Conservatism is dead.
(Phony Burkeanmania has bitten the dust!)
It has been co-opted and hollowed out by the racists, misogynists, the anti-live-and-let livers, by sociopathic wealth, tech futurism and the congenitally corrupt.
It’s been a long game project, culminating in the current occupant of the White House, his antecedents dating back to Reagan and Thatcher, themselves birthed by the never-say-die opponents of FDR’s New Deal and the welfare state—Hayek’s Bastards, to borrow a phrase—a veritable Big Tent of proverbial Lost Causers.
Whatever name this mess of barbarism goes by, it’s not conservative, Big C or little c. That notion’s been trampled into a battered and broken corpse, irretrievable and irredeemable. Rest in pieces.
Modern conservatism, the Red Tory of yore, your, I don’t know, Dwight D. Eisenhowsers, Harold Macmillans, Bill Davises and Joe Clarks, goes by other names now. Liberal. Labour. Democrat. Moderate. Centrist. The Third Way. Anything to the political right of that is calamitous savagery. The dark soul of fascism where no light escapes.
This ideology has no notion of protecting the past, the past worth preserving—a core tenet of traditional conservatism. It seeks to create a past that never ever existed. A partial eclipse of the past where it was always sunny and no one had the temerity to challenge their authority. It erases troublesome aspects of the actual past that contest its vision and its pursuit of current and future gains.
As Canadians are experiencing, even the very recent past is tenuous and negotiable. A trade deal signed in 2020 by the very man currently sitting in the White House now deemed by him to be ancient history, as passing and inconsequential as a mayfly. There is no there back there, back then. Just a deep, dark void of grievance and perfidy. A signature forged with disappearing ink, and not the magic marker he’s taking to maps and atlases.
History adrift, anchorless. Meaningless and amorphous in its service to present exigencies. You can’t remember when there’s nothing to remember. Just making shit up as we go along and no time to lose. There’s a couple of oceans still waiting to be renamed.
They want us all to chase them down the rabbit hole of their distorted imaginarium. Then block up the entrance and tell us their warren is where we live now. The new reality. Just the way it is now. The way it’s always been. Nobody ever called it Lake Ontario, liar. It’s Lake America. Look it up on a map. Just google it.
They’ve cooked the brains of a disconcertingly significant percentage of our population and carved out an elite who profit wildly from the grand delusion. The High Priests of the neo-Lost Cause. Making bank on bunk.
We have a better chance of making a deal with the devil than we do with charlatans dependent on the wilful disregard of reality by millions of people. Their business case is contingent on the continued collective fantasy that their perspective is the only perspective, no grey zone, no in-betweens, no possibility that they could be mistaken.
How do you build a middle-ground on such unstable tectonic plates of bullshit? A dubious reality that goes up in smoke upon closer scrutiny. A no longer is and probably never was in the first place.
The short and easiest answer is, You don’t.
