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So there's been this internal struggle within Conservative space to grasp how it acts and reacts in the wake of what the ideological Left does. I'm speaking here in the States. Conservatives on the right have historically been a reactionary movement, the left, revolutionary.
On one hand is a sort of contrarian Rightism that basically thinks Conservatives overreact, don't act with a certain level of political intelligence, and takes the position of: you can't predict what exactly will happen, so stop getting carried away. These are often elitists.
On the other hand are generally the more reactionary and sometimes more insular Rightists who don't believe the Left is playing a fair game, or are perhaps a victim of what the Left does and sees them as a much greater threat than merely a political opponent.
I won't name names but I've literally heard one of these elitist types basically critique Conservatives for being too critical of the LGBT(etc) movement. and lacking the foresight to see what the next agenda item is, therefore they should pipe down.
For lack of a better explanation, imagine someone saying "don't criticize the LGBT movement because you don't know what the next letter is going to be appended to it." As if there isn't room to criticize some of the people behind it, or worry about where it's going.
The thing is, the last 10 years have been a crazy transformation of what i knew as "Liberals" for my entire life, to essentially "Progressives" now, which involves a lot of social justice warfare, black blocs, and the insane speed at which they've mobilized online.
There was no "woke" in 2010. No Black Lives Matter. We couldn't really tell if the push for biological men in women's restrooms, and the complete separation of gender and biological sex, and straight up identity warfare based on immutable attributes, were serious agenda items.
So yeah, we didn't see these things coming, but they were on a march our way, regardless. And to the shame of the Conservative movement, they basically let it happen.
We can deride GamerGate for being an ineffectual movement in the long-term, but for a couple years some not-so-hardcore left wingers did a better job of combating Social Justice Warriors and woke Progressivism than the entirety of Conservative elite space.
Like it or not, Trump was a delayed reaction to this bold transformation of the American Left. Better late than never, but I worry now it's too late. And the reaction of elitist Conservatives was not just to fight this reaction, but to essentially back up Democrats against it.
The so-called RINOs were never the vanguard of intellectual Conservatism, and were completely unarmed for any fight against the intellectual Progressives. And when the going got tough, they folded, and some went as far as to side with the Progressives/Democrats.
What I'm saying here is, we can't predict the future - but that has NEVER been a requirement of either ideological or political conservatism. It's not our fault we can't see we're going to get AntiFa+ or Red Lives Matter, or another Progressive variant on steroids in 2 years.
What is our fault is what we do about it. Trump was just a stop-gap measure. Like it or not, he was the best we had, and he won when others literally didn't, but ultimately wasn't up to the task. No one man can do it, and I don't think many around him were up for it, either.
The point of this tirade is this: The modern American Conservative movement cannot survive if it's left to the devices and whims of Conservative intelligentsia. They're not just deficient, they're unwilling, and I don't think they're coming back.
