Last Monday Jared E. Peterson posted an article at American Thinker with this headline: “How the Left Turned electoral rejection into triumph (and what Conservatives can learn from them).”
Conservatives sure do need to learn how to fight the information war — here’s an excerpt from Peterson’s very important article (with a bit of emphasis added):
We must finally acknowledge the scope of the damage that’s issued from attaching too much importance to electoral victories and too little to cultural losses. Through this immense misassessment, conservatives, long America’s natural majority, have lost the better part of two generations, and at the same time allowed the Left to enormously enlarge its voter base from abroad.
These two phenomena, tenaciously engineered and supported by the Left over five decades, their importance too often deprecated by those who should have known better, have coalesced to create the present political environment. In that environment, sustained one party presidential government by the Left has become a real possibility. Intelligent and bold political efforts could still avoid this outcome, but it’s late and there is little room for error.
…
To conservatives, [Jimmy] Carter’s 1976 victory was a mere noxious aberration, as they stormed back with Ronald Reagan in 1980, ’84, and ‘88 (in the last of those years winning handily with Reagan’s surrogate, George Herbert Walker Bush). For the conservative victors, the war had been fought and won. And won again.
Except for the nagging detail that such wars are never permanently won. When confronting the Left — with its perpetual compulsive urge to social destruction and glassy-eyed pursuit of utopia through the tender embrace of government — the war is never won for good. The Left never gives up, never apologizes for its unnumbered gross failures, and never, ever, goes away.
That truth — unfortunately for the great America Middle — was forgotten, or never learned, by the political victors of ‘68, ‘72, ‘80, ‘84, and ’88; as was forgotten the related truth, that gaining and holding political power in a universal franchise republic depends on the composition of the population and on what that population believes — both of which, “over the long run,” are constantly changing and infinitely malleable.
When the conservative winners from those years should have been struggling to gain, hold and expand a voice in America’s universities and larger culture, a presence that might have complemented, strengthened and, ultimately, maintained their electoral triumphs, and should have been ensuring that America chooses its immigrants, they instead immersed themselves in the easy spoils of ephemeral political victory. Alas, in the euphoric flush of victory it’s hard to focus on remote dangers. From government posts they went, not to the educational and cultural fray, but to the generous rewards of the corporate world and the comforting same-think of conservative magazines and foundations.
Peterson also writes that “all is not lost”:
If nothing else does, the Left’s own recovery from its crushing defeats of the late 60’s, 70’s and 80’s should convince conservatives that in America electoral victory by one side is never assuredly permanent.
And:
[I]t needs to be clearly recognized that an astonishingly large remnant of the old America has survived the Left’s onslaught. Reality is amazingly stubborn, and a substantial part of the American public is still in touch with it. Very probably that “remnant” still constitutes a majority of the US electorate, and, if the issues of intense concern to it are forcefully addressed, victory at the critical presidential level is very probably achievable in 2016.
Read more: American Thinker
Image credit: barbwire.com.
