Amerika

Furthest Right

How William F. Buckley Ruined Conservatism

A quick note on where postwar conservatives got it wrong:

American conservatism followed William F. Buckley Jr. in embracing, under the name “fusionism,” the split between those two spheres. “We are going to support freedom — economic, social freedom, individual liberties — everywhere we can almost across the boards,” the fusionists reasoned, according to Hazony, while relegating to the private sphere “traditionalism, nation, God, scripture, the traditional family.”

Buckley essentially replaced conservatism, or the idea of conserving civilization, with “Christian libertarianism,” or the idea that you could be as conservative as you wanted in your own home as long as you could pay for it.

Not surprisingly, this enabled the Leftist march through the institutions. Like a good MBA, Buckley ducked the high-cost battle — defining the future of America as having conservative values as a nation — because it clashed with the egalitarian needs of diversity as seen in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s, and instead focused on the business-friendly battle for economic freedom.

By demanding social freedom like a good libertarian, he essentially opened the door to Leftist takeover of popular culture. By focusing on individual liberties, he helped abolish whatever social order remained. But economic freedom appealed to both the mercantile middle class round-headed voters and big corporate sponsors alike.

This tells us how we can un-do his mistake. Our post-FDR/LBJ government consists of an elaborate system of subsidies which boost the economy on paper, although make it sick in reality, as Trump pointed out.

If these subsidies — EMTALA, public schooling, medicare/medicaid, Obamacare, social security, welfare, disability — go away, then the social freedoms become Social Darwinism, or survival of those who contribute and no free entitlements for the parasites who have grown up among us and shown up on our shores with their hands out.

It is time for us to lose the socialist side of America, its entitlements, so that we are no longer sponsoring people to misbehave with a giant system of entitlements and the massive jobs program that is the bureaucracy that supports it.

At that point, we can go after other bad hacks to our system, such as the Administrative State (three-letter agencies under no one’s direct control) and its progressive tax system which is a socialist-style wealth transfer.

Without the attractor that is free handouts, the entire diversity system will collapse. As we withdraw our military for Europe, it will be forced to militarize as well, causing its social welfare systems to collapse.

At that point, we have to reconsider political socialism, or the habit of transfering power much as we transfered wealth from the strong to the weak, which favors minority groups — religious, sexual, ethnic, cultural, lifestyle — at the expense of the mainstay of this society, its ethnic Western European middle classes.

With those done, America would be running on a “microkernel government” that handled defense and a few other functions on probably a quarter of its current budget, and we can work on patching that to include an aristocracy and that glorious 1790 naturalization act that basically said “ethnic Western Europeans only.”

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