The recent NatCon conference (short for ‘National Conservatism’) in Washington, D.C., was a controversial mustering of the troops in the Right’s eternal rearguard action to save the West from the Left’s interminable frontal assaults.
I find myself reflecting on the nature of this political war, and the tenor of the speeches, panels, and discussions I attended, and come away with a general dissatisfaction with the strategic abilities and argumentative acumen of the Right.
What NatCon represents, along with other forms of political organising on our side, is the Right digging in its heels and refusing to argue the case any further. This is a welcome development, far better than the ‘beautiful loser’ syndrome that afflicts so many modern conservatives. But it is tantamount to simply putting up a palisade and manning the gates in order to stop the enemy from overrunning the camp entirely.
Without wanting to single out anyone in particular, the pattern was clear across an otherwise varied selection of NatCon speeches. We were told that families should shop around America, moving to a different neighbourhood, county, or state if necessary, in order to find a church free of woke nonsense. Leftists were attacked as the ‘real racists’ for viewing minorities as a reliable voting bloc when, in actual fact, it is precisely their grasp of demographic realities that gives them an edge over our more complacent liberal notions about identity. Various rearguard actions—think Ron DeSantis’s parental rights crusade or Greg Abbott’s resistance to the federal government over Biden’s border crisis—were hailed as a sign of things to come. This can all be true in a certain sense and yet still signal an acceptance of the present federal, moral, and linguistic landscape—a retreat from our duty to change its contours in a more comprehensive, lasting way.
While we on the Right are besieged in our camp, the enemy has full control of the surrounding hinterland, which they can exploit at their own leisure with little challenge in sight. The Right remains cooped up in its fort, unwilling or unable to offer battle with a superior foe, as our resources dwindle and the enemy’s accumulate.
How has it come to this?
Put simply, the Left is able to subvert or conquer institutions, hearts, and minds from the Right, but the Right is completely unable to capture this kind of territory from the Left, and not enough is done to examine why.
One problem is that the Left begins from premises the Right accepts. The Left will assert that each person should be entitled to individual autonomy, or that stereotyping and prejudice are wrong, or that each person ought to be treated equally by the state, and the Right will broadly agree. This licence then granted, the Left takes these propositions to their most absurd point, identifying every case in which an individual is restricted by reality to be part of the mission of deconstruction, and the Right’s protests become anachronistic, mealy-mouthed, and feeble. Moreover, it gives the Right a vague air of hypocrisy or cowardice: since they already consented to the inherent good of these things, any reticence on the part of the Right must be due to a lack of moral rectitude.
By contrast, the Right begins with premises that the Left flatly rejects, and so arguments made from them fall on deaf ears to anyone in the left-wing camp as they hold no persuasive power. If one approaches political discourse with premises such as “it says in the Bible …,” or “it had always been this way that …” without making an affirmative rational case as to what tangible benefit the right-wing proposition will bring to the audience, then it should come as no surprise that people are not swayed to the Right and new believers are not brought into the fold.
If the Right wants to begin taking territory from the Left, it needs to identify some of the core values the Left idealises and then craft arguments on those grounds to attack the negative consequences that leftism has wrought. The Right needs to identify where the Left is linguistically weak and where the Right could be strong and attack those positions with overwhelming force.
One good example of this is the concept of community. The Left values something it calls ‘community,’ but it isn’t entirely clear what that means. A community is something that is rooted in the real world, in a time and a place, with named individuals who belong to it by virtue of geographic proximity, which determines who is included and who is excluded. There is no temporal location for the ‘black community’ or ‘LGBT community.’ Those on the Left seem to use ‘community’ as a cypher for ‘race’: that is, all members of said identity group are included, in all times and all places. The Left’s abstract ‘communities’ are not communities at all and are in fact their very opposite.
The Right can use this faux concern for community to its advantage here and point to the real damage that the Left has done to actual, tangible communities. One could use the example of Baltimore to show how left-wing thinking, attitudes, and policies have utterly decimated the community there, and that the Right actually has a series of propositions to restore the physical community to a state of respectability and prosperity.
The key to victory is to pin the failure firmly on the Left and promise a wonderful future under the Right, and to sell this as concern for the people themselves and not as an abstract set of principles to be upheld. The Right has to offer a credible, positive vision of the future. Stealing the Left’s language, we must then brand it as the key to progress—of a kind that is truly felt, not abstractly conceived—in order to win the war.
The awe inspired by Donald Trump’s defiant posture just seconds after the razor-thin attempt on his life is dramatic proof of the galvanising effects that courage can have on a battered nation. Our ambition must do justice to that virtue, particularly when we have the good fortune to be led by a man of world-historical significance who, there can now be no doubt, embodies it so resoundingly.
Until this happens, the Right will forever play the part of Athens to the Left’s Sparta in this modern retelling of the Peloponnesian War. Until the Right is prepared to muster a land force and defeat Sparta on its own terms, it will forever fight defensive actions in order to try and retain its dwindling dominions. Meanwhile, the Left will march their army into the Right’s encampments every year and devastate the defenceless territory until it is either worthless or permanently annexed. The Right will be whittled down little by little, until it is unclear why it was ever a political force to contend with in the first place.
