Nobody makes conservatives look worse than conservatives themselves. There, I said it.
It’s an unfortunate conclusion I’ve come to recently as I’ve ruminated, at length, on the conservative—and by that I mean “right wing” in general—propensity for self-sabotage and self-destruction. “Brooded” might be a better word, because it seriously pisses me off, since I’m the opposite of left wing and I want, desperately, to win and prevent the scum of the earth from engulfing what remains of my beautiful country and destroying everything and everyone I love.
But to my point: Look at William F. Buckley, the Grand Dame of 20th century conservatism. What made him such a tragic laughable figure wasn’t the prissy demeanor, the tightly buttoned suits, the club ties and the smarmed lacquered hair. It wasn’t the bizarre diction: that oh-so-affected manner that placed him on an island somewhere in the mid-Atlantic—not quite on the shores of Britain, and well east of the East Coast.
The Azores, maybe?
It was the very terms of the endeavor Buckley was engaged in, as he himself defined it. A definition that has, for reasons known only to conservatives, stood the test of absolutely embarrassing self-defeating retardation to plague us still to this very day.
The Conservative, Auntie Bill told us, “stands athwart history yelling ‘STOP!’”
Can you imagine anything more pathetic, more futile to do with your time than to stand athwart history yelling “STOP!”?
Never mind the caviling archaism of the adverb—a word that would have been better left in the senior common room of a minor Oxford college in the eighteenth century, where it belonged, along with the port and stale biscuits—just how does one stand athwart history yelling “STOP!”?
More importantly, what does it achieve?
The answer of the 20th century is absolutely unequivocal: nothing. Not a damn thing. Conservatives have conserved not one institution, value, ritual, custom, not even the local tea room or library. Instead, for a century or more conservatives have fought a lunging, flailing rearguard action, defending positions that scarcely a decade or two before had been at the cutting edge of the liberal agenda.
Homosexuality in Botswana? Decriminalized! BOOM! The libs are the real racists!
And so on, and so on.
If you want to know why I’ve been so exercised about the right and its uncanny knack for tying its own shoe laces together and falling flat on its stupid face, the answer is mainly events in my native Britain, where the right wing seems hell-bent on cannibalizing itself at the precise moment a genuine route to power lays open, at last. But I’ve been keeping my eye on the other side of the pond too, and signs aren’t great there either. (By the way, if you want to read some of my thoughts on why right-wingers behave like this, check out these essays (one and two) I wrote.)
American case in point: this new AI MAGAtard meme. Now, the MAGAtard isn’t a new creation. That one-toothed, deformed, inbred variation on the Wojak template has been around since at least 2018, according to Know Your Meme.
