October 20, 2024

8 Reasons Why Conservatives Lose

By Stephen Baskerville.1/2

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.

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Why? Here are eight reasons that I would have thought are fairly obvious but apparently need to be rubbed into their faces:

1.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.)

2.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?

3.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.

4.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.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/8_reasons_why_conservatives_lose.html