When someone is trying to sell you something—anything—the use of high pressure sales tactics is clear warning of caveat emptor. Between the urgency and pressure, the intent to to deny you a chance to think things through, or to act in a well considered way, in the hopes of the veracity of the claims are not examined and second thoughts not given time to form. This is true in politics as it is true in other aspects of life, from commerce to faith.
The political message that certain things have to happen right now lest irreversible dire consequences happen if delay is brooked, is just such a high pressure sales tactic. There is no further time to think, which begs the question of what it is they don’t want you to think about. The sentiment that things are so perilous that we must tear everything down and act without constraint in doing so, or not restrain ourselves in our fervor so as to preserve anything of value would otherwise be destroyed, is a sentiment common upon the fringe of the proverbial political horseshoe. In both cases, this need to dismantle a society so irredeemable that only complete reconstruction along the intelligent design of its core proponents is an idea common to the many revolutions that arose in Europe from the French Revolution through the Russian Revolution and onto the modern day call to fundamentally transform society. It is the fierce urgency of now that can brook no delay, no tempering, and no doubts.
Don’t think. Don’t question. Just do.
That urgency to act now with wild abandon, because that the advocates of such abandon seek to destroy and replace, justifies an act of collective self-defense without limit by the ochlocratic mob and those who seek to use them. Against this stands conservatism, which serves not as a proscriptive ideology to be implemented by any means necessary, but a descriptive one that serves as constraint on the ambitious, and also as the wisdom that serves as enlighten bad decisions some would rather keep in the dark.. The value of this wisdom can be clearly seen by the chaos and violence of the French Revolution as contrasted when well measured and considered reflections made against it.
This is the urgency of those whose shibboleth is “do you know what time it is?”
There is no clearer example of emotionally manipulative hyperbole to justify overturning everything, including its own well reasoned past understanding, than the once vaunted Heritage Foundation. Rather than a slow Gramcian march through the institution, the Heritage Foundation fell victim to a short bus drive of fervent revolutionaries—not of the 18th Century American variety—but of a continental European type, which started with the French Revolution.
It’s less “Spirit of ‘76” than the “Spirit of ‘48”. No wonder the need to obfuscate this by denigrating America as an “idea”, doing so makes it easier to sell people on replacing it with an idea that came from a foreign people in a foreign land without further shared history.
And revolution in the continental European sense is indeed what is being sold. The “rules” are evil and the bringer of ruin. Those values and ideas that were a distillation of our great American heritage are considered not as the cause of our greatness, but the destroyer of them. To call back upon that is to become evil oneself, in this view. In order for them to fundamentally transform America, the threat must be so manifest that we must “burn away the rot” in order to achieve their vision of an immanentized and “glorious” future; any actual shared vision of our shared heritage becomes a barrier, or at least speed bump” to that implementation of their vision. They are, fundamentally, the same utopians who wish to immanentize the eschaton on the Left; they may differ on the exact particulars of the eschaton, but they agree that immanentization must not be delayed or even questioned.
Oh, the irony of when they claim it is conservatives who oppose “honest and open intellectual debate” or “solutions that can be implemented strategically”, when their answer to “what time it is” is that it is time to overthrow their oppressors by burning it all down and rebuilding according to their academic design. You see, they are intellectuals who have figured it all out and know there is no time left to debate any—who purported hold unquestioned maxims—who dare question their maxims!
Those so-called unquestioned maxims are but Gods of the Copybook Headings that are the distilled wisdom added to over the better part of a millennium that, not only provides a foundation for what intelligent designers of the past could never understand or predict, but shapes as it is shaped and perpetually refined, and may continue to do so if it is not “burn[ed] away”.
It is a false dilemma fallacy to say that the rules of the past brought us to our present conditions, which being so horrible, requires their overturning and replacement with the proffered solutions that can brook no delay in implementation. To support this, they complain about a fabled “Uniparty” and the alleged “foundational principles” that caused the “demise of the American working class” and the “erosion of the institutions that defined American life”. Those principles, again, are derivative of the collective knowledge and experience of the generations that stood before us, and not the fiercely urgent new first principles created in vacuo ex nihilo.
The strawman “conservative”, to them, at best believes in an extremist libertarian world order that verges on outright immoral libertine depravity, and at worse is part of the “Uniparty” conspiracy. Their worldview is one where liberty and freedom have destroyed virtue, and that liberty and freedom must in turn be constrained by virtue as defined by the darkly enlightened elite acting as intelligent designers acting without any priors other than a superficial sense of normalcy which can be reestablished in vacuo ex nihilo. As in economics as it is with society in general, “how little they know about what they imagine they can design,” to use the words of Hayek.
And this is the fierce urgency of knowing what time it is. They consider our actual heritage to be a dead end, and only a narrow window of time remaining to immanentize the eschaton, lest all be lost. And that is the high pressure sale: That America is at a dead end must be accepted without question their new and different direction must be taken now. There is no time to review the path we have trod; no time to consider the strength and wisdom that came before; and certainly there is not time to debate. You don’t even have the luxury, they claim, to even doubt that we are at a dead and or if their proffered solution is good, wise, or even the only alternate path available.
Did they not consider that those conservative principles are not the cause, but the barrier to the collapse of Western Civilization. One need only compare America with the rest of the West to see the truth of that, if one were to peer beyond the mere superficial and occasional attempts at LARPing “trad” fantasies of a past that never truly existed except in their own minds. But then the entire point of the fierce urgency of knowing “what time it is” and the “now” requiring eschewing prudence in favor of “belief systems” that blind and overwhelm with “dogmatic fervor”.
Don’t think. Don’t question. Just do as they say.
A little temporal mood music:
