Headed Off a Cliff

The Claremont Review of Books carries a long article by someone using the nom de plume Publius Decius Mus (warning: article opens slowly). The nom de plume refers to three generations of men in a Roman family (grandfather, father, and son), who died bravely leading legionnaires into three different battles, inspiring their troops to victory.

The clear implication is that the author risks his/her career as a conservative intellectual by writing this gloomy work. The risk is real. Let me share with you the intro:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

The article makes a compelling case for the following:

America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad.

If conservatives are right about the importance of (snipped here the whole laundry list of conservative beliefs) then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

But, as the author points out, conservative intellectuals don't believe we are headed off a cliff. Their public behavior clearly reveals this.

Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.

If you haven’t noticed, our side has been losing consistently since 1988. We can win midterms, but we do nothing with them. (snip) And, aside from 2004’s lackluster 50.7%, we can’t win the big ones at all. 

About the open borders enthusiasts, the author writes:

This is insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die. Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.

And the thoroughly gloomy conclusion:

We’ve established that most “conservative” anti-Trumpites are in the Orwellian sense objectively pro-Hillary. What about the rest of you? If you recognize the threat she poses, but somehow can’t stomach him, have you thought about the longer term? The possibilities would seem to be: Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial Davoisie liberalism as far as the eye can see … which, since nothing human lasts forever, at some point will give way to one of the other three.

Wow! That pretty much anchors the gloomy end of the scale. I guess I think there is more societal inertia than this author sees, which doesn't make me optimistic, merely less pessimistic.