Once again I find myself reading far, far too many books – though at a greatly reduced speed, for various reasons – and once again, one of those books is thought-provoking enough to prompt a deeper look.

While this is not intended as a book review, I do think that Kurt Schlichter’s 2014 book is worth reading through. It is basically a sort of “future history” – think of the kind of novel that World War Z was – that is written from the perspective of someone living in 2041 and looking back at how America became a conservative, right-wing nation again.

It was written a few years before His Most August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus, came to power, and as such, many of its core ideas and notions are wildly off base. But it provides an interesting insight into the ways that conservatives think – and why they have doomed themselves into utter irrelevance.

I am well aware that these are strong words. They will alienate a number of my readers, who consider themselves conservatives. I understand exactly why. Those of us on the Right have strong small-c conservative impulses. We generally believe strongly in tradition, faith and culture. We distrust and dislike rapid and profound change and prefer to heed the hard and known lessons of the past instead of trusting in ephemeral promises of a bright and glittering future.

The Right these days is fundamentally conservative in nature and in origin. But conservatives themselves have gotten very nearly everything wrong over the past 50 years, because “conservatism” is not an ideology and has no strong roots, and is therefore easily shaken.

These, again, are strong words, but they are not my own. Some might recognise that it was the great conservative intellectual, Russell Kirk, who stated that conservatism is not an ideology but is instead a set of core principles – he enumerated the ten that he considered to be the most important, and prefaced his essay on the subject by stating quite plainly that conservatism is neither a religion nor an ideology.

There is no set of core doctrine for conservatives to embrace, and as such, there is no hill for them to die on.

In case you are wondering why I refer to conservatives in the third person, despite the very Hard Right tone of my writing across my over two-thousand-post, over 6.5-year writing oeuvre, the reason for this is very simple.

I used to call myself a libertarian, or a paleolibertarian, or even at some points a classical liberal. I strongly agreed with the basic principles of conservatism. But over time I realised that conservatism simply wasn’t working. It wasn’t conserving anything much – either in the USA or anywhere else.

And as such, I do not call myself a conservative, and never really have, even though I have often referred to myself as being of a very conservative mindset. I am not a conservative because conservatism is an oxymoron – it does not and has not and will not conserve a whole lot.

In the US, conservatives have conserved the right to keep and arm bears bear arms. (Though, you have to admit, the right to keep and arm bears would be an extremely funny, and awesome, Constitutional right. Ain’t NOBODY from no punk-ass Mexican cartel gonna f*** with a country where they keep trained attack bears in their front yards.) It can easily be argued, however, that this is simply because of the sheer weight of numbers; the assault on the Second Amendment began well after the nation was already armed to the teeth, and as such is much, much harder to overturn than many of the other rights specified in the Constitution.

But, beyond this, what, exactly, have conservatives conserved?

The answer is: not a whole lot of anything.

And the reason for this is because conservatism is not tied to anything concrete, but is instead a set of principles that are ephemeral and quite wishy-washy.

Nationalism, on the other hand, is tied to something very real, very concrete. The etymology of the word “nation” is literally natio, meaning (according to some translations) “birth”. The nation is tied to the people and to their blood. Any philosophy of governance and organisation of society that fails to recognise the very real and irreducible differences that separate us, will always fail.

Conservatism fails to recognise these differences. Nowhere in Kirk’s ten principles is the idea of nation clearly explicated; at best, there are references to “voluntary community”, but that is not the same thing.

It is this central failure to hold onto anything real that makes Mr. Schlichter’s book read like an unintentionally hilarious fantasy.

The basic premise is pretty simple. The abomination that was Obamacare makes the conservative bedrock of the country hopping mad. The Tea Party explodes all across the nation, but is quickly subsumed by the Republican elites. Conservative insurgents start to realise that they need to take back the culture in order to take back power, and start spontaneously organising and recalibrating their strategies. Over the course of the next thirty years, conservatives start fighting back by penetrating every aspect of the Leftist establishment, using all forms of technology at their disposal, and forcing the elections and appointments of politicians and judges at the local, state, and eventually Federal levels who all believe in strict adherence to the written word of the Constitution.

