Much of it comes down to tone

So many people are no longer interested in persuading, convincing, or even inviting to consider

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During the years of the Trump presidency, the go-to attempt to belittle and dismiss conservatives who objected to his ascendancy - “Never Trumpers,” if you must - consisted of the line, “Oh, do Bad Orange Man’s mean tweets give you a case of the vapors?” The caricature Trumpists put forth was one of effete little dweebs with impossibly delicate sensibilities who didn’t understand that the conservative worldview was in a fight for its survival.

What Trumpists didn’t understand was that, by their tacit endorsement of their idol’s sloppily arrived-at worldview and word-salad-and-insult means of expressing it, they’d given the Left a grand opportunity to portray the Right as a boneheaded and thoroughly unattractive approach to modern life. American society’s great middle, the swath of the populace that is at most only minimally engaged in monitoring public policy or even cultural developments, was ripe for this sales pitch.

It proved to be poor tactics and strategy. Trumpists, Neo-Trumpists and their enablers far outnumber actual conservatives among elected Republicans, but the majority that counts - a party in control of the elective branches of government - is Democratic.

The dismaying irony of it is that the Left is indeed fiercely determined to transform Western civilization into something grotesque, and has succeeded to an alarming degree. There is indeed a culture war raging. Societal sectors ranging from education to the corporate world to journalism to arts and entertainment are for all intents and purposes under the Left’s sway. Identity-politics militancy is unavoidable in every arena. The Left is also on the verge of realizing its redistributionist aims exponentially beyond its previous successes.

Here are a few recent tactics that haven’t worked in addressing this.

Kevin McCarthy reading Green Eggs and Ham on YouTube was such an obvious target for ridicule that some staffer should have dissuaded him from going through with it.

Because Tucker Carlson relishes being provocative - not least because it garners his television show great ratings - he went about a discussion of the effect of an increasing female presence in the US military in such a way that it was sure to invite backlash. Say what one will about top military brass taking time to preoccupy themselves with indignation about a TV personality’s remarks, it was never going to be more than a New York minute before examples of badass female military leaders, which are statistical inevitabilities, were cited. This did not go well for Carlson. It was also a setback for those who would like to see the question of this trend’s long-term implications seriously explored.

Ron Johnson minimizing the mayhem of January 6 by engaging in whataboutism predicated on last summer’s racially charged riots was an open invitation to charges of bigotry.

Belittling opinion outlets such as The Bulwark* and The Dispatch, as well as non-Trumpist Republican elected legislators such as Ben Sasse, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger is a dead-end road. These people and publications, contrary to the Neo-Trumpist argument, do understand the threat from the Left. Cheney in particular has been outspoken since the Biden administration got going about its damage to national sovereignty, American jobs and stewardship of the nation’s actually viable energy resources.

One often gets “Quit trying to engage anyone on the Left; they hate our guts” as a supposed final argument against non-Trumpist efforts at good-faith exchange.

It that’s the last word on the subject, there’s no alternative but a red-state/blue-state split, hopefully but not assuredly without civil war. In fact, some who have given up on interaction with anyone outside their ideological bubble have decided that this is the inevitable next step. A particular columnist has even written a series of novels based on this scenario.

Have these people really thought this through? Would a red-state nation-state resulting from such a schism look anything like a Madisonian republic led by people who had thought deeply about preserving that which was worthwhile about an intact United States? Would it reflect the contributions to Western thought from Pericles, Locke, Montesquieu, Burke, Oakeshott and Buckley? Based on the preferred methods of those who instigated and carried out the insurrection on the Capitol on January 6 - including the person who was president at the time - and the pass given them by writers and politicians of their general mien - it seems more likely that it would be characterized by a tolerance as tightly circumscribed as what the blue-state nation-state would be setting up. After all, the January 6 mob was ready to hang Mike Pence. It would almost certainly look to particular people and not ideas and principles to shape it. Regard for character, depth and humanity would not be the main driver of finding and elevating such people.

There’s really no substitute, then, for making the case for real conservatism to the American public broadly speaking.

This doesn’t mean watering down or concealing any aspect of the conservative vision, and it certainly doesn’t mean casting any of it overboard to win progressive favor. What it does mean is that the vision must be articulated in such a way that it’s going to have a sufficient degree of appeal to the great American middle - and there is indeed a middle, where one finds leaners to both the left and the right who are nonetheless open to considering fresh perspectives - to move the needle.

The case to be made includes such principles as that that which is truly fair is that which is biased toward freedom, that human nature, human anatomy and the design of life and the universe have not changed over the aeons, and that dignity, nobility, decency and clarity are virtues to be cultivated (and, conversely, that nastiness and situational reaction to what life presents are most certainly not virtues).

Real conservatism’s ultimate selling point is that it’s universally applicable. It can be implemented with success anywhere. A worldview that puts “America First” front and center is by definition not universally applicable.

What conservatism offers is an answer to the question of how human happiness and flourishing can be maximized among a necessarily interconnected species. At least within the boundaries of a nation-state, people have to find a way to live together, and they feel safer, more productive, and inspired to improve their lot when their society is not precariously brittle.

Confidence that ours is a winning message is a must. That message speaks of the only road that actually leads somewhere.

*As I’ve written elsewhere, The Bulwark occasionally gets wobbly, not in the sense of exhibiting signs of Trumpism, certainly, but in a flirtation with decidedly un-conservative notions spawned left of the center line.