of
social issues and try a flood of fiscal conservatism.

Dream.

First, Republicans have already tried focusing on fiscal
matters and de-emphasizing social ones. Note that except when answering direct
questions, they didn’t talk about social issues much in the 2012 campaign; it
was the Democrats, with their WOW (war on women) propaganda, who talked about
what the GOP supposedly believed. Ah, this only worked because the media
offered air support, you say? See the above list. The media won’t suddenly find
virtue but will only intensify the pacification effort.

As for the growing Hispanic voting bloc, as I wrote
a while back (admittedly, I didn’t provide enough nuance), they don’t mind
social conservatism. And since saying, as I did previously, that they are more
socially conservative than are whites is imprecise, I’ll rephrase it: Hispanics
are less opposed to social
conservatism than are whites.

What Hispanics really want is cradle-to-grave handouts, the
kind of big government they voted for — but never could quite get — in their
native lands. Whether this comes packaged with social conservatism or social
liberalism is secondary.

To spell it out more precisely, a higher percentage of
whites are passionately opposed to social conservatism, but a higher percentage of whites are also
passionately for it. As for Hispanics, the best description of them isn’t
socially conservative or liberal, but socially indifferent. They may register
the obligatory nod when their priest talks about abortion, but they’d do the
same in a setting in which social liberalism was the default. It’s simply not something
on which their votes hinge. And because of this indifference, their youth will
and do conform to the liberal spirit of the age.

Conclusion: Hispanics are not a natural conservative constituency.

Let’s tackle another myth. We often here that this is a
“conservative” country, with a plurality of the electorate describing
themselves as conservative; as Pew reported,
“40% of Americans[…]describe their views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and
21% as liberal.” But two important factors are missed here. First, the majority
of any nation could be called
“conservative,” as the only consistent definition of that term involves a desire
to maintain the status quo, and the status quo is determined by the majority.
Second, today’s status quo was shaped by yesterday’s left and thus is in that
sense “liberal.” This dovetails with the second factor:

Most “moderates” are actually liberals, usually of the lukewarm
variety.

How can this be? First, wishy-washy people lacking in
principle will hew mostly to what’s fashionable, and, again, progressivism is
that. Second, liberals are solipsistic and self-centered and thus see
themselves as defining the center (and
any deviation from their beliefs as radicalism); hence, even when they are left
of our “leftist” middle, in their minds they may be moderates. Third, liberals want
to fancy themselves open-minded, so they often like believing they’re voices of
reason, moderate and not, perish the thought, extreme. Lastly, both the terms
“liberal” and “conservative” have been demonized to a degree, and it takes
conviction to brand yourself as one who has unfashionably strayed from the
pack. And since liberals are far more likely than conservatives to be
relativists — to believe, “Man is the measure of all things” and thus that true
principle (which is transcendent) is an illusion —  they tend to care more about social standing
than standing on “social constructs” (principles). Ergo, they’re more likely
than conservatives to adopt a label that sounds good than one that rings true.     

So that is America in 2012. And where do we go from here? For
starters, we need to stop fooling ourselves. Many Johnny-come-lately-to-reality
types only started talking about Republicans’ demographic and cultural winter
after the Nov. 6 election, as if some kind of unforeseeable revolution had taken
place. But while it may have represented a tipping point, a long Gramscian
evolution had pushed America to that point. A process is in motion, a disease
besets us, and if you understand its pathology, you know that no amount of
Hispandering or appeals to virtue (e.g., personal responsibility) with an
electorate largely lacking in the quality will bear fruit. The remaining
healthy acorns need to recognize this, stop trying to fertilize a tree destined
for the sawmill, and instead prepare to seed new ground.

              
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