The Cowardice of Conservatism: A Call for Christian Right-Wing Action
The useless party politics of managed decline and cowardice have gone on for far too long.
What is a conservative? Ask ten conservatives you meet, and you will likely get ten different answers. Some may say low taxes, small government, religious liberty, abortion restrictions, faith and freedom, and dozens of other talking points. You may also end up hearing just as many complaints of the failures of the conservative movement and supposedly conservative politicians, and how often, it feels like their best quality is that they are not Democrats. Better to drive off the cliff at eighty miles an hour rather than a hundred.
The failures of the Republican Party, which is the primary representative of the conservative movement in America, are innumerable and could fill multiple articles, but we will attempt to outline some of the most egregious betrayals here from recent memory.
Taxes and spending: Bush 43 passed two major tax cuts in his first term, then added two major wars and Medicare expansions, nearly doubling the national debt to over $10 trillion (a small amount in comparison to what it is today). Trump also passed additional tax cuts but did not pass commensurate cuts in federal spending. COVID relief bills added trillions more to the national debt, which is now over $38 trillion. All this is a far cry from spending cuts and balanced budgets they claim to support.
Marriage and LGBT “rights”: For years, Republicans defended traditional marriage, maintaining that it was between one man and one woman – then Obergefell v. Hodges was handed down. Republicans immediately accepted the decision. In 2022, the Respect for Marriage Act was passed, repealing the Defense of Marriage Act and requiring federal recognition of any marriage that was valid under state law. 47 House Republicans and 12 Senate Republicans supported it. Even today, Trump has been especially weak on such issues through public statements.
Immigration: Trump originally ran on the campaign of securing the border and building the wall. As we all remember, the wall was never fully completed, and no mass deportations ever occurred. Now, a year into his second term, although deportations have ramped up, we have still not achieved true mass deportations, and there are no plans to stem the tide of H-1Bs flooding our country, stealing jobs from American workers.
Obamacare: Obamacare passed in 2010 with no GOP support. For six years, every Republican ran on “repeal and replace.” In 2017, with full control of the government, Republicans failed to deliver on the repeal and effectively abandoned the platform point. Already, we are a year into Trump’s second term, and there are no plans for any “repeal and replace.”
Education: Republicans have claimed that they are the champion of getting the government out of education and putting parents back in charge. Instead, Bush passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which has largely remained in place. Trump also ran on abolishing the Department of Education but has yet to fulfill that promise.
Government surveillance: A GOP-controlled government gave us the Patriot Act in the wake of 9/11, which has remained in place to this day along with various reauthorizations despite documented abuses, all which are in violation of our Constitutional rights.
Innumerable additional examples could certainly be added to this list, but the point has already been made—modern conservatism hasn’t conserved anything. It has, at best, simply managed and slowed the decline. Despite the occasional good talking points, the Republican Party has failed to be a truly right-wing party that fights for and delivers the results that we support. This leads us to conclude, is there something fundamentally broken with “conservatism?”
Friedrich Hayek’s article Why I am Not a Conservative makes astute observations about the failure of conservatism as an ideology to provide an effective vision, despite promoting numerous ideas that we as Christian Nationalists would heartily reject. He explains that conservatism, by nature, is an ideology of inertia, which must be replaced by an active vision.
In it, he writes, “Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change.” If the current state of things is good, then such an attitude is proper, but what if the state of things is bad? The strict principles of conservatism are, by their very nature, resistant to change and offer little or no solution to whatever problems are being faced.
He continues:
By its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.
Here, Hayek validates the same patterns that we have seen time and time again, as briefly outlined earlier. The GOP has played the part of the opposition party, and they have done little more than slow the decline, eventually defending the same policies that they pretended to fight just a few short years ago. Only in very rare circumstances, such as the overturning of Roe (which was almost accidental), are there significant policy victories that advance our agenda, and even then, abolitionist bills have failed in multiple states.
How exactly does this happen? Why do they constantly betray their supposed principles? He notes that conservatives “have adopted at appropriate intervals of time those ideas made respectable by radical propaganda.” This, of course, is the propaganda of the left. The left constantly fights tooth and nail to achieve its goals, while the conservatives give some half-hearted protest at best, which today comes in the form of strongly worded tweets and memes. Once the left achieves its goals, the conservative either does nothing at best or completely accepts the left’s gains as settled precedent and completely surrenders—a corrupt combination of cowardice and hypocrisy. This fact has also been noted by Woe, co-host of the Stone Choir podcast.
