Here’s Daniel Pipes’ take on why conservatives keep losing (for mine, visit this page and the accompanying links):
I had no answer when Mária Schmidt, a historian and advisor to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, recently asked me, “Why do you American conservatives keep losing to liberals?”
By conservatives, she and I both understand individuals who respect tradition while intelligently adapting it to new circumstances; those following in the legacy of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Liberals are those who believe in each person’s unlimited capacity on his own to figure things out rationally, the heirs of Tony Blair and Barack Obama. This permanent political conflict pits building on tradition vs. thinking things anew. It’s recognizing 2 genders vs. 71.
Schmidt’s question took me by surprise because European conservatives typically envy their American counterparts for the money, ideas, media, votes, politicians, and power they enjoy. While the Europeans are marginalized, the Americans ride high – at this moment controlling all the elected parts of the U.S. government, from the White House to state legislatures, plus the Supreme Court and other federal judges.
Despite this record, American conservatives face a profound structural problem: politics being downstream from culture and liberal ideas dominating via the schools, the press, the arts, and the churches, they suffer a permanent disadvantage.
Hungarian conservatives do not suffer these weaknesses, however. They not only have political power but also dominate the schools, media, bureaucracy, and judiciary. The result is unique; as the analyst Péter Morvay explained to me, “Hungary’s youth look like everyone else’s but they are more conservative: they subscribe to family values (the small gay parade is mostly made up of foreigners), they take affirmative pride in their history and culture, and they want to keep their country independent of both Brussels [i.e., the European Union] and Moscow.”
Read more: DanielPipes.org
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