Mainstream conservatism is arguably even more destructive to America than neo-Marxism. Judged by its fruits, it can be inferred that conservatism exists to subvert and control the political will of right-thinking people, setting them on a path of compromise and failure over the long term. Conservatism is akin to a Buddhist concept, the "near enemy" of enlightenment. The near enemy is something that appears to be the sought-after goal, but it is not true. Clinging to another person, for instance, is a near enemy of true love because it feels similar to love and satisfies the immediate sense of longing. However, clinging is more harmful than a lack of love because the person who clings to another settles for something vastly inferior to love. If neo-Marxism is the far enemy of authentic nationalism, then conservatism is the near enemy of it. It is hard to tell which is worse. As people of the right, the left is our adversary, to be sure, but conservatism betrays from within. Conservatism is a traitor.

In the controlled dialectic of America's postwar political discourse, the antithesis of neo-Marxism has been conservatism. Early conservatism defined itself by its opposition to Soviet communism. Soviet communism was evil and destructive and deserved to be resisted, but a political movement united only by opposition to the Soviet state made for strange bedfellows. Traditional conservatives opposed communism on religious and moral grounds, libertarians and fiscal conservatives opposed communist economics, and neoconservatives opposed Soviet expansionism. Some early neoconservatives also opposed the statism of Josef Stalin because they preferred the permanent revolution of Leon Trotsky.

This disparate alliance of conservatives, libertarians, and neoconservatives have struggled to present a consistently united front against the left's diverse array of policy offensives. Libertarians and neoconservatives, for instance, tend to be indifferent or even hostile to the moral and cultural concerns of traditional conservatives. Meanwhile, traditional conservatives often oppose doctrinaire libertarian economics[1], and neoconservative interest in economic freedom is limited to its ability to fund a massive warfare state. Traditional conservatives often have submitted to neoconservative warmongering for peculiar millenarian reasons of their own[2], and most libertarians openly oppose it. Similar examples abound of the right's contradictory motivations and ethical commitments. It is little wonder, then, that the internally divided postwar American right has lost so many policy battles with the left.

The right's long track record of compromise with the left validates the observation that conservatism is merely liberalism from fifteen years ago. Conservatives have lost almost every major public policy fight of any significance in the postwar era: border security, immigration, pornography, public obscenity, gay marriage, no fault divorce, abortion, socialized medicine, welfare, deficit spending, federal bureaucracy, taxes, overregulation, term limits, voting rights, states' rights, compulsory desegregation, affirmative action, inner city crime, traditional school curricula, public sector unionization, drug laws, and the failure to achieve military victory in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. If the left beats the dead horse of America's traditional culture and values any more, it may turn into glue.

The ineffectiveness of the postwar right has made their ideas irrelevant to future generations of political and intellectual leaders. Millions of students learn about Karl Marx's failed ideas every year, yet the morally superior thinkers of the postwar right, great minds like Russell Kirk and Eric Voegelin, are largely forgotten outside of historians of political theory and conservative nostalgia. The future of conservatism is even bleaker than most conservatives realize, due to the left's near-complete dominance of academia. The left cranks out class after class of political thinkers and apparatchiks, and the few conservatives who survive college intact have proven unable to make any meaningful difference. Part of the problem is that the purest conservative ideas are insulated from actual policymaking. They must pass through a filter of academics, think tanks, media, and finally politicians before they are put into practice. The people who constitute these filters blunt conservatism's best impulses and even overshadow their intellectual betters upstream.

For instance, William F. Buckley was arguably the most important thought leader among postwar conservatives. He cofounded National Review in 1955, and it quickly rose to become the postwar right's journal of record. Buckley enjoyed close relationships with practically every major Republican politician and media figure for decades. Early editions of National Review included a diversity of voices from the right, pioneering the conservative fusionism that would peak during the Reagan administration. Its first generation of writers included libertarians, religious traditionalists, and hardline conservatives. However, National Review frequently broke the "Reagan rule" and punched right with reckless abandon, purportedly to gain respectability for conservative ideas.

The magazine venomously denounced the anticommunist patriots of the John Birch Society, who eventually were vindicated by the declassified Venona papers, which proved that there were indeed secret communists throughout American academia, government, and media. The once-strong Birchers never recovered from their exile. Buckley also campaigned hard against George Wallace, who was the most conservative candidate in his presidential races and won five states as a third-party candidate in 1968. Over time, National Review would purge all of its most principled writers for failing to toe the moderate line on any issue too controversial for Buckley's Beltway conservative sensibilities. In the process, the magazine sidelined important thinkers, such as Murray Rothbard and Joe Sobran. Eventually, Buckley himself would be kicked upstairs at his own magazine when he came out against the Iraq War. He learned too late that the international intelligence agencies who dictate America's foreign policy are amoral fools.

