In the current issue of the European Conservative, Edwin Dyga talks about the failure of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott to achieve lasting conservative change while in office despite some promising moves.

The article is on page 12 of the linked print edition.

Conservative politicians, if they are to distinguish themselves from ideological progressivism, must understand that they are fighting a cultural guerrilla war — one in which responding with gentlemanly virtues to outright bastardry will be seen as a sign of weakness and treated accordingly; one in which an attitude of ‘fair play’ in the face of Alinskyite agitation will inevitably lead to defeat; one in which alleged opposition to the left must be proven by a fundamental repudiation of the opponent’s worldview; one in which militant calls for apology when that worldview is offended should be laughed at, not accommodated; one in which explicitly rightist reforms and tangible moves to dismantle institutionally entrenched leftist ideology should be pursued aggressively and without compunction; and one in which the core electoral base should never be treated with contempt, even when strategic compromises need to be made to effectively implement reforms.

Failure to understand this will reduce conservative politics to the preservation of the left-liberal status quo, and render conservative politicians little more than seat warmers for those sitting opposite and fundraisers for their programmes. Likewise, conservative voters’ failure to keep their ‘representatives’ accountable has—and will continue—to produce Thomas Carlyle’s ‘phantasm captains’ instead of the leaders we expect.

Indeed, until we make it clear that our votes need to be earned, conservatives will deserve the leadership that they routinely and blindly reward.

While men of the left may recognise similar pathologies of unprincipled opportunism infecting their political culture, the underlying liberal assumptions across the political spectrum renders them, and not conservatives, more capable of ideological advance by default. The status quo is always progressive. Swimming against the current, men of the right must recognise that a lack of militancy will serve only to reinforce this leftward drift. It is not enough to simply declare this protest as political naïveté on the part of disenfranchised traditionalists who do not understand the need for compromise. The brutal and too often ignored fact is this: resigning to and working within a paradigm that systematically favours a left-liberal order defeats the very reason why one would be involved in centre-right politics to begin with.

Those who do not understand this have no business being in politics, and should certainly not expect the support of conviction conservatives at the ballot box. Perhaps the only option left to the largely disenfranchised romantics of the right is to refuse to participate in the present mediocrity, hoping (perhaps vainly) that our votes may be courted by politicians of greater fortitude, who actually value those votes, in the future. The alternative is to continue down the same path of incremental defeat: an unsustainable and therefore unacceptable option for those who reflect on the present political wasteland with growing and bitter revulsion.

‘Growing and bitter revulsion’ is the likely fate of any right-thinking person who becomes involved in electoral politics.

There’s a growing break in the English-speaking world between political factions as both sides recognize that neither really wants to coexist with the other peacefully.

 

Insert Democratic Voting Bloc Studies are popular at most universities among faculty, the students, and the administration. On occasion, conservatives and other bad people will criticize such departments as distracting from the important public missions of those universities or of destabilizing society at large.

Any freshman will probably tell you that the classes taught by these academic departments provide easy As for little effort or even classroom attendance. This is the lure: all a student needs to do is to attend class, write some lightly-graded essays, and skim the readings if they bother to go that far.

The classes will often win some points with new students because the professors and teaching assistants are more reasonable than any nasty critics that they may have heard of had once construed them to be.

It also helps that the university administration and many other departments which aren’t formally an Insert Democratic Voting Bloc Here Studies department have, in fact, been given over to those departments. English departments teach English literature according to how well that it matches up with the precepts of social justice. A character is a good or bad character to the extent to which he matches with the new morality.

While it may alienate a small number of students who have some ideological preconditioning — a College Republican, perhaps — the average healthy person with only a passing interest in ideology as such unless learning to parrot that ideology increases their GPA and therefore their future projected earning power — will do what they’re expected to do.

Insert Democratic Voting Bloc Studies departments are also easier to stuff with various members of Democratic voting bloc racial, ethnic, gender, and behavioral groups than others. It’s difficult to dig up enough Chicano lesbian transmales to staff even a skeletal Physics department, but they’re thick on the ground when you’re trying to staff a humanities department.

Finally, academics love them because the departments simultaneously create more job opportunities while lowering overall standards in all departments throughout the institutions. It’s much easier to parrot political slogans to your students than it is to teach a real subject or hold the line on academic standards.

Conservatives, having a reasonable temperament, tend to encourage a reformist approach to universities if they consider it at all.

Others just encourage prospective students to stick to the ‘hard sciences’ and engineering, even though those departments similarly suffer from political pressures, a constant grubbing for government money, and tangential utility at best to the people who actually hire scientists for productive work.

The grievances will continue to be advanced so long as the funds continue to flow into the universities, and the funds will keep flowing into it as long as the departments serve a useful political purpose — namely to create an intellectual vanguard which revels in the destruction of the society that funds it.