We were discussing the future of electoral politics in another internet forum when a certain poster -- a very erudite man it seems -- expressed his belief that the current state of affairs was heading for an inevitable crackup (a dramatic, but hardly uncommon, point of view these days). His proposal was to make use of the ensuing discontinuity to affect a positive change in the world. "Is anybody on our side [meaning the conservative side] even seriously wargaming this?" was the salient question in his post.

Now I am a Trad Catholic, a Thomist, a monarchist, and a patriarchalist; in other words, I'm just about as conservative as it gets. I do not consider contemporary American "conservatives" to be of the pure stock, or anything close to it. That is why I lament the Right's ideological bankruptcy. My reply to the poster continues below the tildes.

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Dear [Redacted],

The Right cannot seriously wargame anything in our day and age, because it is intellectually bankrupt. I know that this statement will likely be met with many boos and catcalls, especially on a forum such as this one — I know this because not many years ago I would have been among those issuing the boos and catcalls. However, it now apears clear to me that conservatism in America is hopelessly confused and shallow. A muddled comprehension of Austrian economics and a sepia-toned nostalgia for the US Constitution do not add up to a strategy or a vision; and furthermore, they block any objective appraisal of reality from seeping in to where it is needed. What does the Right really want, and what is possible given the world we actually live in? Any political platform has to begin by addressing questions like these, otherwise it is nothing but a collection of catchwords. The Right has catchwords aplenty, but the substance behind them is conspicuously absent, as we can see by examining one of its most persistent demands.

Liberty. The Right is always calling for more liberty — a word which in their vocabulary seems to be used as an intransitive verb. For it appears to designate some form of activity, but the object of that verb, the from what or for what to which the liberty pertains, is frequently left unspecified. We have to probe deeper into the system before we get acquainted with the precious object of liberty, but then the answer raises more problems than it solves.

The Left offers plenty of liberty of its own, mind you. A good Leftist leaves himself free for any sort of sɛҳuąƖ experience or expression. He is free to abort unwanted babies or to “death panel” unwanted old people. He is sweepingly unconcerned with any kind of history or tradition. Leftist protesters are free from the rule of law, just as Leftist artists are free from the canons of taste and Leftist intellectuals from the demands of reason. The Leftist religion, too, is quite untroubled by the meddlesome interference of God. O what blessed liberty exists on the Left!

I take it this is not the kind of liberty the Right is talking about, for no self-respecting conservative ought to desire any of that horse manure. In the realms of law and morality at least, even for the freedom-loving Right, permissible modes of behavior must be retricted to what is truly praiseworthy. And that sounds more in keeping with conservatism, does it not? After all, aren’t conservatives supposed by the people of virtue, the people of law and order, of uprightness in behavior and clarity in thought? So it seems, or so the Rightists themselves will continuously tell us. But virtue is always the narrowest of paths, the straightest of ways, of all walks of life the most difficult, most demanding, most rigorously circuмscribed, the least tolerant of error or deviation, and the one having the least in common with what is ordinarily meant by ‘liberty.’

