That retort of “what have you ever conserved” oft spouted by both the Alt-Right and the more emotional Johnny-come-latelys to the root of the struggle against the Fabian Left and their Gramscian march, is an obnoxious, and usually ignorant, thing.
Often the targets of this taunt are accused of being “soy boy beta males”, “Fredo-cons”, “cucks”, or selling out America in order to be invited to Leftist “cocktail parties”. After all, the taunters might claim, there must be a reason that the taunted aren’t running around like headless chicken demanding that we “do something NOW”. They seem to believe that the Left doesn’t actually play by any rules, and that we should fight back without restriction like the Left does… all the while not realizing that those social rules and boundaries are indeed helping to impede the Left and thus actually conserve something from the Left’s grasp.
In other words, the “what have you conserved” type arguments are based on an incorrect premise, namely the idea the assumption that the Left and Right are on equal footing and that the Left only wins because they play dirty while the Right plays “fair” if not loses on purpose.
The conservative movement has increasingly stood up to the broader Left more in the past 50 years than in the 50 years proceeding that. It only seems the other way around because longer ago we had more to give up in attrition. All we had 100 years ago or so was “normalcy” to appeal to and descriptive tenets that were already being rotted by the Left’s prospective goals. There was not cohesive conservative ideology let-alone organized movement. “Conservatism”, even into the ’30’s was merely a rejection of the Left’s economic command/control economy.
Sussing out the Left’s goals and what the conservative opposition is didn’t happen until the cold war. In other words, the Left used to have unrivaled momentum and had successfully infiltrated institutions via the “Gramscian march”. Against such momentum and fundamental transformation, any resistance against the Left is equates to something conserved. Against such institutional empowerment and movement momentum, actual victories and counter transformations of society may seem like a loss because the immediate outcomes show only a slowing of the Left’s relentless drive.
The transformation of fundamental precepts is necessary to counter the Left, and the transformation of such precepts may not show immediate reversals of any large magnitude… yet still, they are conserving. That there have been massive victories seems to escape some. Take, for example, 2nd Amendment. Less than 50 years ago almost every Constitutional lawyer in any potion of power would have told you that it wasn’t an individual right. Yet, today, the Supreme Court recognizes that it is. That didn’t happen overnight by “fighting dirty”. It happened because people took the time to change the fundamentals to the point where their argument was a fait accompli.