It is all utterly laughable.

Why?

Because the Constitution is irrelevant, these days.

And if that doesn’t dump a hundredweight of wasabi straight into the shorts of every conservative who reads this, nothing will.

Gentlemen, let me be perfectly clear about my views with respect to the Constitution.

As I have written for years, I believe that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are the most brilliantly articulated and well-informed explications of governing principles ever conceived by human intelligence. The magnificent, soaring rhetoric of the Declaration found its concrete realisation in the Constitution, a flawed and imperfect but nonetheless ingenious document that tried very hard to make that rhetoric practical and useful.

I believe that the Constitution is the single greatest document of political governance and jurisprudence ever devised by human intelligence.

I believe that the Constitution means exactly what it says, right there on the paper. I believe in strict Constitutional fidelity. I believe that not a single word of the Bill of Rights is open to interpretation, ever, by anyone. I believe that the First and Second Amendments, especially, mean exactly what their authors intended them to mean, and those intentions are perfectly transparent to anyone who bothers to go looking for them.

I do not believe that the Constitution can be reinterpreted at will by activist judges at their whim and fancy. I think that such judges should be thrown out and defrocked, at minimum, if not clapped in irons.

All of that does not change the fact that the Constitution was written for a people and a nation that has largely ceased to exist.

My friends, the Constitution was not written for men like me – foreigners from the Dirt World with no origins in the United States and no blood ties to the land – no matter how much we might respect and revere the document and its creators. The Constitution was written for the sons and daughters of the free-born English and Dutch settlers who came to forge a country out of a vast wilderness, who feared and revered God the Father of Jesus Christ. It was designed and built for those people and was utterly unsuitable for any other – a sentiment that was put quite clearly into words by one of the men who helped design it.

So when Kurt Schlichter and other conservatives come along in 2014, or 2019, and claim that America will be taken back by conservatives adhering to strict Constitutional principles, I simply have to laugh.

The book goes into further detail about how conservatives change their tactics over time and build alliances with people normally outside of the core constituency of a conservative movement, such as weed-loving libertarians, gays, and women. The President who comes after the fictional reign (thank God!!!) of President Hillary Clinton is also a woman.

That, alone, should tell you what an utter joke the very idea of a “conservative insurgency” is.

Let’s be clear here: women have no place in executive leadership roles when it comes to the fight to take back our culture and restore the sovereignty of Christ Jesus as King. They play a supporting role, certainly, but the record of women in power is abysmally poor.

The idea that a female conservative is going to come along and help restore the country back to its Constitutional principles is, based on the very historical traditions and evidence that conservatives claim to revere so much, utter nonsense. It is pure wish-fulfillment fantasy with no basis in reality.

The notion that a right-wing insurgency that respects God the Father of Jesus Christ is going to find much truck with degenerate homosexuals is beyond absurd. All men sin, and all of us have to answer for our sins – Christian or otherwise. But only homosexuals and other similar degenerates celebrate their sin and demand that they be given special privileges and recognition for their sins.

I write that as a strong supporter of Milo Yiannopoulos, whose writing style I can appreciate even as I loathe his living style.

Are we to believe that a right-wing insurgency will magically put aside the very real and very deep problems with homosexuals, given their well-known propensity to demand special rights for themselves? The only way for homosexuals to live in peace with a nationalist Christian philosophy of government is for them to avoid being outed for their sins. In Russia, for instance, gay “marriage” is regarded as a bad joke of very poor taste – but there are no laws against sodomy that I know of, and as long as gays don’t bother or annoy others, they are left pretty much alone. That is the likely model of the future for a nationalist Right – which is very far away from “acceptance” of gay “marriage”.

And that is before we get to the really big problem with the book, the one that jumped out at me on every page.

Not once did Mr. Schlichter take the time to note the fact that the American nation no longer exists in any realistic form.

The American nation is best understood as strongly majority white, very Christian, and heavily European in nature. And that nation is mostly gone.

