Longtime conservatives can hardly believe they're now fighting a last-ditch battle to conserve the basic rights of free speech, private property, and presumed innocence. We have to fight to preserve history, and even to keep the police.
But that IS unquestionably where we are right now, and if you aren't fighting tooth and nail against the all-out Democrat war against free speech, property, the rule of law, history, and the police, you are not "conservative" in any meaningful sense.
At best you're trying to keep just a little of what the Left would take away, negotiate terms of surrender favorable to yourself while you kiss off everything you're supposed to be conserving. This is not even slightly ambiguous or nuanced. The Left has made it all VERY clear.
There have been times when complicated arguments about the definition of conservatism have been necessary. This is not one of those times. Every single thing we ever thought was vital for a healthy, just, and prosperous society is under sustained attack by the extreme Left.
Those trying to make some kind of "Republican case for Biden" are like the people who kept trying to make peace with the gleefully murderous aliens in "Mars Attacks." Your outstretched hand of peace will fall to the ground as a smouldering stump.
This is true of Trump and his team as well. If they don't understand what's at stake and get fully in the game, pretty damn quick, they're not really playing for Team Conservative either. We need to see some red-zone hustle and hear some plans for scoring first downs.
This election should be a binary choice: vote Republican, vote Trump if you want to have police, free speech, capitalism, the rule of law, and the tiniest shred of historical memory and tradition. Vote Democrat if you want none of those things and you're up for Mao's Year Zero.
Anyone nominally on the Right or in the GOP who clouds that choice, anyone who doesn't make it crystal clear through every word and deed between now and Election Day, is helping to kill off conservatism. There won't be anything left to conserve. No more choices, only echoes.
Conservatism is not supposed to be progressivism achieved at slightly safer speeds. We have no need of a GOP or "conservative" intellectual movement that serves as little more than backseat drivers hectoring the left-wing extremists who will sit forever in the driver's seat.
Again, we're talking about the basic pillars of society, the key elements of our Constitutional system, the core concepts of liberty and justice under direct attack. If you won't fight for those things, proudly and passionately, then what the hell are you "conserving?"
That also goes for the people who don't understand what a desperate battle this is, the folks who assume some silent majority of shy Trump voters has this election in the bag, no matter what the polls say today. Trump is blowing this election and EVERYTHING is on the line.
Conservatism is not passive. It demands passionate defense of its principles, a strong case made every single day for how they are all connected as the only successful formula for liberty, justice, and prosperity mankind has ever devised. You should be HAPPY to fight for it.
That's what being a "happy warrior" really means. It's not just advice to avoid being a sourpuss and make some jokes. It's about the pure pleasure of fighting to conserve a nation and its culture that stand tall and proud over the bloody and oppressive history of this world.
You can't conserve America by fighting for little bits and pieces of it, here and there, picking only the easiest battles and falling back when the Left gets violent - or picking only the fights that benefit your personal political goals or policy preferences.
The Left knows this, which is why they spent decades teaching generations of our young people the opposite lesson: America is uniquely and irredeemably evil, everything we value is hypocritical and corrupt, enlightened totalitarianism has never really been given a fair chance.
They spent decades bullying conservatives and Republicans out of making populist or moralist appeals. This allowed the Left to seize populism and moralism entirely for itself, virtually unopposed. Now it makes moral arguments for violence and oppression.
Against that kind of onslaught, playing defense just means losing slowly. Making deals with the aggressors only slows them down until they don't see any further point in honoring the deal. Hoping "moderates" are somehow lurking behind the extremists is delusional.
Assuming that sensible people will just wake up and vote against extremism is also delusional. Those people are being made to feel helpless and isolated. Surrender is their only reasonable option, the only way to get back to normal. Trump isn't giving them much to fight for.
Whatever your reason for sitting 2020 out are - whether you hate Trump, or you ARE Trump and you can't get your act together, or you're a Republican looking to cut a deal with the New Order - if you don't grasp the stakes and start playing to win, you aren't conservative. /end
