There is No Such Thing as True Conservatism

Topic: Perspective

Sometimes, when we least expect it, the words just roll from the mind to paper, or in this case, to a keyboard and into a Word document.  Last summer, I unleashed what has been one of my most popular SubStack pieces to date, outlining the failures of conservatism, which no one can seem to define when given the runway to do so.  I declared myself an accelerationist at the end of the article, pointing out that populism is the only political stance worth embracing, because doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result is otherwise known as insanity.

Last week, Arizona’s fraudulently elected Governor, Katie Hobbs, signed House Bill 2785, sponsored by Representative Alexander Kolodin (R-Legislative District 3).  I may author a piece about that bill to direct traffic and give a detailed analysis of what it is and what it is not, what it does, and does not do, but that is not why I am writing this article.  I am writing once again to express how we fail as Americans when we gage every piece of news, or every legislative action, through a lens of unbridled ideology.  Again – what is a true conservative?

Let’s try this in a Town Hall format:

QUESTION 1

Candidate True Conservative, do you support abolishing Social Security?  After all, it is a socialist system set up under a socialist president that was designed entirely to push older Americans out of the work force, as if the free market and innovation couldn’t accommodate expansion once the Depression ended.  Now we are saddled with an albatross that is destroying our childrens’ and grandchildrens’ financial future.

Uh, no… because I’ll lose the elderly vote and they have paid into that system with their hard earned tax dollars.

Well, you’re not a TRUE CONSERVATIVE, because true conservatives don’t support socialist entitlement systems.

QUESTION 2

Candidate True Conservative, will you issue a statement calling for all public schools in your district to be shuttered by the end of your first term?  After all, government didn’t have much of a role in public education, if any, from the colonial days until the middle of the 19^th century.  Since then, our youth have become dumber and less prepared for adulthood than at any point in Western history, and to make matters worse, public schools are heavily invested in propagandizing students and turning them into future collectivist, Uniparty-aligned voters.

Uh, no… because our devalued dollars have forced too many of my supporters to require two incomes, and they can’t home school or afford to send them to private school.  I won’t get elected.

Well, you’re not speaking like a TRUE CONSERVATIVE, because public schooling is one of the main reasons polling shows Americans, for the first time in recorded history, now have a pessimistic view of the future.  Up until now, every generation thought the next generation would be “better off.”

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End of exercise.  Are you tired of waiting for the next election cycle to see some true conservatism?  If you’re new to this journal, take a look around.  You will find that you have to work awfully hard to get further to the right than I am personally, culturally, and generally speaking, politically.  I am a pragmatist.  I want problems solved, and I don’t care who it is who solves the problems so long as they bring about the desired end state. For the examples above, I don’t expect any candidate to answer as the moderator would have prompted a true conservative to answer - because I look at the political world with its realistic constraints intact.

One time, when I was stationed in Alaska, I went backing out of my driveway early in the morning in pitch-black winter, with the temperature below -20 degrees, and forgot to close the garage door – either that, or I did hit the button to close the door, and it bounced back up due to an obstruction of some sort.  Either way, a section of pipe on one of the operating systems inside the garage froze within an hour.  $500 later, someone who knew what the hell he was doing, which ruled me out, came out and with precision accuracy, fixed the problem.  It was one of the best $500 exchanges I’ve ever made, and I didn’t care if this technician was happy that Barack Obama had just been reelected, or if he thought church was a waste of time, or if he resented outsiders and their lack of winter smarts in his home state.  My pipes were fixed, and things could have been much worse if the garage had been open longer.

Back to Arizona – there is some debate about the legislature having the ability to appoint Arizona’s 11 electors, presumably for Donald Trump, because the state has been plagued with crippling fraud in the past three federal elections. That matter is up for debate, and several long-time political voices will bring up the issue of the existing statute designating the popular vote in the state as the mechanism of allocating the electors standing in the way of such a pragmatic solution.  If they are correct, then any legislation having to do with election reform has to not only pass through two razor-thin majority Republican chambers, but past the pen of Hobbs.

The fallout from the bill’s signing has led to even more chaos on the political right, less than nine months out from the last election that really matters.  On one side are a number of extremely principled legislators who have the think tank marks suggesting a strong stance for liberty who approve in varying degrees of the bill’s effectiveness, and on the other, grassroots voices who call the entire bill a betrayal of all things conservative, as if a window to pass legislation banning all Democrats from voting, getting rid of vote by mail in one swoop, and moving to hand counting with this Governor’s signature was legitimately on the table.

So what is it that I believe?

I have come to believe that I only care about four pillars of political life.  None of my desired end states are things I would isolate as conservative, but rather common sense.

Pillar 1 – Elections

Election must be free and fair, with full transparency afforded to the public to verify accurate counts, voter intent, and that only real, living, and lawful voters participated in an election conducted within the confines of the law, and ideally with advancing legislation stripping away all methods used to cheat.  If we don’t like the result, but it is fair – those are the rules and we will try again next time.

Most people can agree to this on paper.  This is not a conservative idea but rather an idea of intellectually healthy human beings before big money bought politics and politicians.

Pillar 2 – National Sovereignty

The battle against globalism should not rest only within the political right.  The most pressing example I can give you is the crisis on the southern border. Nations either recognize and assert their own boundaries, or they cease to be nations at all.  This is, once again, not a position that must be limited to conservative thought, and I am being proven correct by the incalculable number of working-class Latino voters living in close proximity to the border who are just now fleeing the Democrat plantation they identify with economically.  Effective policy here also cures many societal evils, like economic enslavement of minorities and putting the screws to human trafficking.

Part 3 – Trade

Without our own fully functional economy and manufacturing base at our disposal in the 1940s, we almost certainly would have lost World War II before the bomb was ready.  Unions, long a staple of the political left, used to recognize that trade should benefit the citizens of this country, and not others.  That is now obvious with the shift from long-time FDR Democrat types to the Republican Party, only if the candidates in question are Trumpian in their approach to trade.  Seeking trade arrangements that benefit your own country is common sense, and not ideological or partisan in any way.  The same can be said about immigration – if it doesn’t benefit our country, it shouldn’t happen.

Part 4 – War and Peace

I was a war hawk when I was a college kid and didn’t know any better.  One tour in Afghanistan cured me for life, because I saw how ineffective we were in a counterinsurgency environment.  A warrant officer colleague of mine once told me he felt that using the United States Army to police warlords in Afghanistan was like using a battle axe to perform open heart surgery.  Americans of all political dispositions seemingly everywhere except for the D.C. Beltway believe is it unethical and immoral to expect America’s sons and daughters to die in wars that do not protect the American homeland, and that are not essential to preserving and saving the American way of life.

Conclusion

I have opinions about taxes, infrastructure, manufacturing, and other hot-button issues, of course, but this article is to point out that time, failure, and my own two eyes and ears have convinced me that pragmatism, populism, and outsiders are the future of the American political arena.  That will either come because enough people wake up and realize what nonsense they’ve been told to support when the common sense solutions to our biggest political problems have been right under our noses the entire time.

Author’s Note: Thank you for reading! If you enjoy my work, I would be grateful to have you as a paid subscriber to this journal. Your efforts in defense of liberty are greatly appreciated.