Why Conservatism Is Gaining Universal Appeal - Natural Law, Common Sense, And Culture

There have been remarkable conservative victories in Latin America, a region historically socialist, and the Presidents of El Salvador, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, and Panama have taken strong stances on crime, public spending, taxation, and individual rights.

Nations in Western Europe have followed suit with Italy's President Giorgia Meloni leading the way, followed closely by likely winners in the next elections, Le Pen of France and Farage in Britain, Wilders in the Netherlands; and an Eastern Europe led by Poland and Hungary have become conservative stalwarts. 

 

This conservatism is bold, aggressive, and undaunted.  Bukele in El Salvador has redefined civil rights, stating unequivocally that the rights of the ordinary Salvadoran citizen to live in a peaceful, crime-free country trumps the rights of criminals; and accordingly he has rounded up members of the violent MS-13, Mara Salvatrucha gang, incarcerated them without the usual democratic due process, and has turned the country from one of the most violent in the hemisphere to the safest. 

Javier Milei of Argentina has made no bones about calling the socialist Left 'mierda', bloodsucking parasites on the body politic, taking money from the most productive and wasting it on unaccountable, fairy tale programs with no discipline, no objective indicators, and nothing but vain, self-serving, give-away appeal. 

Meloni of Italy has said she is proud of Italy's history, culture, and Christian leadership, and has refused the blandishments of the Left which has led to the uncontrolled illegal immigration from Africa, a Muslim wave which has threatened social stability and cultural integrity.  She has ruled that no LGBTQ proselytizing will not be allowed in Italian schools and that gay marriage and parentage is no longer officially recognized.  

 

Marine Le Pen and Marion Marechal in France have been even more defiant and have vowed if elected to cleanse France of the anti-democratic, divisive, hateful Muslim invasion. Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch of the UK have both denounced illegal, Muslim immigration and have said that legendary English culture is being eroded, derogated, and destroyed because of this unwanted influx. 

Sanae Takaichi, the new president of Japan has said that there will be no Muslim immigration to Japan, that no mosques will be built, and that despite the country's falling birth rate, she refuses to destroy its homogeneous culture.  

China, while officially Communist is socially conservative and committed to the universal extension of Han culture, adherence to Confucian values, and nationalism. Vladimir Putin is as committed to Russian cultural, social, economic, and political hegemony. 

These leaders and their constituents laughed at America during the Biden years - an unrecognizable country of fiction, absurdity, and self-indulgence.  The very idea of the gender spectrum, let alone transgenderism was unconscionable; and the lionization of the black man, former slave drawn from the African forest for his physical strength and fertility, was equally unthinkable.  Integration perhaps, but undeserved honor and privilege? Never.  

Americans might overlook the ghetto in the name of identity but not the rest of the world. Open borders are tantamount to erosion of the state, culture, and the nation. 

The arrival of Donald Trump has been welcomed by these countries.  Even America's adversaries, Russia and China, have given Trump respect.  He is a member of their Machiavellian realpolitik club, and such members can do business together.  The rest of the increasingly conservative world has looked to America for leadership and example. 

This conservatism is fueled by three things - natural law, common sense, and culture.  No one but America's progressives can look at history and see peace and internationalism in the offing - a naive misreading at best and a profound ignorance at worst. 

Self-interest is the driving force of human nature and has been played out in every social arena from family to tribe to region to country. Countervailing force, defiant opposition, territorialism, and hegemony have been the human rule since the first settlements and will continue.  Geopolitics should be based on that understanding, nothing more. 

Americans with their gender focus have rejected natural biological law just as they have dismissed the absolute of human nature.  No one but American liberals claim that sexuality is a matter of choice.  Such ignorance is remarkable. 

It only takes common sense to realize that open immigration will destroy the cultural underpinnings of a culture, will lead to a dismissal of nations' storied past, and will alter the central ethos forever.  It takes only common sense to realize that a nation without border integrity will be overrun, taken over, and weakened. 

Perhaps because America is such a new country without the thousand-year history of its adversaries and allies, and because it has no central moral, religious, or philosophical ethos, it defies the concept of culture.  Yet France, 'the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church', the nation that saved European Christianity from the Muslim invaders, is profoundly and historically 'cultural'.  So is Italy, Russia, China, and Japan. 

No nation has been successful without such a central, universal, cultural core.  Ethics and moral principles are important and the same ones have characterized the highest civilizations since Greece and Rome. 

The Left cries racism, xenophobia, nationalism, sexism, and homophobia; but these are empty threats, built on fictitious, unfounded, fabulist imaginings. National cultural integrity is not xenophobia but an expression defining human society since its origins.  

Traditional marriage and parentage is not homophobic but subscription to natural law, Biblical injunction and demographic reality. Pie-in-the-sky public spending has bankrupted, corrupted, and destroyed the strongest countries.  Idealism is for religious worship not public policy. 