So if we agree that liberty is too dangerous to be apllied willy-nilly to the really important stuff, then perhaps it pertains only to the non-essentials of expressivity, those little quirks of personality which color life through and through with the beauty of all that is individual and accidental. If this were so, then we ought to reserve our severest unbrage for things like Homeowner Associations, company dress policies, and the mass marketing of standardized merchandise. There are people in the world — some of them ostensibly intellectual; the names Naomi Wolfe and James Howard Kunstler spring to mind — who do in fact rail against such things. None of them whom I know of are particularly eager to self-identify as card-carrying members of the Right. In fact, they accuse the Right of being the very enforcers of this stifling uniformity, an army of squares occupying a hive-like Levittown Leviathan which receives its marching orders from Joel Osteen, Rush Limbaugh, and the Wednesday Walmart mailer. I am no great fan of suburbia myself, nor of mainstream conservatives; however, I do not blend the two of them together into one homogenized effluent to be quickly flushed down the drain. The Left, by way of the SWPL crowd, is just as susceptible to the charge of being suburbia’s overlord as the Right is, and therefore I do not think the accusation is fair. I do find it ironic, though, that suburbia has become something so universally despised that both Left and Right are disposed to join each other in a rousing chorus of “I am not Spartacus” whenever the subject is brought up, and yet everybody still wants to live there. This tells me that the prejudice against suburbia is essentially a creature of the Left. It is the corollary of Affirmative Action, multiculturalism, and political correctness: If non-whites and ethnic ghettoes are to be made “cool,” then whites and their habitations must be made “un-cool.” Exhorting others to “express their individuality” (by which the exhorters principally mean “reject civil society”) has by now become the standard method of baptizing new generations of young people into the Leftist program. When the Right takes up the banner of individuality, it accomplishes little more than shooting itself in the foot. What we see here is a classic example of the Left up to its old tricks, i.e. winning support for its loathsome agenda through the techniques of social psychology (rebranding the Revolution as fashionable and cool), while the Right is engaged in its perpetual and pathetic display of running after the bandwagon with its stupid propeller-hat on, crying “Me too! Me too! Me Too!”

Therefore, it is very counterpruductive for the Right to conceive of its ideal of liberty in terms of “freedom of expression.” The Left will always outplay us if we try that tactic. Another instance of the same problem can be seen in the recent GOP debates. Mitt Romney accusses Newt Gingrich of being a career politician, and Newt responds to him by saying “You would have been a career politician too Mitt, only you lost.” In both their quips there is the implicit assumption that career politicians are horrible, deplorable creatures. A clearer example of the Right’s intellectual bankruptcy could not be asked for. Politics is a high and noble calling, and being a career politician is nothing to apologize about if you’ve performed your job well. Yet there is something in contemporary conservatism which rejects the very notion of politics out of hand. The Right is chasing the concomitants of coolness like a wannabe. “I’m an outsider, I’m an individualist,” is the shibboleth that plays to the Republican base. I have never understood why political naivete is supposed to be a qualification for political office, any more than I understand why, in order to serve on a jury, you must sufficiently demonstrate to both attorneys and the judge thay you know little about law and absolutely nothing about the facts of the case.

In any event, we can always look to what successful conservatives have actually done as a good guide for what they ought to do, using the anecdotes of history as an heuristic for political calculation. And nowhere does it appear that freedom of expression was ever very high on the conservatives’ to-do list. We do not find the God-fearing peasants of Vandee standing up for their self-evidently true and manifest right to paint their houses hot pink if they damn well pleased, nor did they take up arms against the evil tyranny that declared “Vee vill have no pastic flamingos in zee yard.”

So what meaning remains to be attributed to the Right’s precious liberty? The final non-negotiable at last appears: it is economic liberty, the liberty of money-making. Here we run into what is perhaps the greatest thicket of misperceptions and outright lies that has ever grown up among the dwellings of men. Economic theory is a vast topic and is much too cuмbersome to address in a mere blog comment, but we can say a word or two about mainstream conservatives’ current understanding of the concept, and how unhelpful it is.

When today’s typical conservative says he wants more economic liberty, what does he actually mean? He can already purchase everything he will ever need and most of what he will ever want. He is free to start a business, to own real estate, to buy shares in joint-stock companies, to own commodities and derivatives, to borrow from banks, to have a revolving line of credit issued in his name, and to finance his consumption through any number of venues. He can run up huge, unpayable bills and never fear the debtors’ prison, for today we handle such situations through the bankruptcy courts. Whatever else he means, he certainly cannot say that his field of economic activity is restricted.