Buckley's great sin against conservatism was written into the mission statement of National Review. In his own words: "[the magazine] stands athwart history, yelling Stop!" Buckley and National Review were so profoundly influential on the right that these words became the de facto mission statement of the movement as a whole. Buckley's neutered definition of conservatism had an impact both vast and tragic. A closer inspection of the meaning of his words reveals that conservatism's failure was inevitable from the beginning. By "history," Buckley implied more than just what gets recorded in the history books. History here means the realized will of a people to achieve its destiny. In this way, Buckley typecast conservatism as an eternal loser, roadkill under the march of liberal history. Buckley's conservatism always will bow to the left in the end, just as our Republican politicians do today. We on the right are merely the noble opposition, here to moderate the most extreme excesses of the left.

Ceding this ground to the left allows our enemies to choose the battlefield and the rules of engagement. It is little wonder, then, that the postwar right has racked up loss after loss in public policy. This conservatism does not stand for anything in positive terms, so how can it achieve victory? Conservatism cannot even define what victory is without reference to the left because it has no vision for what the world ought to look like. The right only wants the world not to look like whatever happens to be the present leftist vision. In this sense, the left is correct to label the right as reactionary.

Reactionary politics are not compelling. They have created the oppositional and inherently negative political discourse that everyone complains about today. The right therefore relies on distastefully negative campaign ads. Everyone who works in politics secretly knows that negative ads are the most effective by far. But the right's oppositionalism and negativity are sufficient only to get a candidate through the next election cycle. They cannot inspire a truly victorious movement. People need leaders who believe in something, who have a positive vision. The fortunes of conservative politicians are determined instead by their talent for complaining about the left.

Conservatism can and should be replaced by a new system of thought, a positive new vision for America's spiritual destiny. Under the weight of Buckley's yoke, it is surprising that the right has had any electoral success at all. Its meager successes reveal its true purpose: placating voters on the right with tolerably frequent electoral victories. The fact that crippled conservatism continues to limp forward with any support at all is due only to the fact that half of the population is predisposed to right-leaning values, regardless of such pitiful leadership. Conservative and liberal predispositions are hardwired into the brain and the personality to a significant extent[3], creating a natural constituency for both sides to draw from.

If the right were to be offered an alternative to impotent conservatism, it would form a much more powerful movement. That vein of power is what our new nationalism will tap into. Such a movement could do untold good for America and improve life significantly for all people. Imagine what the right could be if it harnessed the power of its natural constituency. From this vantage point, Buckley's conservatism becomes a detestable lie. It mollifies and controls the natural constituency of the right and prevents it from achieving its historical destiny, its spiritual birthright.

Buckley may have been an honest actor, and he may have been controlled opposition, but he likely fell somewhere in between. If he was put in place and promoted to serve as controlled opposition, he would have acted no differently. Controlled opposition is a feature of all democracies, and conservatism's doomed fate demonstrates that our political discourse is controlled. The real question is who controls it. It is difficult to prove definitively that small groups of people control public policy, but the hypothesis has considerable explanatory power and makes sense of otherwise contradictory political realities.

When Buckley began work on God and Man at Yale, the book that launched his career, he also participated in the initiatory rituals of Yale's Skull and Bones society. Skull and Bones is shrouded in mystery and disinformation, as are all secret societies, but it is a matter of public record that it was founded by the Russell family and other British-aligned families of the American Northeast who trafficked narcotics during the Opium Wars in China[4] and were funded by the British crown[5]. Other "bonesmen" have included Buckley's close friend Henry Luce, the founder of the magazines Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, and George H.W. Bush, who would become director of the CIA before "serving" as president, as well as president George W. Bush and his alleged adversary, senator and climate czar John Kerry. These men always refuse to answer questions about their membership in the group, and they have quite a lot else in common. Like the Bushes, Buckley's family had a background in the oil industry, long the handmaid of international intelligence, and many bonesman families are aligned with the financial industry. If there ever was a group of wealthy elites with untold power and something to hide, such men would be among them.

Next: The Modern American Political Synthesis

[1]  Mark Henrie, Understanding Traditional Conservatism, 2005

[2] Ronald Stockton, Christian Zionism: Prophecy and Public Opinion, Middle East Journal, 1987

[3] Jacob Hirsh et al, Compassionate Liberals and Polite Conservatives, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2010

[4] Eustace Mullins, The World Order, 1984

[5] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966