Konkvistador comments on Help, help, I'm being oppressed! - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Yvain 07 April 2009 11:22PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 19 January 2012 08:45:31PM *  13 points [-]

"Everyone's liberal, things are hopeless, might as well stay home."

These are called Paleoconservatives.

The social class on which [Will Herberg] and I both once pinned our hope of national regeneration, those whom we jokingly referred to as "the Archie Bunkers," has gone the way of the dinosaur. It has been replaced by a multitude of vastly more radicalized versions of Meathead, Archie's fashionably liberal son-in-law who by now could be an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal.

-- Encounters, by Paul E. Gottfried

Peoples of European descent are not only in a relative but a real decline. They are aging, dying, disappearing. This is the existential crisis of the West.

-- Suicide of a Superpower, by Pat Buchanan

Liberals control all sorts of nefarious institutions that are currently exercising a stranglehold on power and hiding the truth, but most Americans, once you pull the wool off their eyes, are conservatives at heart and just as angry about this whole thing as they are. Any day now, they're going to throw off the yoke of liberal tyranny and take back their own country.

The left has it's own equivalent, it is supposedly the weaker force, made up of those speaking truth to power in the name of the little man. Yet it has more or less generally won for the past 200 years and consistently won for the last 70 years on all social issues it has picked up. This is interestingly also true when it has very little support of the people or when the people are divided and it takes a generation or two for the education system and media to change things.

What do you call a weaker side that consistently wins? The stronger side.

There are branches of social science that consciously devote themselves solely to officially identifying the Powerful and the Powerless in every issue and conflict.

This in itself is a quite potent source of power.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 January 2012 11:34:36PM *  7 points [-]

Actually now that I think of it a few non-paeloconservatives have taken such a stance. John Derbyshire's (one of the writers at secular right) 2009 book was all about this:

To his fellow conservatives, John Derbyshire makes a plea: Don't be seduced by this nonsense about "the politics of hope." Skepticism, pessimism, and suspicion of happy talk are the true characteristics of an authentically conservative temperament. And from Hobbes and Burke through Lord Salisbury and Calvin Coolidge, up to Pat Buchanan and Mark Steyn in our own time, these beliefs have kept the human race from blindly chasing its utopian dreams right off a cliff.

Recently, though, various comforting yet fundamentally idiotic notions of political correctness and wishful thinking have taken root beyond the "Kumbaya"-singing, we're-all-one crowd. These ideas have now infected conservatives, the very people who really should know better. The Republican Party has been derailed by legions of fools and poseurs wearing smiley-face masks.

Think rescuing the economy by condemning our descendents to lives of spirit-crushing debt. Think nation-building abroad while we slowly disintegrate at home. Think education and No Child Left Behind. . . . But don't think about it too much, because if you do, you'll quickly come to the logical conclusion: We are doomed.

I so need to read this book.