Ah, but there is too much regulation, he says. “It’s no longer profitable to start a business. There are taxes, fees, licenses, codes, bureaucratic red tape; there are stipulations attached to who you can hire, and how much you have to pay them, and whether or not you can fire them; certain potentially lucrative areas are simply declared off limits; special interests and big corporations have politicians in their back pockets; there is a political spoils system which seems to reward everyone except the white middle class; and furthermore, I have to pay for the existence of the social strictures which do me no good, and actively seek to undermine me.”

My friend, I am entirely sympathetic to your plight. However, I need you to realize that most of what you’re talking about has nothing to do with economic liberty per se. You seem to be asserting that you are a member of an oppressed class. If that is true, then you must go in search of your freedom through the crucible of naked power politics — there you will find your answer. Seek it in nationalism, class interest, race interest (words currently anathema on the Right), but do not expect it to come as a handout from your oppressors. And as for the rest of it, remember that the producer’s lot in life is always to be fending off the swarms of flies and jackals who seek to help themselves to the fruits of your labor. Hesiod’s Works and Days is in part a lament on this very problem, and things haven’t really changed that much in 2700 years.

If you are to find any sort of justification in the struggle, if you are to believe that all the sacrifice and anxiety are still worth it at the end of the day, then you must insist upon a very different kind of “liberty.” The freedom that you seek, freedom in the only meaningful sense of the word, is the freedom to rout your enemies, to beat back the attempts that are being made on your livelihood and dignity. For that to happen, you have to be in charge, you have to be the man “who decides.” And to be in charge means that you must seize the scepter of power.

So as for wargaming (if you’ll pardon the long explanatory matter), I would say this. It is time to prepare for a new nationalism. It is time to hold up the white middle class, and those capable of sharing its worldview, as the natural heirs to a world empire. The first practical step to be taken in this direction will be closing the southern border. This will naturally involve a redefinition of American citizenship. Needless to say, birthright citizenship must be ended and the “rule of blood” set up as the new standard. Blood-citizens of America will have access to social welfare systems and the legal redress of grievances; others not. The next step will be to eradicate political correctness from workplace ethics and educational standards. It is easier than it sounds; the right president could do this with the stroke of a pen, simply by refusing to enforce Affirmative Action protocols. The third step will be to replace the US Constitution and our current system of a government of divided powers, with an Emperor and a Diet. Perhaps the governors of the 50 states could serve as the 50 Imperial Electors, but it is not important to worry about the form right now. The essential thing is to re-conceive of what American power is all about. The role of the US Government in the 21st century is not to defend the “Rights of Man” or other such ideological nonsense, but to defend civilization against third-world barbarism and anarchy. This ought to be obvious by now, but the libertarian dreams of the Right prevent most of them from making the connection. All powers not essential to the fundamental military role of the Imperial government will be devolved to the state and local level. The Right will end up getting everything it wants anyway, so it really has nothing to complain about. But the Right will have to accept the fact that imperium is the only practical means of securing what it wants — a concept hitherto foreign to its entire way of thinking.

My experience seems to be that when right-wingers of varying stripes come together to discuss things they end up moving leftward.  I suppose it's inevitable, the problem with the Right is that it is a reaction to the Revolutionary movement in history.

I think the primary problem is that the right is so splintered. There is no unifying doctrine or goal that can bind people on the right together. They spend much of their time arguing with one another.

I think one of the primary issues is the trend of neo-paganism and atheism in the right. These groups tend to both share a view of the history of Western civilization and Catholicism that is almost identical to Marxist historiography on the same subjects. They tend to see Christianity as something foreign (if they are neo-pagan) or illogical (if they are atheist) and generally believe the narrative of the left about the Catholic Church and Western civilization, painting these two entities as oppressive and "evil." I believe therein lies their major flaw. They disconnect themselves from their history and their tradition, and betray their ancestors.

Meanwhile, the left is genuinely unified under the central tenets of their religion, which is that of secular humanism, cultural Marxism, consumerism, political correctness, and tearing down every facet of traditional Western civilization.