California used to be the land of Ronald Reagan, the state’s pro-life, pro-school-prayer, small-government, two-term chief executive. Today, many Republicans pin their gubernatorial hopes on Bruce Jenner, a man who thinks he’s a woman, calls himself Caitlyn, and who advocates amnesty for illegal aliens. Yet both Reagan and Jenner are branded “conservative.”
What’s wrong with this picture?
Attorney and pastor Scott Lively has some idea: “‘Conservatism,’” he writes, “has always been a losers[’] game for those who forget what it is we’re supposed to be ‘conserving.’”
In a Monday piece at WND.com, Lively says that “slippery slope” arguments have become moot because all the worst that traditionalists predicted has come to pass. In fact, the MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status or “transgender”) agenda, he states, reflects the reaching of this moral-death-spiral nadir. And that Jenner, the famed male Olympian-turned-reality star-turned-wannabe woman, could be the GOP’s Golden State golden boy indicates that Republicans are drinking more deeply of the goblet of Gomorrah.
Lively then relates a bit of the history of decline:
At the top of the slope in the 1950s we conservatives correctly predicted that normalizing porn and making comedies about marital cheating was a slippery slope that would break up marriages. In the 1960s, we correctly predicted that legalizing contraception on demand and promoting “free love” philosophies would turn the children of those newly broken homes into self-centered and self-destructive hedonists. When that hedonism led to abortion on demand and “no-fault” divorce in the 1970s we called it a slippery slope to social and fiscal chaos. When the left wing pulled out all the stops to undermine the Reagan Revolution’s efforts to restore normalcy in the 1980s, we predicted that the country would collapse into socialism and the loss of our family-centered society if they won. Then they won.
By the 1990s the slippery slope of moral and ethical decay had spread to the Republican Party, and the “establishment” RINOs had moved so far to the left that JFK’s legacy became conservative by comparison. We conservatives now had to fight the elites of both parties in warning that normalizing homosexuality for adults would be a slippery slope to the recruitment of our children in that lifestyle. By 2015, that battle was fully lost: “Gay marriage” was “legalized” by the Supreme Court, and a vast percentage of American school children had been fully brainwashed in Marxist ideology and “sexual freedom.” Lesbianism among teen girls was the most popular social fad of the decade, and increasing numbers of boys started wearing girlish clothing and defending “gayness.”
Lively then notes how rapidly our social “norms” — if you can thus label provisional standards that change with the wind — are transforming. It was not even a decade ago, he laments, that the acceptance of the MUSS agenda was a point on the slippery slope about which we could warn.
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Lively does, however, get the top and bottom wrong. He may, of course, be engaging in hyperbole in locating 2021 America at the slope’s base. But we can still decay much from our current point (Weimar Republic Germans perhaps thought “things can’t get any worse” — then they got Hitler).
Moreover, while I’m quite the fan of the 1950s, it was already a time when moral degradation was apparent. Without getting into the weeds too much, I’ll note that some trace our problems back hundreds of years to the “Enlightenment,” while Pope Benedict XVI believes the West’s high water mark was the late Middle Ages. And, of course, there was already obvious and increasing moral laxity in the “Roaring ‘20s.”
Yet Lively really gets lively, intellectually, in his sixth paragraph, which is worth reading twice:
“Conservatism” has always been a losers[’] game for those who forget what it is we’re supposed to be “conserving.” These “loser-conservatives” think their job is just to conserve the “status quo,” whatever that might be at the moment, and as the status quo gets more liberal, so do they. They’re the conservative movement’s version of useful idiots, always moving leftward at the same rate of speed as the liberals, just ten paces behind. They’re actually more idiotic than the liberal’s useful idiots, who at least get the joy of winning each new battle as it gets fought, while the “loser-conservatives” never stop eating their dust while they adjust themselves to each new loss — perpetually. Look at how many “conservative” opponents of transgenderism now defend homosexuality, just as many opponents of homosexuality in the ‘90s defended sex outside of marriage. It’s a whole other kind of crazy, to be frank, but we’ll leave it at that.
I’ve at times called such people “connedservatives.” But, my, Lively is singing my tune, as I’ve been warning for years about how conservatism is the caboose to liberalism’s locomotive of libertine change. Yet the problem is not, as most suppose, that we need the “right definition of conservatism.” The problem is with conservatism itself.
Both it and liberalism are not ideologies, but processes. Consequently, the actual positions represented by “liberalism” and “conservatism” vary greatly from time to time and place to place because there is only one consistent definition for each term:
- Liberalism is the process of ever trying to change the status quo.
- Conservatism is the process of ever trying to preserve it.
This has led to a liberal-conservative cycle of decay, which philosopher G.K. Chesterton profoundly warned of almost a century ago, writing:
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. …Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob.
Speaking of blunders, this liberal-conservative model is itself so much status quo that most people can’t think beyond it. Many behave as if you could only be on one side or the other, or maybe a libertarian. They may wonder, “How else would we define things?”
Well, how were matters defined prior to the political terms’ origination and prominence (which are modern phenomena)?
Answer: Truth vs. lies.
Some would call this orthodoxy vs. heterodoxy (and some at one time branded the latter, dare I say it, “heresy”). Whatever you call it, though, it’s the only sane way of viewing the world — and arranging society.
The alternative is what we have now, a situation wherein decisions impacting civilization as a whole are made based on the “range of acceptable political discourse,” which ever changes and reflects man’s preferences as opposed to unchanging principles. We’re now using, as Greek philosopher Protagoras put it, man as “the measure of all things.”
If you want to know where this leads, just look around — and down that slippery slope. It leads to madness.
