Luke McCormick

There's a recurring theme I keep seeing pop up over and over again with a specific subset of the Right, whether you want to call them classical liberals, neocons, or just the boomercon establishment. And that issue is that these people don't actually believe the Right has the moral legitimacy to rule, and they instinctively reject any tactic that would assert that authority. These people still see the political arena as little more than a debating society governed by process and procedure. And they think these things encompass the neutral ground upon which politics plays out. But those are liberal assumptions of what politics truly is, not neutral ones. The Left recognizes this. They understand politics not as a debate amongst friends but as a contest between two diametrically opposed visions of the good, where whoever can act decisively will see their prefered vision prevail. And what's more, they act on this belief by using power to entrench their vision and delegitimize ours. So every time someone like me is asked what we would do in response to this, the answer always goes back to accepting reality for what it is (a fundamental battle for the soul of this nation) rather than what we wish it were (a friendly debate between fellow Americans on how to reach mutually agreed upon end states). Once you accept that the Left has a totalizing vision, an explicitly hostile intent for large swaths of what we would call conservative America, and respects no limitations on power whatsoever (and how could anyone possibly think anything otherwise post 2020, post COVID, and post Kirk?), you realize that the only winning move we can possibly make at this point is to tear away the mask of neutrality, drag the conflict out into the open, and force a confrontational showdown with the Left in a way that makes them pay an unbearably steep price for the power they seek to wield against us. This means waging a total and unrelenting political war upon them, on all fronts and at all times, until they either surrender or secede. And you do these things not because they're fun, or edgy, or because you like to burn it all down for the thrill of it, or because you're a nihilist with nothing better to do with your time, but because this is what any faction must do if it believes it has the right and the obligation to rule. Yet those same classical liberals, neocons, and boomercons will sit there in horror at the prospect of someone demanding that power be taken away from the very side they themselves were declaring to be dangerous lunatics over the last 5 years. Why do they do this? Why would they essentially say: "The Left has lost their minds, want to destroy this country, and seek to kill prominent critics of their ideological program, but I still want to give them an equal chance to obtain political power so they can continue doing it all." Apparently, they do. And they do because these people all implicitly believe that the Left's worldview is actually normal and that the Right's worldview must justify itself under the Left's moral framework. What's more, they see any decisive use of power by the Right as inherently illegitimate. That's the whole divide right there. One side of the Right is squeamish about anything that asserts the Right's moral authority to govern this nation because they don't actually think the Right has any moral authority at all because these people aren't actually on "the Right" in the first place. They are ex-Leftists who fundamentally agree with the presuppositions of the Left and are just upset that the revolution has betrayed them. And they see in "the Right" a parked car they can hijack to drive to their preferred liberal destination for society that they believe the Left has taken a detour from.