“This [Northern Conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation.
“What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.
“American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted?
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“Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip.”
–Robert Lewis Dabney
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Dabney’s characterization from a century ago of “Northern conservatism” remains unsurpassed in both eloquence and accuracy as a description of that contemporary phenomenon that styles itself, “conservatism.”
This is what I refer to as Big Conservatism, the Big Con, or the Conservative-Industrial-Complex.
A curious, or perhaps not so curious, thing that has unfolded before our eyes during The Great Panic of 2020 is the readiness with which the Big Con has labored indefatigably to exacerbate it.
Indeed, Fox News and The New York Post are indistinguishable from CNN, MSNBC, and The Washington Post in their breathtaking, hyper-sensationalized coverage of…The Virus.
The Big Con, in other words, has been every bit as much a purveyor of Fake News and fear as has their leftist counterparts.
As of this writing, April 8, 2020, some in the Big Con have begun—even if, like the prisoner in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave who, with no small measure of reluctance, breaks free of his bonds to ascend into the blinding light of the sun—slowly, carefully note holes in the official narrative on The Virus.
Still, though, those in the Big Con who have gotten just this far are in a minority. The Big Con will not dare say anything so much as remotely critical of Dr. Fauci, for example, or Dr. Birx. Hell, for that matter, I don’t recall them uttering a negative syllable even about Andrew Cuomo.
The Big Con, however, is behaving now as it always does: In order to maintain the illusion that it represents an opposition party to that of the left, it seeks to quarrel with the latter over differences in degree—never differences in kind.
Examples:
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Race and “Racism”
The left: Republicans and conservatives are “racist.”
The Big Con: Democrats and the left are the real “racists.”
A genuine opposition party: “Racism” has been rendered an all but meaningless term inasmuch as it is has been used as a political weapon to bludgeon white people. That this is so is proven by the fact that while the overwhelming majority of interracial crime and attacks in this country consist of black perpetrators and white (and other non-black) victims, black perpetrators are never accused of “racism.”
Immigration
The left: All immigration is good and should be permitted and encouraged.
The Big Con: All legal immigration is good and should be permitted and encouraged.
A genuine opposition party: All immigration is not good. Immigration comes at great costs, cultural, social, economic, demographic, and, of course, political. At the very least, illegals need to be summarily deported and we need an indefinite moratorium on all legal immigration.
Abortion:
The left: Abortion—“a woman’s right to choose,” “reproductive rights,” etc.—is a moral right.
The Big Con: Abortion should generally be discouraged, but, in the cases of rape, incest, and when a mother’s life is endangered, it is permissible.
A real opposition party: There is no such thing as “abortion.” What’s in question is filicide, the killing of the youngest human beings by their own mothers before they’ve made it beyond their mothers’ wombs. As such, if it is immoral to kill, say, three year olds, irrespectively of how they were conceived, then it is immoral to kill the preborn.
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Big Government:
The left: Government needs to supply its citizens with access to however many programs are necessary in order to satisfy their basic needs and wants.
The Big Con: The government must never exceed the limits imposed upon it by our Founders and the Constitution that they ratified—except for all of those cases, like the War on Poverty, the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, and the War on the Coronavirus, when it is “necessary” for it do so.
A real opposition party: It is always impermissible, morally and legally, for the government to transgress its Constitutional limitations—whatever the circumstances may be.
This list could be multiplied exponentially. But the point, I hope is clear enough:
The Big Con is not now, nor has it ever been, a genuine opposition party. It is not even genuinely conservative.
No, the Big Con is now, and has always been, the Deputized Left.
Inasmuch as the men and women of the Big Con implicitly consent to challenge the official left only from within the parameters of the narrative or script of which the left approves, it is fully accurate to conclude that the Big Con takes its marching orders from the left that it purports to oppose.
It is, then, a Deputized Left. For all practical purposes, the left has endowed the Big Con with the authority to challenge details of its narrative—as long as the Big Con never challenges its fundamental premises.
But why, one may wonder, would leftists do this?
The answer is not hard to figure out, and amounts to the proverbial killing of one bird with, not just two, but three stones:
First, as long as the Big Con never strays beyond the boundaries of the template that the left has established, the Big Con’s existence provides the left with a fake enemy against which to rally its base.
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Second, the Big Con, being a fake enemy, guarantees the left and its base a limitless series of victories.
Third, the Big Con is the best of all conceivable fake enemies for the left, for even while its agents are pretending to oppose the left, because they never challenge the most basic premises of the left’s vision and agenda, even while they are taking shots at it, they promote the left.
All of this being said, is it not now clear why the Big Con has accepted, enthusiastically accepted, the left’s official version of “the Coronavirus Pandemic?”
Although Anthony Fauci and all of his fellow fear-mongers in Big Government and Big Media had to admit this week that the Doomsday scenarios that they have been tirelessly predicting for weeks have been (as some of us have always known) wildly off, the Big Con has failed to call them on it.
The Big Con has failed to bring to the public’s attention that no more than a month or so ago, Dr. Fauci revealed a very different face when he didn’t have remotely as large an audience (i.e. remotely as many people to scare). In an essay that he co-authored with Dr. H. Clifford Lane and Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an essay that was published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Fauci acknowledged that the mortality rate of COVID-19 could very well be about .1%–the same as that of the seasonal flu.
This is a far cry from his initial claim—which he made loudly in front of cameras and microphones—that The Virus would be ten times more lethal than seasonal influenza.
Had the Big Con been interested in challenging the conventional wisdom, then they would’ve asked Fauci when he recently confessed that the number of deaths (allegedly caused) from The Virus is “likely less” than we thought, as to whom he was referring, the Fauci of the New England Journal or the Fauci whose face and voice have become omnipresent over the last few weeks? The former appears to have been correct.
The latter, however, was epically, stupendously, indeed, scandalously, mistaken.
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The Big Con has refused to welcome into its media orbit any of the world-renown distinguished epidemiologists, bacteriologists, virologists, microbiologists, i.e. medical specialists, who have been insisting from the outset, and whose judgments developing events have only confirmed, that not only is The War on The Virus a monumental overreaction to it, but the identity of The Virus itself, though ambiguous, is more like a seasonal flu and nothing at all like another version of the Black Plague that the Flat-Curve Society is making it out to be.
Opportunists in Big Media and within the Big Government of which it is its propaganda machine have every reason to frighten citizens into thinking that a plague has descended upon the land.
And the Big Con is Big Media.
The Big Con, which has always claimed to value tradition, faith, the free-market, the Constitution, and the spirit of America’s Founders, has not only sat back idly as governments at the national, state, and local levels have, with seemingly a single resounding, sudden voice, dramatically and indefinitely undercut all of these good things; the Big Con has encouraged the systematic violation of them by applauding the “mitigation policies”—the draconian orders—that Flat-Curvers from President Trump on downward have issued in order to “Flatten the Curve!” and “Save Lives!”
The Big Con, that is, consists now of Corona Walkers.
Airing their television and radio shows from their homes (“Shelter in Place!” “Stay at Home!”), the men and women of the Big Con have joined the very herd of the walking dead, the Corona Walkers, that they helped to foment.
We can call them “Corona Cons.”
It’s often said by those on the (classical, traditional, “dissident,” i.e. real) right that the Republican Party, home as it is to the Big Con, is the “Stupid Party.” I submit, however, that in light of recent developments, a better, more precise moniker is in order:
The Dead Party.
