Being a smug conservative is much like being a smug Carthaginian. Both are able to watch all there once was being ground into dust, while smiling at their own virtue.
The author, Porter, goes on to observe,
The left wants the West in ruin and its daughters in infantry tents. The mainstream right wants a comfortable seat to watch the show. Thus it’s not difficult to understand why both factions feel intense enmity for those few manning the ramparts.
I myself used to despair of the right-wing intellectual types who had no fight in them, but just wanted a space to prove their own cultural and intellectual superiority over the leftist vulgarians. It was a kind of smugly self-satisfied armchair politics, unserious really.
So it's been a joy to watch the emergence of a livelier and more combative right-wing movement, one that has even notched up a few victories.
There were even fewer on the ramparts 10 years ago, far fewer. The momentum is with the defenders now, rather than the watchers.
ReplyDeleteVirtue Signalling: This is where it gets you kids!!!
http://i.imgur.com/tZanfFn.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/LYSWBPy.jpg
Those are good links, thanks. I didn't use the term virtue signalling in the post, as it's usually used to criticise an aspect of left-wing politics, but it probably fits the "smug conservatives" as well - their focus is on signalling their superior virtue to leftist radicals rather than defending their own tradition.
DeleteRecent successes are a sign of life which we suspected (hoped) was there but fending off an aggressive liberalism is ultimately fruitless. We must eventually turn the tables and hunt down the opposition, socially and politically speaking, or submit to abandoning the social and even the literal terrain. Islam has added a special visceral element to the current conditions.
ReplyDeleteDefenders and sympathetic watchers are good but without offense no victory is possible.
Yes, not everyone has to be an activist (though more would be great), but it's the attitude of smugly watching the decline whilst signalling your virtue over the leftists that is part of an older failed right.
DeleteOne thing Trump does well is to go on the offensive. He ended up owning the "fake news" ploy that the left was going to use against him - he used it against the liberal media instead.
That is a technique from marshal arts - take the energy of your opponent and turn it against them. It is Putin's strategy and Trump has picked up on it and used it effectively.
DeleteThe majority of "conservatives" who sit smugly whilst watching the on going destruction of civilisation do so because they are not conservatives. Conservatives by nature are motivated, vigilant warriors who instinctively understand that traditions have to be actively enforced and guarded against human nature itself which is always more easily seduced by pleasure than by temperance.
ReplyDeleteThose who don't understand that and who want to sit quietly are liberals who are looking for an easy life and are unmotivated to defend their traditions because they don't actually believe them.