Conservative movements are on the rise around the world, and increasingly taking political power in predominantly liberal, leftist, and socialist-leaning countries.
While often labeled in the mainstream media as “far right,” “extremist,” “populist,” or “nationalist” (the latter two derided as if voting the will of the people or loving one’s country are bad things), by and large these conservative parties represent the commonsense values of their constituents.
For example, in Europe they believe that the fate of their nation shouldn’t be determined by bureaucrats in Brussels; in Latin American that inflation is bad and impoverishing them; everywhere that too much immigration is destructive to national culture and heritage, not to mention their economic standing; and, generally, that farmers shouldn’t be required to stop producing, drivers be forced to abandon their cars, or the elderly forced to freeze in their unheated apartments for some unpractical Utopian and globalist ideal that will never work in the first place.
These conservative party political victories are described by journalists, government officials, and commentators using terms such as “alarming,” “dangerous,” “surprising,” “stunning,” and “shocking,” as if no one could see this coming from miles away, and as if there wasn’t a perfectly rational explanation for all of it.
On Sunday, Argentine presidential candidate Javier Milei won the presidential election on an anti-statist and libertarian campaign that focused on ending the hyperinflation that has decimated the Argentinian economy and the wealth of its people. Mr. Milei, a trained economist and highly effective political polemicist once nicknamed “the Madman,” has vowed to go after Deep State corruption and close the central bank, making the U.S. dollar the official currency of the nation.
In the United States, the conservative movement is typically identified with the Republican Party. Yet the rising awareness and concern among Americans about the state of their nation hasn’t translated into Republican victories at the polls.
So why are Americans turning more conservative as individuals but not voting according to their awakening consciousnesses? The best answer is often the simplest. The Democrats conveniently point to abortion (the left’s top issue, but not as singular for conservatives) as the reason Republicans haven’t gained ground. Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy blames the repeated failure on poor leadership in the Republican National Committee. Some observers reason that the elections have been rigged, and until the great evil of election fraud is not only exposed (as it increasingly is in this hour) but also eradicated, nothing will change. Others believe that there’s no awakening. The hypnotic power of the mainstream media’s Blue Pill narrative remains powerful enough to keep most Americans in a fog of denial and ignorance.
But perhaps the issue lies somewhere else. It’s possible that one reason conservatives have failed to win majority support in the United States is that, as much as we’ve gone through as a nation in the past three years, Americans have yet to suffer long enough or hard enough. Compared with the decades of impoverishment the Argentines have experienced, or the slow bleeding out of cultural and political sovereignty that Europeans have gone through, Americans haven’t yet been made miserable enough to throw the leftists out on the street.
Perhaps things must get worse before they can get better. Marx believed the same.
