Editorial - The Revival of Muscular Conservatism
by Wayne Lutz
August 30, 2002
The "heyday of muscular conservatism" is how Mona Charen described the 1980's, "when the Cold War still offered the contrast between left-wing totalitarianism and the free world." But here in the post-Cold War 21st century our enemies are more nebulous, and the wall between good and evil has been steadily eroded by the nihilism of the Modern Left.
We live in a time when the very concepts of right and wrong are considered relative to the beholder. It's a time when a not-insignificant portion of the American public has succumbed to the multiculturalist mantra of the liberal intellectual elite, to the point where they are unwilling even to admit to a moral distinction between those who would kill us and our right to self-defense. It stands to reason that if enough people, in and out of government, were to be successfully propagandized by liberal guilt, then our nation and our way of life would be in grave danger. When we as individuals and as a people become so meekly unsure of our own noble history and of our sense of the good and right and honorable that we respond to aggression with self-flagellation, then we are lost - it remains only for one of the forces that hate us to administer a killing blow.
In that sense at the very least, modern American Liberalism is a destructive force. It is not an opinion to be respected or a viewpoint to be given a fair hearing, rather it is part and parcel of the same ideolgy that led to the most repressive and murderous of totalitarian regimes - regimes that were responsible millions upon millions of murders and for untold human suffering in the last century. Personally, I'm against human suffering and mass-murder.
It's been one year since the cowardly sneak attacks on the United States, you don't need us to tell you. For a brief and shining moment a year ago, it seemed as though the horriffic fact of the existence of true evil staring America in the face would, once and for good, relegate Liberal hate-America-firstism to the shadows - would condemn "progressive" thought to imprisonment in the damp, shadowy halls of academia where it belongs, and where its Marxist proponents would be more likely to find a sympathetic, hair-sprouting ear.
But that was not to be. Instead, the Liberal Estate came roaring back to life in record time - complete with inexplicable condemnaton of America's failure to be prepared, America's intent to prepare for the future, and all that goes between.
Liberalism cannot be reasoned or compromised with. Liberalism is not to be understood, studied, tolerated, or afforded equal time. Liberalsim is the enemy of the principles and traditions upon which our nation was built and Liberalism must be destroyed - utterly. It must be denied, discredited, rebuffed, renounced, ridiculed and, finally, tossed, battered and torn and without a backward glance, onto history's ash heap of failed ideologies, to borrow a phrase.
The instrument of the destruction of Liberalism will, of course, be Conservatism. Conservativism and Liberalism are as compatible as matter and anti-matter, which is why there can be no such thing as compromise with a Liberal - one ideology or the other must win out. In the war of ideas, there can be no draw, only victory or defeat.
As in any war, the war of ideas needs foot soldiers to fight its battles. The large institutions - the think-tanks, talk radio, the foundations and the (precious few) conservative media supply the big guns, but the war will ultimately be won in the trenches by brave but otherwise "ordinary" men and women - people with heart, people with guts - decent people who possess the courage to live what they believe.
If 60 years or so of exposure to Modern Liberalism has taught us anything, it's that even the best-equipped army cannot win a war if the soldiers lack the will to fight. So it is with the conservative foot soldier in the war of ideas. Conservatism needs strong, confident voices to put the lie to Liberal propaganda. It needs men and women who understand the concepts of character, decency, and integrity, and who have the courage, not merely to state their convictions, but to fill their lungs and shout them from the rooftops.
As has proven true for every 'ism' that is based on a lie, I believe Liberalism cannot survive as a viable cultural or political force indefinitely - so long as it is forced to compete with truth. Conservatives need to stop cowering in response to Liberal claims to the moral high-road and expose every Liberal justification for the fraud that it is. They need to seize every opportunity to loudly denounce Liberalism as antithetical to American ideals and to drive it, exposed and disgraced, from the public square.
We need a revival of the muscular conservativism of the '80s. The Muscular Conservative will, when faced with "progressive" baloney, square his shoulders, rise up to his full height and forcefully denounce and expose the Liberal Lie - and send the cultural reprobates scurrying back to cower in their dank, dismal, ivy-choked burrows.
©2002 The Tocquevillian Magazine