Real conservatism vs counterfeits

What conservatism was trying to conserve: liberty, variety, hierarchy, order, beauty and dignity in general — and ecclesial Christianity and Western man in particular. No other mission is worth pursuing, and anyone who tells you different is, simply put, an enemy. The most dangerous enemy of all is not the Islamic interloper or the spiritually purblind Social Darwinist, nor even the flaccid and decadent suburban secularist. No... it’s the leftist Christian, who steals the stern and spiritual demands that nestle inside the true religion like a lump of uranium fuel — cherished and controlled behind thick walls of prudence and tradition — and uses them to poison the natural waters of love for life and kin. Absent such people and their degenerate descendants, the multiculturalists, our civilization could easily defend itself again, as it did for 1,500 years of Christendom, and make fair compromises with internal minorities [religious liberty including getting the state out of the marriage biz for example] and foreign enemies. [Trade with all and meddle with none, and people won’t crash planes into your skyscrapers.]

Other dead ends:

I might have followed my closest friends in college down the sterile, concrete ramp that is Ayn Rand, or some other variant of autistic individualism — convinced that I owed nothing to my ancestors, neighbors or descendants but a thumb of the nose and a well-thumbed copy of The Virtue of Selfishness.

On the other hand, it’s possible my hormones would have triumphed, and I would have learned to savvy the lingo of Nookie Feminism.

Worst of all, I could very well have followed the subtle cues, nods, winks and nudges delivered by a certain set of campus “conservatives” I met. Nowadays we’d clearly spot them as neocons, but back then that term referred to hard-working, numbers-crunching pragmatists who wrote for Commentary, when that was still a magazine for the “reality-based” community. So I just thought of them as the Smoothies.

Slick and glib, alternately unctuous and condescending, the Smoothies made it clear that they were teaching me how to “make it” in the world — and avoid political pitfalls that would land me out in the unclubbable reaches of the “crazies.” That might leave me, they made it more than clear, in the same social class I’d come from, forever a denizen of Archiebunkerland.

So it was very, very important that the Party of the Right, in one of its debates, vote “Yea” on the resolution: “Israel is the Hope of the West.”

Very young fogeyhood:

Imagine a young Frasier Crane trapped on the set of ‘That ’70s Show’.

— John Zmirak at Taki