In “The Origins of Cuckservatism: The Slow Retreat, The Benedict Option and “Exit””, Brett Stevens writes:
What went wrong with conservatism? It has opposed the Left for centuries and yet been defeated to the point where, before the rise of Donald Trump at least, all visible conservative politicians endorsed Leftist ideas and all the “extremists” wanted Left-hybrids of a more totalitarian sort.
The term “cuckservative” irked the political establishment because it revealed how conservatives have compromised the ability to be anything but captive opposition doomed by changing demographic trends. With soft genocide, or demographic replacement, the option for anything but flavors of populist Leftist leaves the building.
As Occam’s Razor would point out, the most direct explanation is that conservatism shares an origin with liberalism. I identify this problem as individualism, or thinking in terms of the individual only and not as part of a larger organic structure. Conservative individualism consists of the idea that the individual doing right (and “working hard”) somehow makes society work out okay.
From this notion comes the conservative concept of retreat. That is, society itself is a dead loss because — as we all know, if we search our intuition — groups of humans turn toward delusion…
Stevens then elucidates some thought-provoking routes through which we might wriggle out of the mess:
… I propose a new idea, parallelism, which includes the notion that civilizations are organic wholes and therefore, must find a way to synchronize different platforms like religion, race, culture, capitalism and leadership around a central set of values. This originates in culture, but must have some aspect of the transcendental to it, or it equates the symbolic with the literal in the way of Leftism and signaling replaces understanding.
We live in exciting times. Liberalism/Leftism — they are degrees of the same thing — has won because “the right side of history” is always with inertia, which among human beings is the illusion of equality. However, because it has succeeded, it now has no victimhood strategy except of course wiping out non-conformists. But without a big enough scapegoat, it cannot explain its failures.
And so as the West settles into a disaster created by democracy and consumerism and other forms of egalitarian mob rule, Leftist ends its arc yet again. (Like all evil, or illusions, it is reborn anew every time someone needs a scapegoat to blame for their own failure).
With Leftism ending its arc, we have both a need and an opportunity to re-create our civilization in a way that does not fail. I suggest conservatism as principle, which is distinct from conservatism as an organize group (Republicans) or individualistic notion (Libertarianism). This idea instead suggests treating society as an organic whole and fixing it instead of retreating from the disaster and hoping enough of us survive to say “I told you so” among the smoking ruins.
With this, our civilization quest comes full circle: we are facing the same task we did before civilization was created, which is to come up with a way to live together. Egalitarianism does not work, and retreating from egalitarianism to let it destroy society also does not work. The four ideas suggested in parallel — nationalism, aristocracy, capitalism and transcendental goals — do, and if we refuse them, we are choosing retreat and doom.
