Comments on Zman's Iron Law of Conservatism

Recently a blogger by the name of Zman put up an interesting post, The Iron Law of Conservatism, which asserts that conservative organisations over time tend to drift Left. I felt was very good and one which I think warrants some comments. Zman writes;

The defect with the Alt-Lite is the same problem the Buckley Conservatives had a generation ago. They have no antibodies to resist entryism, because they lack a timeless definition of what it means to be Alt-Lite. Western Civilization, after all, includes Karl Marx and Hitler. Nazism is just as much a part of the West as John Locke. In fact, Hitler currently casts a longer shadow than any of the men of the Enlightenment. On what grounds can the Alt-Lite reject Hitler, but embrace the slave owning Jefferson?

The same is true of anti-racism and egalitarianism. How can these be rejected when they are inventions of the West? Of course, the Alt-Lite makes no attempt to reject these as that would get them in trouble with the Left. That’s what opens the door to, and requires them to accept, the defining feature of the dominant orthodoxy. That feature is the blank slate. As McInness goes to pains to point out, if a hotep brotha is on the Trump Train, he has a place at the table of the Alt-Lite, a cherished place.

That’s the fatal flaw that was the undoing of the Buckley Right. The Alt-Lite has no affirmative argument. Instead, it is a list of things it is not and most of those things are to their Right. That firewall they are building to their Right, just as Buckley did with Kirk and with the paleocons, comes at the expense of any defensible line of demarcation between themselves and the Left. That leaves them open to entryism, corruption and subversion, which is why the leading opponents of Trump are all Buckley Conservatives.

One of the reasons I've been harping on the subject of Fascism lately is because best it illustrates the entryist problem as it pertains to right wing politics. Ask almost anyone about Fascism, and where it sits on the political spectrum,  and more likely than not they will locate it on the Right. Yet, as this blog and the objective historical record shows it was a child born of the Left, riddled with its genetics and from its outset was ready to wage war against traditional European society and its underlying foundations.

How does an movement become considered a member of the Right when the ideas of Marx are its conceptual foundations is not something that gets talked about much in Rightie circles, yet, if you think about it, it would appear to be a rather serious problem.

It's my contention that one of the reasons why the Right has been a continual losing proposition in the 20th Century is because it has failed to develop an doctrine, or litmus test, on what it means to be "Right". This failure has led to "infiltration" into the ranks by elements which are subversive and thus the Right is caught in a continual pincer grip, attacked from the over Left from the outside and the covert Left from the outside. It's hard to defeat the enemy in front of you when you're being stabbed in the back.

How we arrived at this state of affairs deserves a book length treatment, but briefly, I think a lot of this has got to do with the fact that prior to the French Revolution the world was Right wing by default. Anyone attempting to change the world had to argue for the change first with the result that Left wing tradition of justifying itself developed quite a formidable body of supporting argumentation which gave it some form of superficial intellectual coherence, Right wing ideas, on the other hand, were simply assumed by many and not much thought was given. Furthermore, the Christian religion did the lions share of Right wing defence by prohibiting by morality that which could not be rebuked by argument. With the collapse of the Christian religion, the whole "Right" defence was dealt a mortal blow.

The significance of this latter collapse shouldn't be underestimated. With the demise of Morality all that was left was intuition and tradition, with the preference for tradition, when it all comes down to it being a temperamental matter, the so call "Conservative disposition."

The problem with this "dispositional" approach to politics and culture is that things are assumed to be Right wing by virtue of them "feeling" right wing. Therefore any ideology which emphasises order, authority, patriotism and identity is assigned to the right of the political spectrum by its associated qualities with the "Right" disposition.  Fascism, Catholic Integralism, Neoconservatism and the Soviet "hardliners" are all put on the right despite totally incompatible underlying philosophical foundations.

Then there is the problem of political "framing".  Perhaps the greatest victory the Marxist-Leninists ever achieved was convincing everyone else that theirs was the only "authentic" interpretation of Marx™,  and labeling everyone who opposed them as "Reactionaries". How conservatives ever played along with this idea is beyond me--further proof that they really are the stupid party-- however the historical record shows that the rebranding of Fascism was hugely successful, allowing Nationalist Marxism, i.e.  Marxism v2.0™to be percieved as of the Right. After all, all those Nuremberg rallies feel "Right" don't they.

The successful branding of Fascism, and other ideologies as a right wing phenomena meant that membership to "Right Club" was based on the feels rather than pedigree. However the differences in their respective philosophical underpinnings meant that the members of Right Club were, in the end, incompatible. Furthermore, the pragmatic attitude of "you don't punch to what feels the Right" makes sure that the entryist problem remains entrenched.

The solution to this problem is for the Dissident Right to develop a litmus test of membership. Yes, in a sense, it is a sort of 'purity" test but it needs to be done in order to stop the movement from being subverted from the inside. I think if any other bloggers are interested, I think it would be worthwhile to make a concerted effort on this subject over the next few weeks.

The Z man proposes this as a sort of test:

The great chain of causality is Biology→Culture-→Politics-→Economics. It’s why Libertarianism, in its current form, not right wing. The Reason Magazine crowd are sure that all you have to do to fix Haiti, for example, is end the licensing of barbershops and other small businesses. And legalize weed, of course. In other words, they get things backward and end up rejecting the human condition. This is the crack in the foundation of all Left Wing movements. It’s what they share in common.

I think he's nearly there but just misses the mark. The Natsocs satisfy the above criteria and as we have shown on this blog they're clearly they're from the Left.  In fact, the more you think about it, even most of the Left can in someway be made to fit that schema of things. The Left have their notions about biology as well as the libertarians, the point is that they are wrong.

This leads us to the what is the distinguishing feature of Right wing belief is its commitment to Realism. The reason I don't believe in the blank slate approach to human nature is because it is disproved by the empirical observations of human life. The reason on I don't believe in biological Calvinism is because education does make a difference, but there are limits.

The great error of 20th C Rightism has been that it has been based on the "feels" rather than the "thinks". And any litmus test of Rightism has to go beyond the "feels" with all the "will to power", "comfort in Tradition", and other associated intellectual shit and concentrate on reality calibration. The underlying principle of Rightism is that 2+2=4 no matter how inconvenient or how bad it makes us feel. Chesterton saw where we were headed years ago and saw that in the end it will be a battle between those who asserted the Truth and those who preferred something else.

Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.

The Litmus Test of Rightism is a belief in the Truth, any other test misses the mark.