It is time to face the harsh reality of why the extreme left has been able to seize power in the United States: the logical and inescapable corollary to the left’s victory is the right’s defeat. The conservative professional political class lost.
Yet the right refuses even to acknowledge the left’s victory. The reason is clear. If you admit that the left won, then people will start to ask why the right lost, and the next logical question is why we should continue listening to what they say, giving them money, and so forth.
It has now become so glaring that a few are starting to acknowledge their uselessness:
The establishment Right’s failures over the last generations have been manifold. … Since the end of the Cold War, what trajectory-altering successes or victories can the Right cite to demonstrate its worth? … Despite spending billions of dollars supporting its infrastructure…the establishment Right has registered no clear gains and many clear losses. Much of the nation was conquered on its watch.
Thus writes the editor of an unusually forthright recent book assessing professional conservatism. One contributor goes farther. “You could even argue that it abetted most of it[s defeats],” he suggests. “Where official conservatism’s opposition hasn’t been ineffectual, it’s been collaborationist.”[1]
Conservative media today are full of horror stories about the wicked deeds of the left (and they are indeed wicked). They rant and rave, and then they offer wish lists of how they would put things to rights if they had magic wands. But about their own failure, the silence is deafening. This confirms suspicions that the failure involves more: incompetence, cowardice, perfidy, or betrayal.
Imagine a military leader or athletic coach, reviewing a recent defeat with his team, who just lambasted the opposing side for their successes but never critiqued his own team’s performance or told his men how to improve.
With the left having ascended to unprecedented power over the U.S. government (and most Western governments), one might have thought that conservatives would reassess what they may be doing wrong. But no, they expect to dig themselves out of the mess they permitted by doing more of the things that got them into the mess in the first place.
This is not limited to the Republican Party: “RINOs,” “neocons,” etc. It involves the entire professional conservative political class: pressure groups, think-tanks, media, law firms, colleges and universities. One defeat after another.
Why? Here are eight reasons that I would have thought are fairly obvious but apparently need to be rubbed into their faces:
- Professional conservatives seldom even acknowledge that they were defeated. The quotations above are exceptional, and even if I missed others, this is hardly soul-searching. (I examine these meager exceptions in a book review.)
- Professional conservatives do not understand why they were defeated and do not want to understand. When was the last time you heard a conservative leader explaining what they did wrong, let alone expressing any desire to learn from their mistakes and endeavoring to correct them? What can we expect but more mistakes?
- Conservative politicos are highly authoritarian and do not tolerate criticism, not even constructive criticism, so here again they never learn from their failures. Naturally, this leads to more failures. I have published a series of articles showing that censorship (“cancel culture”) is at least as ruthless at conservative institutions and organizations, such as their colleges and universities (also usually failures), as it is at “mainstream” or leftist ones.
- Conservative leaders’ main priority is not to address public problems or oppose the left, but to build power bases and fiefdoms for themselves: media, lobbies, law firms, think-tanks, colleges and universities. These exist to enhance the power and influence of conservative kingpins, not address America’s problems or the abuses of power that afflict ordinary Americans. High-profile conservative leaders enjoy power and wealth. Self-criticism or friendly criticism (see #3 above) — let alone a healthy range of views — could cause donations to dry up.
- Professional politicos, including conservative ones, develop a vested interest in perpetuating the problems they claim to be combating. Like everyone in Washington (and in state capitals, European capitals…). What they complain about regarding their favorite villains — federal bureaucrats — is equally true of themselves: they are paid to address problems, and so they have no intention of allowing those problems to go away. If your livelihood depends on solving problems, you will not be in any hurry to solve them. On the contrary, you will do anything to make sure those problems never go away, and you may look for opportunities to make them worse.
- Many conservative professionals are lawyers who love to sue. Lawsuits depend on injuries. Rather than preventing the injuries in the first place, it is better to wait until people are injured and then select a few cases for sensational, high-profile, lucrative litigation. Cases take months or years to resolve, and even if they win, it takes more years for a decision to trickle down through the courts, if it ever does. Thus, they provide no immediate protection or relief for anyone. But they provide lots of money for lawyers.
- Conservative groups imitate leftist ones and collude with them. This is especially true when the left is winning (like now), because conservatives envy the left’s success and power and want to share it. Their latest ploy involves bringing less extreme leftists (invariably female ones in distress) on stage to fight their battles for them, thus allowing the left to control the terms of debate.
- Conservatives are contemptuous of ordinary Americans. Hardships inflicted by America’s crooked Judiciary, social welfare machinery, and regulatory labyrinth go unchallenged because they are under the media radar screen and often because they are perpetrated by conservatives’ own friends in the bar associations, government bureaucracies, and giant corporations.
In short, professional conservatism simply does not work. It can never work, and it can never end in anything other than defeat, because paying people to perform your civic responsibilities for you amounts to farming out your citizenship to a different group of overlords. It is like hiring mercenaries to fight your battles. Eventually, they start obeying whoever pays them more. Citizenship is like anything else: if you want it done right…
Political professionalism (“politics as a vocation,” in the words of sociologist Max Weber) was invented by the left, and it serves leftists’ interests well. It does not work for the rest of us, whose aim is to control those zealots whom Lenin exalted as “professional revolutionaries” and professional radicals. Creating a class of professional counter-revolutionaries and conservatives does not check or counteract the left; it merely expands the political class and provides the left with collaborators and infiltrators.
This is the central conundrum of democracy: we say that We the People govern, but in practice we quickly delegate our authority to paid government officials. When those officials inevitably abuse that power in flagrant ways, we then hire paid activists, who abuse their power in more subtle ways, but the result is the same. They pretend to hold the officials to account but readily collude with them.[2]
If we want a permanent political class to run our public affairs, it is better to have a monarchy-aristocracy, whose livelihood does not depend on being justified by numerous social ills and political catastrophes that they can manufacture to make themselves indispensable.[3] Figures like Donald Trump; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.; Elon Musk; and Vivek Ramaswamy can take independent positions and address real needs because they have independent means.
But if the rest of us depend on billionaires to rescue us from the railroad tracks and our own lethargy, then the “conspiracies” will continue, and the left will continue to consolidate control.
Stephen Baskerville is professor of politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His most recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” and What to Do about It, has just been published by Arktos. His other books and articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.
[1] Arthur Milikh, ed., Up from Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right after a Generation of Decay (Encounter, 2023), Introduction, vii; Michael Anton, “The Pessimistic Case for the Future,” ibid., 14.
[2] “The deep state arises only within democracies,” writes Alexander Dugin, “functioning as an ideological institution that corrects and controls them.”
[3] This is why republican revolutions that promise power to the people invariably degenerate into authoritarian quasi-monarchies headed by a Cromwell or Bonaparte. The American Republic did not do this – yet.
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