by Christopher Roach
The midterm results were surprising. Dismal economic conditions and widespread public sentiment suggested a wave, and the Republicans did get more votes, but they barely won the House and failed to carry the Senate. There are reasons for all of this, including Democrat-friendly election procedures, but it is still very disappointing.
Republicans like to think of politics as something you do every few years in the same manner as nominal Christians who go to church on Christmas and Easter. When it comes to politics, the Left are the fundamentalists. For them, it is full-time, dictating what needs to happen with everything and everyone, everywhere.
Leftism Invades Every Sphere
This is why so many things we now call politicized are just alternate facets of the leftist propaganda apparatus. Every business, every school, every pharmaceutical product, every TV show, every movie, and every interaction reflects the leftist value system. Those fat, sloppy mannequins now at the mall are there for a reason. Think of the choices behind shows like “Modern Family,” “Will and Grace,” and now “nonbinary” Transformers. Think of how rare it is to see a couple in an advertisement that is not mixed race.
None of this is accidental. None of this is apolitical. None of this involves an election.
Gillette lost tons of customers a few years ago with an advertisement, ostensibly selling razor blades, that basically mocked and insulted their core customers. These trends continue, because the decision-makers in the business world are first filtered through the campus because of mandatory degree requirements. Profits are becoming secondary to those so indoctrinated. They aren’t selling burgers or grooming products, they’re selling salvation and religion.
While Republicans strategize about economics, public policy, candidate quality, mail-in voting systems, and a host of other policy issues, the Left is busy doing real politics in schools, with your kids, at the border, on the TV, and within the military.
This is why there is such a significant skew towards the Left among young people. From what they learn in school to what they absorb on TikTok, they are fully immersed in a steady stream of heavy-handed propaganda. The relentless messaging has an impact.
In the recent midterm, two-thirds of Gen Z voted for Democrats. But with regard to their lifestyles, the results are even more dramatic. In one study, a total of 40 percent of Gen Z say they are LGBT. Over 1 percent claim to be transsexuals (300 percent higher than older cohorts). For Gen Z, 27 percent do not want kids, and more than half say they are not patriotic.
Urban, childless, unmarried, indebted, brain-dead people are ideal consumers and ideal activists. Simply by living this lifestyle, they are laying the groundwork to make themselves loyal servants of the unified financial-political-technological system, permanently agnostic about the future and hostile to the past.
Aloof Conservatism Will Conserve Nothing
Normie conservatives are loath to talk about this. They consider noticing replacement immigration or socially engineered voting demographics to be déclassé and divisive. They think of themselves as above it all, dismissing campus antics as something people grow out of as they mature.
Regarding indoctrination, many consider worries about television and media to be alarmist, akin to the adults fretting about heavy metal or comic books when they were young. But this is simply wishful thinking, as those mild forms of teenage rebellion did not, generally speaking, act in the service of a worldview shared by everyone from George Soros to your local community college professor.
Wishful thinking is not a strategy. The world is changing, and it is changing according to a plan. One side is conducting its “march through the institutions,” and the other side is mostly asleep, assuming their gated communities, pockets of normalcy, and occasional electoral victory will be allowed to continue.
The Left Is a Religion on a Crusade
The Right has an overly restrictive view of politics. For the Left, politics occupies a different place in their mental and spiritual landscape, the same place that religion does for most people.
What is religion? For most, it’s a grand unifying philosophy that ties the present to the past and the future, including the afterlife. It provides moral rules and ideals and lends deeper meaning to what otherwise would be a mundane existence. It provides structure and spiritual sustenance during difficult times.
American conservatives believe in a limited politics. For us, the goal of political life is to create space and security for commerce, family life, private pursuits, and actual religion. Thus, conservative politics is prosaic, limited in scope, and rooted in a deep recognition of fallible man living in a fallen world. In short, it is fundamentally humble.
For the Left, by contrast, politics is the main event. It’s a high-minded affair that aims, ultimately, to eliminate injustice and save the world. It proposes to do this by transforming humanity into a superior kind of being through superior political conditions and indoctrination into correct beliefs. The end state is one where we are supposed to be less tribal, less selfish, and more equal. The Left’s obsession with healthcare and vaccinations suggests we may transcend death itself, given enough technology and resources.
The idiom of leftist politics is analogous to that of the not-quite-conservative, puritan faction on the American Right. Both aim to purify a fallen and sinful world, and thus employ politics to encroach upon realms that otherwise have their own unplanned trajectories: private opinion, business, art, music, food, courtship, family life, and religion itself.
Whether one likes it or not, the enemy has a vote, and the enemy sometimes gets to choose the terrain on which battle is conducted. The Right can no longer afford to ignore the schools, the boardroom, the doctor’s office, or movies, music, and social media. While some thought we were dealing with distinct spheres with distinct logic—commerce or education or medicine or entertainment—the Left has decided that in every area we are dealing with politics. We must do politics that way too.
What this means in practical terms has to be worked out. For starters, it requires awareness. Worries about being “divisive” or condemnations of “identity politics” prevent us from staking out territory and conducting our own identity politics. Consider how so many on the Right still want to give corporate America a pass, as if these mercantilist behemoths are our allies or have anything in common with small, entrepreneurial businesses. The Right needs to get comfortable with rewarding its friends and punishing its enemies. The Right needs either to destroy, coopt, starve, or frustrate institutions in the hands of the enemy or build parallel institutions of its own when that proves impossible.
Too many on the Right “want to grill” and ignore the gathering storm. Lost and disappointing elections should concern us, but only because they reveal that one avenue of politics may not be available. Even with such losses, and even if such losses continue into the indefinite future, we still have some power in how we live, where we shop, what we read and watch, and whom we choose to associate and organize with.
We can still be dissidents. We can still resist. This also is politics. Today, everything is.
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Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views presented are solely his own.
Photo “Joe Biden” by The White House.
