Culturally, the Left won; so what's to conserve? The Old Right, bow-tied and bespectacled, gentlemanly and erudite, has proven impotent to slow down, let alone stop, the Left's long march through the institutions and their subversion of them. Assembled in their well-appointed 'cucksheds,' the likes of George F. Will fiddle with ideas while the Republic burns. Enter the New Right which, as David Azzerad puts it,
. . . is anchored in the realization that the conservative project in America today is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary one. We lost. They won. Painful as it is to admit, we no longer feel at home in our own country. In this progressive theocracy in which all must worship at the altar of Wokeness, conservatism, if one can still even call it that, is more about overthrowing than conserving. Burke’s edifying exhortation—“Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna”—must be altered to suit the times: Sparta was your inheritance, now reclaim her.
As such, this new Right has a decidedly unconservative temperament. It is spirited, manly, and combative. We fight with the same intensity, resolve, and clarity of purpose with which the Left fights. And we fight not to stem our losses, but to win. As Pat Buchanan once wrote, we “want to engage the Left on every front; to defund it; to drive it back into the redoubts whence it emerged decades ago. We want to return to their places of honor the republican beliefs, cultural norms and moral values we were raised with.”
This new Right understands not just ideas, but power. The Left’s ideological hegemony is not principally the result of better ideas, but of its long march through the institutions. We understand the need to build new institutions—in particular those with the power to shape public opinion—and to reconquer lost ones or, at the very least, defund them. The universities, in particular, must be brought to heel.
Absolutely. Defunding the leftist seminaries is a job each of us can do right now. Every day brings news of a new outrage and an additional reason to divest the institutions of the Higher Enstupidation. For example, the cancellation of Mike Adams, and that of Flannery O'Connor by Loyola University Maryland.
The Catholic Universities are among the worst of the leftist seminaries. They are neither Catholic nor universities.
Related: Defunding: The Most Effective Weapon in Our Arsenal?
Addendum (7/31): "Every day brings news of a new outrage . . . ." A bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Just this morning I learned that a dean at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell was fired for stating in an e-mail that "black lives matter, but also, everyone's life matters."
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