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.

A while ago, I published a long and poorly-titled article about New York’s current mayor as he was assuming office.

Since then, some of the retrospectives about the upsurge in reported violent crime have been trickling in – especially about the so-called ‘slashing’ attacks, of which there were more than 550 in 2015 alone. The pace in 2016, according to reports, looks to be at over 10 attacks per day.

In a typical slashing — which often but not always occurs along racial lines in a pattern that good people who think correctly won’t notice — a young man aims to disfigure a woman with a knife.

So, what explains these ‘puzzling’ attacks? The safe explanation is that the attackers are ‘crazy’ or that it’s a result of the pullback of policies like stop-and-frisk and the increased caution that the police forces have towards any action that has a disparate impact across racial lines.

The way to solve the mystery is to recognize that it isn’t actually a mystery: you’re just supposed to be befuddled by it to remain in polite society. To express puzzlement is to show that you are a good person, even if by being a good person who supports the new direction of the state, you result in the disfigurement and traumatization of hundreds of innocent people per year or more.

Let us imagine that there are some groups of people that can win more through violence than they can through trade. This isn’t hard to imagine because there are countless examples that we see in our own lives and in history. Pirates hit the high seas in search of booty because it’s both more fun and more effective for them to rob boats and kidnap people for ransom than it is for them to go to trade school to learn how to weld.

Similarly, there are entire classes of people who can get more from the world by being unstable and dangerous – like the political leadership of North Korea.

By attacking civilians with impunity, you demonstrate in blood that the current political authority is incapable of providing effective security even at an inordinately high price.

When animals attack other animals in a bid to solidify their claims over territory, we rarely call the attacks ‘random’ or ‘senseless’ — instead we aim to understand the behavior in a detached way.

Humans, also, are intensely territorial and have many complex means of cooperation and coordination. One way that humans and many, many other species assert dominance over territory is to use limited violence to demonstrate control. What the laws say about who owns what is much less relevant than who can use violence with impunity in what territories.

Behaviors always have reasons motivating them, even if those reasons don’t meet high standards of rationality.

The press – and even articles like this one – also encourage more symbolic attacks, because effective countermeasures are forbidden and alternative security arrangements are some combination of illegal, infeasible, and culturally taboo for modern New Yorkers.

The reason why people use violence to achieve their political goals is because under the right conditions, it’s both cheaper and more effective than the alternatives. The slashers slash because it gets them and their fellows what they want for a couple dollars in hardware and a flick of the wrist.

Similar to the motivated incomprehension that people show in regards to terrorism, the better sort of educated person knows to make themselves stupid in how they think about ‘random’ violence between groups.