Adversarial opposition

When there is only one part to an argument, both sides suffer.

Khuman Khamba Wrestling With His Opponent, Courtesy of Wikimedia

Eugyppius makes a good (if rather depressing) point about the “Failure of Conservatives to Mount Effective Opposition”. The point of the piece is, roughly, that we have witnessed one after another of ridiculous policy enactments (primarily by the far left) that the opposition has been utterly unable to mitigate. At some level, it appears that Conservatives have been beaten down to such an extent that there is no longer an active adversarial system of politics … and this is a danger to all of us.

Some choice quotes:

• “I’ve tried not to make right-wing politics a focus of this blog, mostly because I’m not even sure what it means to be on the right, in a world where there’s no operative political identity beyond establishment leftism…Nor do I consider myself in any real sense a conservative.”

• “… the complicity of conservative politicians in enacting lunatic leftist policy prescriptions is a very deep problem, and one that characterises politics not just in Germany but across the West.”

• “In a rightly ordered society, the conservative would find himself among the elite or its most enthusiastic supporters…The primary source of innovation and criticism in traditionalist social structures would come from the non-conformist, anti-establishment element … those people we call leftists today. The problem is that we live in an inverted order.

• “… This ‘three-fold own goal – to fail to advocate for your own position, to make yourself responsible for it nevertheless, and to vilify it on top of that’ is central to a broader cultural process…”

• “… What we’re really seeing, I think, is the inevitable degeneration of liberal norms and ideals, as they are replaced one after the other by leftist simulacra that present themselves as the perfected form of liberalism….”

Full Article: On the Failure of Conservatives to Mount Effective Opposition to the Most Insane Policies Ever Visited Upon Mankind, May 19, 2022.