The failure of conservatism is one of those things that has been observed many times by many different people, but why it failed is never discussed. The assumption is that conservatism failed because the people in it did not try hard enough, or they were easily corrupted by the big money donors. The underlying assumption is that it could have succeeded and created the civil nationalist paradise.
This is why these successive efforts over the last decade to create a new right have failed to get very far. They assume they just need to get new people saying the same old things and they can get the band back together. Christopher Rufo's internet activism is in pursuit of the same agenda as Buckley conservatism. It has the same agenda because it learned nothing from failure.
The most likely answer to why conservatism failed, however, is that it was doomed from the start and by start, I mean the founding. Conservatism, in a nation that was never a nation, but rather a country that saw itself as a radical experiment in liberty, was going to be the first thing reformed out of existence. What a radical experiment of any kind can never tolerate is anything in its way.
Conservativism in America was just slow progressivism, with progressivism being the radical ideology at the core of the experiment. As Dabney noted a century ago, conservatives were merely a drag on progressivism. Its job was to slow the process but eventually concede to the progressives. This meant that the reason conservatism failed is the progressivism has failed.
That is the show this week. Technical issues made it difficult to record and compile the show, so it may sound a bit wonky. Getting over those technical issues left little time to organize my thoughts on this topic, so it is mostly thinking aloud, but it is a subject I may returned to in a future show. The death of conservatism is as much about the death of progressivism as anything else.
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This Week's Show
Contents
Intro
The Death Of Conservatism
Doomed From The Start
The Mystery of Progressivism
Buckley Conservatism
Trumpism & Populism
After Conservatism
After Conservatism