Did you know that the Trump campaign’s charges of election fraud are “unsubstantiated”; that there’s simply “no evidence” to back them up? You surely ought to know by now, since that’s been the liturgical formula, repeated by the mainstream media (including Fox News, whose primetime anchors now resemble the proverbial rats abandoning the sinking ship) at least a thousand times a day.
By the way, there’s “no evidence” of Hunter Biden’s emails either (another Russian disinformation campaign), and “no evidence” of the Biden family’s influence-peddling enrichment scheme; heck, there’s no evidence that Hunter Biden even exists.
The liberal press, which ludicrously applauds itself for its “hard-hitting investigative journalism” and its vocation of “speaking truth to power,” is evidently as dumbstruck as the hapless victims of the Gorgon Medusa whenever the truth is inconvenient to the acquisition or preservation of power by Democrats.
On the other hand, there was apparently lots of evidence that Brett Kavanaugh was at a party some month, some year, and at some geographical locus somewhere within the continental United States around, oh, approximately, give or take, 30 years ago.
The agnosticism of the mainstream media in the face of blatant leftist wrongdoing is by now an ancient tradition, going back to Walter Duranty’s repeated declarations in The New York Times that there was apodictically “no evidence” of dissidents’ being sent to the Gulag during Comrade Stalin’s paradisal reign. If CNN and The New York Times had been around in Roman antiquity, they would have found no evidence of the Catiline Conspiracy, the persecution of Christians under Diocletian, or Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents.
Of course, it should be obvious that electoral fraud is allegedly rather more than “occasional” for the Democratic Party. (They have a long history of it, if anyone cares to check the court record.) It’s hardly, in any case, an aberration when leftists lie and cheat to obtain and maintain power, treat the rule of law as a bourgeois atavism, and censor or consign their political opponents to prison. That’s what the apologists for communism used to say about the Soviet Union, which they argued was a perversion of the authentic, humane, and benevolent essence of the original socialist idea, which (they continued) had never been anywhere reified.
But the “evidence” is overwhelming that leftist ideology is inherently malignant, inasmuch as it is grounded in the monstrous arrogance according to which the state, which invariably means the few who have wrested control of the government and its monopoly of force, knows better than you, or knows how we should live our lives and how our societies should be organized, and that it’s justified in using the full might at its disposal to compel its subjects to accept its superior wisdom.
What I’m describing here is not merely the discredited and superannuated totalitarian despotisms of the past century (the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, etc.). I am describing a perennially corrupt moral disposition—the antiquated terms “vainglory” and “lust for power” still seem apposite—an attitude of such moral and intellectual presumption that it deems it not only excusable, but also ethically imperative, to use all means necessary, legal or illegal, in order to effect and enforce its enlightened vision.
- The suborning by the Obama administration and its loyalists of putatively independent agencies of government to overthrow a duly elected president because his views, as judged by the inquisitors of progressive orthodoxy, are retrograde and “deplorable.”
- The violent (though in the case of the media and the academy, violence is no longer necessary) suppression of heterodox thought, by means of the Maoist shaming, dismissal, and ostracism of nonconformist thinkers.
- The riots in Democrat-controlled cities, condoned by Democrat legislators and indeed incited by Democrat rhetoric, in which defenceless residents and business owners (many of them black and Latino) were fire-bombed, maimed, and killed, and had their livelihoods destroyed—atrocities that were exhorted and celebrated as heroic acts in the cause of “racial justice.”
- The threats of violence or financial ruin that successfully intimidated otherwise sane and rational citizens and corporations to excuse and support the above.
- The morally and psychologically toxic cult of victimhood, which has long been the fundamental plank in the Democrats’ platform, though it foments only hatred, self-exculpation, dependency, and the resultant panoply of sociopathologies that have inevitably wrecked the lives of their client victim-groups.
- The murder of babies under the auspices of feminist abstractions.
- The extra-judicial conviction of men by Believe-the-Women feminist witch-hunters.
- The modern-day persecution of Christians by the LGBT Ministries of Truth.
Doesn’t the right also, when it serves them, bend the rules? It would be platitudinous—just as the evenhanded imputation of good and evil to all political philosophies is platitudinous—to say that many politicians who have identified themselves as “on the right” have been malicious. But in all such cases with which I am familiar, it has been their defection from conservative principles—usually by succumbing to the temptation to be befriended by liberals—that has betrayed them.
For that reason, it’s facile to conflate conservatism with Republicanism, or any other nominally conservative party. I know of no party at this juncture that can still call itself “conservative” with a straight face.
But so far as titularly “conservative” politicians dedicate themselves to the defense of traditional conservative principles (the smallest government possible, equality before the law, rule by right not might, the guarantee of public safety, the protection and promotion of freedom of thought, expression, association, and religious conscience, and the preservation of the traditions and moral norms that the “deplorable” majority has anciently agreed upon), in the service of those principles, I can’t see how it’s possible to transgress.