The Original Sin
The original sin of modern conservatism is that it never came to terms with the reality of the Left’s race delusions. Last century, Progressives concluded that the obvious racial disparities in the world were solely due to racism, specifically the racism of whites toward the world’s non-whites. Everything that defines the American Left now is based on this assumption. This a lie, not a sin. The sin was that the American Right, or at least those who came to define the Right, never honestly challenged this claim.
Instead, Buckley-style conservatives accepted this two-part assumption about the world and tried to fit their ideas within it. This was mostly expedience. By going along with the Left’s egalitarianism, they could have a place at the table. With the Civil Rights Movement, the Left claimed the moral high ground on the matter of race. Confronting them on the reality of race would have required courage the conservatives did not possess, so they chose to make an accommodation with the Left. Cowardice became a feature of the Right.
This mistake has haunted Buckleyites for fifty years, because there is no way to fit conservative ideas about society and culture with what amounts to race delusion. The fact that race is real, ethnicity is real and human diversity is immutable, means differences between the races are eternal. Worse yet, by casting the issue in moral terms, opposition to the Progressive race program was by definition immoral. After all, if racial differences can only be due to white racism, any white resistance to reform must be racism.
There was always another problem with Progressive race delusion. Eventually, the Left would run out of ways to address the immutable racial differences. That means they would run out of possible explanations, leaving them with just one conclusion. That is, racism is what defines white people, so the only way to achieve social equality is to get rid of white people entirely. This is why the media is full of over-the-top anti-white rhetoric. The Left is now entirely defined by a visceral hatred of white people.
This leaves conventional conservatism with nowhere to run. When the Left howls about white privilege, the white guys of Conservative Inc. have no response, since they cannot get away from the fact that most of them are white. Then they have the neocons, the shape-shifters of American politics, who will be white and non-white depending upon how they want to play an issue. The result is that any resistance of the Left is automatically a white guy thing and therefore immoral. The prevailing morality is now explicitly anti-white.
As their ranks dwindle, the Buckleyites seem to have some sense they are now in a blind alley, but they are baffled as to why. Super-cuck David French thinks conservatives should try to out-hustle the race hustlers. Roger Clegg would like to hide under his bed until the issue goes away. That is the default position of conservatives on most things now. The swarthy cohort of the Buckleyites thinks the way forward is to bore everyone to death on the issue and this guy has decided to hold his breath or something.
The conservative position on the Left’s anti-white turn is a combination of pleading, groveling and wishful thinking. The reason is they cannot do anything else as long as they accept the Left’s egalitarianism and blank slate assumptions. If all the problems of the world are due to white racism, and all other efforts failed, it is only logical and moral to get rid of white people, or at least make them sub-citizens. If the problems persist, then killing off the whites is not just the right thing to do, it is the only thing that can be done.
Buckley conservatives have written often about the original sin of race, but the real original sin was their unwillingness to confront Progressives on their racial delusions. Whatever American Progressivism was in another age, in this age, for more than half a century, it has been a cult based on the belief that whites are the root of all evil. It is a toxic religion that makes Bolshevism look optimistic by comparison. There was never any reason to accommodate it, other than expediency and greed. Now it is the ruling ethos of our age.
The opposite of race delusion is not a different form of race delusion. That is the problem with colorblind society argument. There can be no such thing as a colorblind society as long as humans populate society. Man is tribal and hierarchical. These are defining features of our species. To think otherwise is at odds with biological reality. The dream of the colorblind society we hear from civic nationalists is just as nutty as the Left’s delusions about racial justice. Egalitarianism is not simply wrong, but it is also toxic and perverse.
The foundation stone of western conservatism is the unblinking acceptance of the human condition, without reservation. The point of society was to mitigate those aspects of the human condition that interfere with a peaceful and prosperous existence. The original sin of the Buckleyites is they agreed to abandon that core understanding. The result is a movement composed of hollow men, inexorably shuffling toward their demise, as they plead for a second chance. Sin pays its wages in death, but reality is eternal.
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