Have conservatives moved dramatically to the right?

Tori D. writes from Kansas:

I have been reading your site for a few years now. I wanted to pass on a few encouraging comments to you. I have four children. Three of the four were homeschooled and the fourth started going to a public high school to play baseball last fall. Three of the four are teenagers. When I started reading your site a couple of years ago I would discuss your articles, information, and thoughts with them regularly, albeit on a casual basis. They thought I was being “mean,” or politically incorrect, or just plain wrong. I ran into this kind of thinking time and again, even in my leadership position within the TEA party. People thought some of the things I was mentioning about race, Muslims, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were way over the top.

These past six months I have witnessed a revolution among my friends, family, political acquaintances, and even in comments sections across various websites. People are loudly and boldly proclaiming the truths I have been reading here for years. The tone of e-mails, Facebook comments, and editorials has veered sharply to the right and/or strains of libertarianism. Your little light emanating from a small corner of the Internet seems to be reaching well beyond its limits. People say things in comment sections now that sound very similar to the information, comments, and articles you post here. Sometimes I just grin and shake my head in wonderment. My, how the world has changed this year! Who would have though Barack Obama had the power to return us to the visions of our Founding Fathers in theory, even though we do not yet know how to implement those visions into reality in the present day?

LA replies:

Thank you very much for your encouraging and kind words. Let’s hope you’re right. My concern is that the move to the right of which you speak mainly concerns opposition to liberalism on economic and taxation issues, not on the core of modern liberalism, namely non-discrimination, diversity, group equality, and radical personal autonomy, all leading to the steady undoing of the American nation and culture and to the increasing persecution of conservatives even as conservative show newfound determination and acquire new power. Let’s remember that during the very period you’re talking about, homosexual conduct has been accepted in the military. And this revolution happened with almost no opposition from the conservative movement and in many case with the active support of conservative publications.

As with all previous anti-discrimination measures from the 1964 Civil Rights Act onward, this step will inevitably mean not just non-discrimination toward homosexuals so that they will be treated the same as everyone else. It will mean the systematic privileging of homosexuals as a group and of homosexuality as an orientation. And it will certainly mean the prohibition of any criticism of homosexuality. Such a radical moral inversion, in which what had once been completely disapproved by society has become society’s honored and empowered norm, and what was once the unquestioned norm has been prohibited, hardly indicates a traditionalist conservative renaissance.

On racial issues, let us also remember that to today’s conservatives the word “immigration” almost exclusively illegal immigration. Legal immigration is not questioned or thought about at all, even as it is steadily turning us into a nonwhite country in which whites wil increasingly find themselves deprived of their familiar way of life and of their very identity as a people.

This is my concern, that the highly motivated and outspoken American conservatism we see taking shape around us is radically inadequate and even counterproductive, because even in the act of opposing the statist egalitarian aspect of liberalism, it signs on to the moral and cultural egalitarian aspect of liberalism, which will destroy our culture even as it leads to a new statism.

LA continues:

In “Where are we now?”, an entry posted March 22, 2010, the day after Obamacare passed, Tori had a remarkable comment about her and other people’s responses to the passage of the bill.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 23, 2011 12:17 PM | Send