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“Both anchored the right end of “acceptable” conservative opinion.”

Great observations!

“Acceptable conservatism” is too timid, too afraid to speak the truth, too afraid of labels and insukts, too comfortable to engage the fight.

And so the left keeps wiping the floor with us in this culture war.

It’s somewhat hopeful that today we’re starting to have people on our side unafraid to speak the uncomfortable truths. We need many more and followers ready to take to the streets if we’re going to have a chance at reversing this dystopia we’re living in.

There doesn’t seem to be a “left end” of acceptable communism.

Saw a meme posted recently that referred to the cartoon “Tom and Jerry.” It compared the “adversarial” position of the GOP vis-a-vis the ‘Rat party to the relationship between the cat and the mouse on the show, pointing out that Tom can never really catch Jerry because that would mean the end of the show.

The conservative movement starting with the prominence of William Buckley and National Review from the late 1950s through 2015 had some benefits in slowing down the progress of the liberal agenda, but it was something like the Confederate Army: having better generals and good soldiers and winning a majority of battles in the first two years of the Civil War but ultimately losing. Before Buckley, the opposition to the New Deal and Fair Deal was a hodgepodge of ideologies ranging from minarchists to populist authoritarians. What Buckley did was to marginalize the dissenters, banishing Taft style isolationists, Birchers, Objectivists, and assorted dissidents. Populists like George Wallace and Ross Perot stood outside the umbrella of Conservatism, Inc., but were able to draw substantial minorities to their platforms that were outside the conservative vs. liberal window of acceptable thought.

Rush Limbaugh, who unlike Buckley did not come from an elite background, became the popular voice for Conservatism, Inc. He was a talented communicator, having "made his bones" in sports and local radio before entering the national stage. The abolition of the Fairness Doctrine during the second Reagan Administration and the shrinkage of AM radio to the FM band provided an opportunity that Limbaugh grabbed. He attracted a legion of imitators, like Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Medved, and additional air hosts, both national and local, but he set the tone for the others. Conservatism, Inc. took Limbaugh under its wings, and co-opted grass roots movements like the Christian Right and the Tea Party to maintain a hold on the right flank of the Uniparty.

Limbaugh held a steady audience of 15-20 million listeners, mostly white males, until his death. However, starting in 2015, there was a change in the political environment that broke the dominance of Conservatism, Inc., from its hold on the right side of "acceptable" politics. The first factor was the rise of Donald Trump, essentially outside the conservative-liberal window. His was the most successful populist rising since perhaps Andrew Jackson. Unlike Ross Perot, George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, and others, he worked within the Republican Party rather than try a third party run.

The second factor was the increasing radicalism of the Democratic Party. Decades earlier, Gus Hall, head of the Communist Party, USA, stated that his party's goal was to take over the Democrats. Remember that Communist ideology transmuted from class based warfare to race and sex based warfare, using the theories of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. As more moderate Democrats were pushed to the margins, we saw the rise of politicians with significant connections to leftists and Communists come to prominence. Communist and other leftist influence started in the Democratic Party as far back as the New Deal era, e.g., Alger Hiss and Harold Ickes. With the flight of white Southerners and later Northern white Catholics away from their ancestral party, the party increasingly shifted leftward. We have a President Biden, who got his start through Armand Hammer, the mid-20th Century equivalent of George Soros, a President Obama, who was mentored by Communists like Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright, and a President Clinton, a draft dodger who as an undergraduate traveled to then Communist Czechoslovakia and Russia, as the guest of the head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.

The third factor was the rise of leftist billionaires, not only the public figures of Bill Gates, but investment firms like Black Rock and tech billionaires, corporate America became the enemy of traditional values, pushing a cultural Marxist agenda while also maintaining their economic dominance, sometimes aided by the Federal government and their blue state counterparts. By the 2020s, many conservatives questioned their allegiance to corporate America, something Buckley or Limbaugh would not have countenanced.

The fourth factor was the overreach of the Left during the COVID lockdown and the attempts to suppress conservative and other dissenting speech. The unprecedented attempts, at least in American history, to punish Trump and his supporters through lawfare and the Federal police forces, contributed to the collapse of Conservatism, Inc's hold on the conservative public. Trump himself was duped during the COVID madness, endorsing the "vaccines" that proved increasingly unpopular with his MAGA movement.

The 60+ year hold of the conservative elite on the conservative masses has ended. That has its benefits and drawbacks. Conservative voters are less likely to support moderates like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, who talk a good conservative game but are members of the Uniparty. The downside is that at least some voices on the alt-right are blinded by the nonsense coming out of the Kremlin that Russia is an Orthodox Christian champion, while Lenin's corpse is still honored at Red Square and the red star is still above the Kremlin.