In its place is a landmass of 48 contiguous states where at least two distinct nations have emerged in the geographical footprint of an empire held together by the threat of force.

The first of those nations occupies a small number of counties and densely populated cities along the coasts and near the rivers. It is highly diverse and consists of multiple ethnicities, races, creeds, and ideologies, and concerns itself primarily with worshipping the false gods of Diversity, Tolerance, and Inclusivity.

The second of those nations is spread out across the vast heartlands of the geographical territory, and is peculiarly uniform despite its extreme dispersion. As LTC Kratman astutely observed in a comment to one of my earlier posts, someone living in rural or suburban Maine nowadays has a lot more in common with someone living in rural Alabama than he does with someone living in New York F***ing City.

The divide in the USA these days is not between North and South. It is not even really between conservative and liberal. It is actually between what we could call the “Clinton Archipelago” versus the “Great Trumpland”.

Mr. Schlichter could be forgiven quite readily for not seeing this. He wrote his book in 2013, a good two years before the mighty God-Emperor hit the stage and announced his run for the Cherry Blossom Throne – may his reign be long and blessed! – and as such, like many (but not all) conservatives, missed the signs in the tea leaves.

What Mr. Schlichter cannot be forgiven for is in making the utterly foolish mistake of thinking that “the Constitution” is going to be restored to its place without serious and severe violence.

In his theoretical future, there are only a few minor skirmishes with relatively few casualties before conservatives mount a full-blown, but entirely legal, insurgency that puts conservatives who want their powers to be limited, into positions of authority.

This is pure fantasy.

It is becoming clear even to conservatives like Mr. Schlichter, whose writings over at Townhall and other sites have become increasingly strident over the years, that war is inevitable now between the Left and the Right – and not war with words, but with fists and rocks and knives and guns.

May God help us all when it happens, because this war will be fought in the streets, in a way never seen before. The violence and brutality of this war will be horrifying to all who witness it. The rupture is inevitable; the sides lining up in the conflict are simply too different, and hate each other too much, to seek any kind of rapprochement.

Nor will there be much space for tolerance when that war is done and dusted.

In his book, Mr. Schlichter argues that the conservative majority of the future will embrace gays and legalise most minor drugs, such as marijuana, and will generally have far fewer problems with abortion than Christian conservatives have had thus far. This typically conservative mindset makes absolutely no sense given the actual demographic trends.

The parts of society that believe in religious tolerance and openness are dwindling fast, because they are failing to reproduce. The parts that believe in God the Father of Jesus Christ, and in the mighty and glorious sovereignty of Our Lord and King, are reproducing much faster than the effete, degenerate, and dying urban elites that seek to rule them.

Contra Mr. Schlichter, I do not believe that the future will be one in which degenerate hedonists and homosexuals will be left alone. Nor do I believe that whatever nations emerge from the coming civil war will practice significant religious tolerance.

I do expect that in the future abortion will be severely restricted or even outlawed. I do believe that this nonsense of gay “marriage” will be outlawed, and gays will be told to get the Hell back in the closet – where, incidentally, they were mostly better off to begin with, given their disease-prone lifestyles. And I do reckon that the future will result in at least one thoroughly Christian nation in which the practice of the Christian heresy of Mohammedanism will be illegal, if not outright punishable by death.

In other words, the future will look a heck of a lot less like a “conservative insurgency” that Mr. Schlichter has in mind, and far more like a post-Apocalyptic wasteland interspersed with flourishing civilisations rediscovering their glorious pasts, like what William S. Lind had in mind in Victoria.

Let me anticipate one major, and valid, objection to what I have written above, where I have essential crapped all over the idea of a conservative counterinsurgency against the Left.

The aforementioned LTC Kratman has made the point in other comments to my posts that the Hard Right are numerically too few and too fractured and, in his opinion, too silly to mount any kind of effective resistance to the Left. A war needs warriors, and the real warriors are all among the conservatives.

