The subheadline of a Federalist article about the Boris Johnson/Tories election just concluded in Great Britain caught my eye. Read the whole article; it’s valuable in its entirety.
It is far easier for the right to compromise on economics than for the left to compromise on culture, religion, and nationalism. And that is the formula conservatives need to remember.
We’ve seen this in our nation, too: the Left’s and its Progressive-Democratic Party’s constant drumbeat of attacks against the right of particular, disapproved-of Americans to practice their religion and attacks on our nation, demanding, instead that we subordinate ourselves to internationalism, wherein we lose control of our own lives. Understand: these sorts of things are unique to our nation. No other nation in the world has a written-down Constitution that says in so many words—opens with the words—that We the People are sovereign in our nation. Not Government, not any arm of Government, we citizens. Government works for us.
We’ve seen also the refusal of Progressive-Democrats to compromise, even to try, with Republicans. The Republican Party is just a Trumpian personality cult, they say. Supporters of Trump are racists, now including Conservatives. Blacks who support Trump are, to use more polite terms, Uncle Toms or oreos. Women who support Trump are, at best, voting against their interest, and at worst, as was said about a Republican woman candidate for Vice President, she should be gang-raped by blacks and then shat in her mouth. Americans, generally, are just bitter Bible- and gun-clingers, ignorant, racist, and misogynistic. The Left and Party are in open warfare against our American culture.
In contrast, an ability to compromise on matters of economics, what those of the Right, the Republican Party and Conservatives in general are willing and able to do is a far more successful method, and it’s far more protective of American culture: economics is near, if not at, the center of culture.
It’s how businessmen of a particular religion live their business lives while still doing business with customers of differing religious tenets, or no such tenets at all. It’s how businessmen protect their rights to speak openly and freely by not selling a product with a particular message to customers demanding that message, and this freedom is especially protected by American free markets: there will be another business just down the block willing to sell the same article with the customer-desired message.
Free market economics is how we interact with each other within the framework of culture. And the freedom of our market is how we find compromise among each other. And that preserves our American culture.
The fundamental difference in Western politics now is cultural, and is between Westphalian sovereignty and unifying nationalism on one hand, and complete individualist internationalism and rule by technocratic institutions on the other.
Indeed, in American politics in particular, as well as the British politics of which Sumantra Maitra was writing at the link. And one is preservative of our culture, our way of life, our central ethos, while the other is overtly, carefully considered destruction of all of that.