Why are conservatives like this? Hayek notes, “Conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose to them.” Conservatives have consistently opposed any radically right-wing movements in the US – labeling them as extremists, racists, and of course, feds. Thus, those that are truly right-wing and want radical change in our society cannot in good conscience call themselves conservative. There is far too much in our nation that must change. To conserve what we have would be manifestly wicked.
Such a condition of the conservative parties was also noticed by Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda in National Socialist Germany, in his book Battle for Berlin. The conditions in Weimar Germany were strikingly similar to those that exist in America today. One of those is the attitude of what he calls the “bourgeois parties.” The extended quote below aptly describes today’s conservative movement, including MAGA.
The cowardice of the bourgeois parties in the face of Marxism is utterly unprecedented. They are incapable of mobilizing the people. The bourgeois will be ready, when the time comes, to vote for his party, but nothing can persuade him to take to the streets to defend the political goals his party pursues…That bourgeois wants peace for the sake of peace, even if he suffers under this rancid “peace.” …Bourgeois public opinion allies against National Socialism with the Jewish press. In doing so, the bourgeoisie dig their own grave and commit suicide, for fear of being killed by someone else.
In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler also noted a similar attitude. In the German Parliament, he observed that “the moment that their principles and convictions are of no further use [in re-election] they are thrown overboard like sand ballast.” This is why the Republican Party has proven itself to be useless. They say what they believe they need to say to appease the masses, but when it comes time to execute, they abandon their post or change their position entirely, as doing what is necessary is too politically costly for them. This is what has led to the long slow decline through their passive inaction and cowardice.
Such an attitude clearly will lead to no improvement in our current state. Simply advocating for good policies and desiring to “make America great again” solves nothing. “Faith without works is dead.” This applies to every aspect of life, not merely our personal piety. True action is needed to achieve the goals we wish to attain for our people. Again, Woe notes what is at the heart of the conservative spirit.
So, if conservatism is to be rejected, what is the solution? What does a truly right-wing movement look like? Instead of the passivity of conservatism, we must instead be proactively and intentionally right-wing—be a movement that has a true ideology with real goals that we wish to achieve, as “Any worldview, though a thousand-fold right and supremely beneficial to humanity, will be useless for the maintenance of a people until its principles become the rallying point of a militant movement.”
Later, Hitler explains the conception of the State that must rule over people in order for success to be realized. He believes:
The highest purpose of the folkish State is to guard and preserve those racial elements that, through the bestowing of culture, create the beauty and dignity of a higher mankind…The State [is] the living organism of a people—an organism that doesn’t merely maintain a people’s existence but leads them to a position of highest liberty by the progressive development of the spiritual and intellectual faculties.
Thus, the proper State will contain two elements. One is that it is explicitly racial. This immediately rules out the “melting pot” conception of the State that is held amongst conservatives. Today, America is made of magic soil – that anyone who believes in our globohomo ideals of freedom, democracy, and of course, egalitarianism can become an American. The ideals of blood and soil are the backwards part of a bygone era that men like MLK helped us transcend beyond through Hart-Celler and the Civil Rights Act. True to Hitler’s diagnosis, it is at this moment in our nation’s history that the decline accelerated, leading to the degraded state that we find ourselves today in.
Secondly, it is not passive. Instead, it actively promotes and fights for the wellbeing of its race. There can be no true unity in a State where multitudes of different groups are all fighting for a seat at the table and for their own existence. Men are naturally tribal, and only a State made up of one racial tribe can be truly effective at fighting for their existence and wellbeing. When men are truly united according to nature, it is only then that they can formulate their own goals and achieve them.
With this conception in mind, it is important to note that “The fundamental principle is that the State is not an end in itself, but the means to an end. It’s the pre-condition of a higher form of human civilization, but it's not the cause. This cause is found exclusively in the existence of a culture-creating race.” The State is not what is primary. The State is merely the natural outflow of the will of the race and a realization of the goals that they wish to achieve for their own betterment. Thus, the State is not an end in itself but is a means to an end – the end of actively serving the cause of the race of the nation.
Christian nationalists must reject the weak and tepid conservatism that has dominated our nation. The useless party politics of managed decline and cowardice have gone on for far too long. The conservation of nothing but the status quo must be rejected by all White Christians and be replaced by a truly right-wing ideology that honors God in service of the people:
This faith must replace the weak and cowardly command to defend with the battle-cry of a courageous and ruthless attack… We, by our aggressive policy, are setting up a new worldview, one that we shall defend with indomitable devotion.
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