I readily concede this to be true. The fact is that the people who will be doing most of the fighting will not be the baying-at-the-Moon Hard Right nationalists like me. The Hard Right will comprise the hardcore shock troops that fight hardest and die earliest. We have already seen evidence of this in the first few battles between the Hard Right and the Hard Left in Portland, Austin, Charlottesville, and other places.

But we are still too few in number and will be for a long time. In reality, the major casualties will actually be among those who call themselves conservatives, for now.

Let’s be clear, this is NOT a good thing. It goes without saying that I categorically do not want this war. I don’t want to see the USA tear itself apart. I don’t want to see the Western world fall. I simply recognise, with great sadness, that it is inevitable. The divisions have grown too great and the West has grown too weak, complacent, degenerate, and foolish.

However… if conservatives are going to end up doing most of the fighting, they will also have to recognise and grapple with the severe contradictions in their philosophy. War tends to make beasts out of men, and I think that the coming war will be no exception when it comes to the conservative mind.

The very reason we have to get into a war in the first place is because of the failures of conservatism. Conservatives have a track record of failure that is second only to that of socialism. No matter where you look in the world, conservatives who base their actions on anything other than the rock of nationalism, of blood and faith and iron, have been knocked back repeatedly and failed to defend almost anything of note.

It was a conservative President – none other than the legendary President BAMF himself, St. Reagan of the Right – who signed into law a massive amnesty of illegal invaders, and thereby set the precedent for decades to come whereby illegals could simply stream across the borders with near-impunity. Great though Ronald Magnus might have been – and he was great, one of the last of the Romans – it was still his mistakes that set the stage for what America has become today.

It was a conservative President who signed into law truly huge expansions of the welfare-warfare state, invaded the Middle East on a damned fool “Syracuse Expedition”, and drained the people and nation of blood and treasure.

The track record of “conservatism” is, I repeat, one of failure second only to socialism.

Indeed, it is the height of irony that the man who has done more than almost any other President in living memory to restore the Constitution to its rightful place is a man whom most Constitutional conservatives look upon with anything from mild irritation to outright horror.

President Donald Trump is not a conservative. He is, at the very best, a classical liberal and a civic nationalist. He governs as one. He is crass, uncouth, volatile, brash, loud, and utterly disdainful of a great many traditions. He is the polar opposite of a Burkean or Kirkean conservative.

But, unlike most conservatives in public office, he is getting things done. And, weirdly enough, he is actually doing so with considerable fidelity to Constitutional limits on Presidential power – despite not much caring for the protocols of his office.

Why?

Because he is a businessman first and a politician second, and as a businessman, he understands that laws are only laws if they are enforced.

And because, unlike the conservatives who came before him, by and large, he understands that there is a war on for the very heart and soul of the American nation – a concept that conservatives appear to have a very difficult time coming to grips with.

In closing, Kurt Schlichter’s novel is a fun read if you are a conservative, but it reads as utter nonsense if you are of the Hard Right and think in terms of nation and faith. This is a real shame, because Mr. Schlichter can do better – he has done better, I’ve read one of his books about an America ripped apart by civil war and secession, and that one is vastly more realistic and sensible than this.

I expect that the Right will win the coming war, simply because we are motivated to fight for Truth and because we do not bend the knee to serve the Lord of Lies. But I do not expect that the coming war will be easy or simple. It will test bonds between family members to and beyond the breaking point. It will break the geographical footprint of the United States of America into multiple nations – anywhere between two and four, I think. And it will come at a cost in blood that will be so horrifying to future generations that World War II will look like a mere storm in a teacup by comparison, at least to Westerners.

(Russians tend to think rather differently about such things; they suffered north of 20 MILLION casualties in that war and are cynically amused by Westerners proudly proclaiming that “they” won the war. Westerners did nothing of the sort. The Russians did, by bleeding the Germans dry on the Eastern Front, at a truly horrendous cost to their own people.)

Conservatives are going to face some uncomfortable choices in the years to come – and I wager that many, if not most, of them will no longer call themselves “conservative” by the end, because there will be very little of anything left for them to conserve of their old ways by then.