Progressivism advances while the political right fiddles

A couple of weeks ago I was talking with a few other conservatives and one of them was intent on telling me about a documentary he saw that detailed the agenda and accomplishments of the political left over the past 100 years. I had heard of the film but have no interest in watching it.

The documentary I’d like to watch is the one about what defenders of the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution have been doing over the past 100 years. As you might have guessed, that film hasn’t been made because our side has done sorry little to defend the amazing inheritance left to us by our forbearers.

Last week I put up a series of posts on the topic of why optimism is still an option for political conservatives. Some very good minds have wrestled with the ugly reality we face and have come away with the belief that our side can still save the country from the kind of internal forces our Founding Fathers warned us about. I’ll concede that some very good minds have also come to the opposite conclusion. It’s up to every one of us to decide what we’re going to believe. Is it all lost — or not?

As I’ve said, if the decision is to say “all is lost,” then no one should pretend our side lost a fight. If you call what Republicans and conservatives are doing now “fighting,”  well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. The information war in this country is so one-sided it’s not even funny.

Ask yourself this: where do people get politically liberal information? With few exceptions they get it from the K-12 school system, the higher ed system, pop culture, and the old but still dominant media. Where do people get politically conservative information? If they don’t actively search it out they’re not going to hear or see it. The left widely delivers their message; the right expects everyone to go looking for theirs.

Conservatives who listen to Mark Levin or Rush Limbaugh or who visit the fantastic conservative news and commentary websites might think that we are fighting. Here’s why I disagree: the fight is supposed to be about winning the hearts and minds of those who are not yet on our side. Endless preaching to the choir doesn’t gain us ground, election victories, and it certainly doesn’t get us to where we can start to enact the massive public policy reforms that are needed.

It’s all about what the uninformed and misinformed don’t know — and when they don’t know it.

On Monday I referred to myself as a broken record and cited a couple of examples from my 2002 columns. In separate posts today I’m re-running one article and sections from others that I wrote in the summer of 2008.

If you want good government — if you don’t want confiscatory taxes, unsustainable spending and diminished liberty, and if you’d prefer to not leave the next generation a country fiscally and morally bankrupt — then some action on your part will be required.

Here are the posts:

Self government and a republic in name only

Counterinsurgency: An operations manual conservatives