There are many reasons to sympathize with young conservatives who have grown up in modern, or worse, in postmodern, America. Surrounded by on-demand and even no-demand pornography, the Muzak of their era, and schooled on the supercilious condemnation of virtue, white males, and American history in particular, they are barely acquainted with the America that decades ago enjoyed a much healthier moral and intellectual culture.
No wonder, then, that the leading characteristic of the so-called New Right is its simultaneous alienation both from woke liberalism and from what used to be called “movement conservatism.” The latter it disdains as Conservatism, Inc., the “beautiful losers” (Sam Francis’s haunting phrase) who didn’t try to win because they didn’t even want to win. Why struggle to dethrone cultural liberalism when it pays so well to faux-fight it forever?...
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