Thursday, January 03, 2013

Marching Backwards Through the Institutions: Daniel Pipes’ Vision of Conservatism's Future is a Death Sentence

By Nicholas Stix

“Like so many other conservatives, I had come to assume that the Tea Party, the 2010 election results, Solyndra, 8 percent unemployment, Benghazi, and an aroused opposition ... assured defeat for Barack Obama's bid for a second term.”

So begins Daniel Pipes’ shallow postmortem of the 2012 electoral catastrophe. He “assumed” that Romney would win. Republican positions need to become “cool,” which will come about through a Gramscian march through all of the institutions that are presently leftwing strongholds. The march will be spearheaded by such bastions of style as the the Liberty Film Festival, Wall Street Journal, and Commentary.

There is a complete mismatch between Pipes’ ends (GOP dominance) and his means. He speaks of a long-term strategy in which Republicans create cultural institutions that will act as “feeders” for the Party.

That ship has already sailed. The GOP has had its think tanks and propaganda outlets for generations--almost 60 years, in National Review’s case. They are marching through the institutions, alright--backwards! National Review, Wall Street Journal, and Commentary are in surrender mode. They support America’s demographic destruction. They represent not the future of American conservatism, but its past. Pipes, like the rest of Conservatism, Inc., has learned nothing. These “conservatives” are as ideologically calcified as the racial socialists they claim to oppose, but to whom they in reality long ago surrendered.

* * *
What is the Future of Conservatism in the Wake of the 2012 Election? 
Symposium
By Daniel Pipes

January 2013
Commentary
To see the replies of 52 other writers to this same question, click here. [Requires paid subscription.]

Like so many other conservatives, I had come to assume that the Tea Party, the 2010 election results, Solyndra, 8 percent unemployment, Benghazi, and an aroused opposition (said one Romney adviser: on election day, "you just don't want to get in the way of a Republican heading into the polls") assured defeat for Barack Obama's bid for a second term. His victory was therefore particularly bitter. Was I alone in sleeping badly and avoiding the news for days?

So many analyses have been proffered for what went wrong: Romney was too conservative or not conservative enough, he ran on his biography, he shied away from winning issues, he could not connect with the masses. So many conclusions have also been drawn: conservatives need to modernize (hello, gay partnerships), they must reach out to non-whites (welcome, illegal immigrants), they should nominate true conservatives.

Myself, I subscribe to the "politics is downstream from culture" argument. While conservatives sometimes prevail in policy debates, they consistently lose in the classroom, on the best-seller list, on television, at the movies, and in the world of arts. These liberal bastions, which provide the feeders for Democratic party politics, did not develop spontaneously but result from decades of hard work traceable back to the ideas of Antonio Gramsci.

Conservatives should emulate this achievement. With Ed Gillespie, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, I look forward to the day when it will be as cool "to believe in the principles of free enterprise, the need for strong national security, the merits of traditional families, and the value of religious faith as it is to sneer at capitalism, demean the military, denigrate parents, and deride religion."

Happily, American conservatives have a counter-establishment already in place: the Wall Street Journal and Fox News Channel may be best known, but the Bradley Foundation, Pepperdine University, the Liberty Film Festival, and Commentary matter no less. Yes, conservative institutions rarely enjoy the history, resources, and prestige of their liberal counterparts – but they do exist, they are growing, and they possess a convincing and optimistic message.

It will be a long, hard road to traverse, but there is no short cut and it can succeed.

Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

His name fits, Pipes, in pipe dreams.

Anonymous said...

Good catch Nick! I've read Dan Pipe for years and have found him to be a mixed bag of some small worth regarding the ME history but overall he stinks of Neo-Conism. Commentary and the 'Wartburg' Journal are rather worthless sources of rejuvenation for Freedom advocates.

Anonymous said...

Nick, you'll eventually have to make a decision. What's healthy and right or what's comfortable to your kinsmen. The internet has opened the doors, Nick. People know all about it now. Pipes, as a "political strategist", won't work any more. Everybody knows where he's coming from. Join us if you will but you'll have to show more evidence of conversion this time.

PDK said...

I got a fair amount of my education by reading on my own back in the 70`s and 80`s. I did get in 1.5 years of college and learned some there as well.

On my own I read Carl Jung, Carl Sagan and others including Steven J. Gould. I consider myself a Jungian, but I also read others including Freud and Adler.

The other day I was thinking how our liberal, non-liberal dichotomy here in our American culture can be seen, at least in part, as a reflection of Freud`s model of the psyche, of Ego, ID and Superego, where if one thinks of the Id as representing reality and the superego representing the idealistic, and both competing for control of the Ego, the individual. For those who remember Laugh-in, Flip Wilson had the joke that the devil made me do it. Further, back in that same day was the commercial of the devil on one side and the angel on the other, each trying to influence the man being spoken to.

As I`ve come to understand liberals and their democrat party, I see their leaders, the God complexed, narcissistic few who endeavor to control all, via their ideology as a mind control enterprise, whereby their ideology is the superego, that which should and therefore must become reality. For example, the only difference between whites and blacks is the color of the skin, nice illusion, but one`s eye of reality sees something different and conflict ensues, eventuating with one or the other to be accepted as reality.

Our democrats chose that name because they want the rule of the law of our culture to be chosen by majority vote, democracy, and here in American ours is a fully enfranchised democracy. Unfortunately, the democrat constituency is comprised of blacks and browns; they are of lower IQ, Islamics, insane people, and white liberals, the immature, where cowardice, sloth and envy course their psyche deeply.

The republicans represent our non-liberals, those who have matured and further, intend the law of our culture be a written law in the form of a Constitution, and a Republic is just that, a culture ruled by a Constitution. Our written law is our Constitution and its addendum, the Bill of Rights.

There is a fair amount of truth in this model as far as the competition between our two dominant groups of liberals and non-liberals. Further how our future and therefore posterity will live is dependent on who out competes the other, and most unfortunately liberals are allowed to cheat, cheating being the prerogative of the immature.

One venue of the liberal ideology is the accomplishment of conjoining the gene pools, creating a half breed, single gene pool. This is good for the lower IQ blacks and browns, but further is an abrogation of the white evolution of 10`s of 1000s of years and is to me, horrifying.

That someone such as Kim K. should set an example to our young, impressionable white girls, circa 12 to 18 years of age, just before their age of reproducing adult hood dawns, is one example of this sick liberal ideology becoming both materialized and manifest.

I have gleaned and garnered this information over the course of my life, and further, have processed it over my 58 years. This is what I see and it scares me.

It not only scares me for us of today, both for older and younger, but also for our posterity who shall inherit from us what we leave behind for them.

Our white gene pool and our Founding Fathers culture of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness genuinely hang in the balance. Both these realities are our white way in which we live in harmony with our nature. Hopefully, with this fuller understanding, we may arm ourselves better, and do battle with the liberals in a more winning way.

May God speed our endeavor. Thank you.

Anonymous said...

Here's a link to a story I just saw. Details are still sketchy but typical media manipulations are already at play. Note the video shows a "white" guy making tasteless comments re the assault. Why do I have the feeling the remarks may become more of a story than the actual attack? Oh...it's cause it's a white guy they can focus on! Not sure how this will actually play out but you can be sure the media is going to look to deflect and deep six this story as usual. jERRY

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-usa-crime-ohiobre9030nb-20130104,0,1063448.story


http://news.msn.com/us/video?videoid=d60e4f83-d313-e01d-ba0d-95d45bca91f9