Not only have conservatives lost all the battles but it seems they’ve lost the war.

Conservatism: Its Meaning and Prospects

by James Kalb

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Not only have conservatives lost all the battles but it seems they’ve lost the war. After the Supreme Court declaration that opponents of “gay marriage” are enemies of the human race, and Obamacare, with its all but universal mandate to provide contraceptives and abortifacients, and given the principle of inclusiveness combined with that of everlasting mass immigration from everywhere, there is very little room left in America for any recognition of the roots of social order in nature, transcendent principle, or particular history and culture.

Appearances are deceiving, however, since the triumph of technocratic liberalism means its destruction. It is based on a defective understanding of knowledge and the world that eventually destroys common sense and good judgment. It depends on popular acquiescence, and secures it by promises it will not be able to keep. Most basically, perhaps, it needs its ideals, since it depends on loyal and somewhat dedicated ruling elites, and the ideal of equal freedom that inspires them will grow steadily less believable as the years go by and the system becomes less free and more divided by class, with the top tier ever more dominant and the people at the bottom ever worse off. Nor is a coherent and public-spirited elite likely to survive in a diverse multicultural society in which there’s ever less social trust and more and more of the elite’s members view themselves as entitled recipients rather than disinterested providers of social protections and benefits.

The predictable result of such trends is a radically cosmopolitan and therefore deeply fragmented society that lacks a common faith and with it any basis for free cooperative public life. In such a society public reason and the technocratic project cannot continue, so the basis of rule is likely to become some combination of dynasticism, cronyism, deceit, bribery, and force. The outlook for liberalism is therefore no better than that for conservatism.

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