The American Left still cannot get over the victory of Donald Trump and his fulfilled promises of returning the country to its originalist roots. No president has been so hated, vilified, and been the victim of such inchoate attacks.  The Left’s failed vision, one without historical validation and defying logic is empty of policy, salient ideas, or resonance.  Hatred is the only thing left in the armory. 

The Left looks with horror at the conservative wave across the globe and sees it as only a temporary setback to progressive ideals.  Their day will come. 

Perhaps. History has its surprises and vagaries; but such a reversal is unlikely since conservativism is based on historical appraisal, objectivity, human nature, and reality. Progressivism is based only on idealism, hope, utopianism, and fancy. 

Big Talkers, Butt-Ins, And Bores - The Curse Of The Vaporous And The Charm Of The Politician

Lena Barton was a big talker - an incessant, unstoppable, determined and woman who lurked, waited and pounced. She did not discuss or listen.  There was a djinn inside her which demanded exit.  Whether her hydrangeas, her health, or her boys, they needed out. Tapped within they did not exist; but when voiced whether to interested or uninterested listeners, they lived. 

 

The origins of this talkativeness - or rather this need to talk - were vague - Lena could only remember as a young child feeling the need to talk and to talk a lot.  Speech was a gift not to be wasted. It existed solely as a part of her whether or not it was listened to.  It was her own shamanic ritual, a purging of feelings which had built up in the night.  She told about her dreams and her nightmares, expanded and elaborated them the more she told about them until they had a life of their own and were no longer a part of her. 

 

At Sunday Mass she thanked God for giving her such eloquence - a kind of second, separate but equally important nature.  She could create worlds with her voice, translate imaginings into physical shapes, sounds and smells.  God had been particularly generous when it came to creating her out of a lump of clay. 

In adolescence it - her volubility - turned into gossip.  She couldn't help herself when she heard a rumor - like her speech, a foundationless thing which sprang up without reason or warning - and carried it, embellished it, and spread it.  Rather than isolated as the source of unattributed, unsubstantiated claims, she became a kind of Cumaean Sibyl - a prophetess, a seer - all of which gave her an unusual ascribed agency.  She became the arbiter of all things social - which boys were interested in which girls, who was anointed and who was left out.  Girls came to her for advice, for prophecy, and for guidance. 

Her college years began badly.  No one, it seemed, was that interested in what she had to say - a girl who rattled on was the take - but soon enough she found her voice and her calling. Although campus radicalism was of no interest - a desperate flogging of others on a grand scale for recognition - she was sought after for her by then marvelous prolixity.  Not only could Lena talk and be listened to, she could inspire and motivate.  It mattered little whether or not she believed in what she spoke, it was the articulation which counted - the cadence, the rhythm, the tonality, and the passion. 

Lena was a vaporous person - a woman without substance, principle, or purpose whose voice carried weight; and she used it to her advantage. If people listened, nodded, agreed or not, it made little difference. It was the swaying that gave her credibility and worth. 

It was magic, this ability to turn heads, to turn skeptics into believers, the indifferent into the committed. She had passed on not one iota of wisdom or good sense. It was her words, her gift of gab, her carefully crafted prolixity which did the job. People who heard her were delighted and convinced; and she, having found her calling, was satisfied. 

Opposites attract goes the old adage, and in a way it was true for Lena although with some codicils.  Brent Mayberry was also a big talker which if the old saw were true, she would have stayed clear; but Brent was a different kind of talker.  A bulldozing, voice-over talker.  Hearing a discussion on Joyce, he interrupted with reminiscences of County Cork, the six-pack of Guinness he had downed on the moors, and the lovely dark-haired blue-eyed maidens on his watch. 

He was a man who could not tolerate anyone else's voice. It was not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing but one of center stage.  He could not stand to be left out, a trait he inherited from his mother who no matter what the subject offered either confabulated history, statistics, citations or something from her own store of personal trivia.  

The woman was a tedious bore, demanding attention, claiming against all reason that she was right and it happened the way she said, and Brent got the picture.  He couldn't help himself when it came to discussion.  Drawing on fiction, imagination, and presumption he like his mother kept up the front and added pain to misery as they dominated and bullied their way into every conversation. 

 

So the relationship between Lena and Brent turned out to be a vaudevillian pas de deux.  She began with some impossible confabulation, and he interrupted with more of his own.  Before you knew it the conversation had become theirs and theirs alone, a world apart, disconnected from reason, rationality, and reality. 

One can only imagine their pillow talk, unless freed from the strictures of polite society, they were able to get to the heart of the matter; but the greater likelihood was that they stepped on each other's overtures and turned foreplay into a whodunnit of sexual conundrums. 

Lena waited for the opportunity to talk about Ralph at Wayne State, Bobbie at Ole Miss, and Ferdinand still at home, an assumption of interest that went far beyond neighborliness.  I was supposed to care until after many months of these hijackings I realized that nothing she said mattered to her either.  It was the telling that was important, not the import or the reception.  I could have been a block of granite for all it mattered to her. 

Big Talkers - The Psychosocial Dimensions Of A Compulsive Disorder was a monograph published by Duke University Press by Harold Underwood, PhD, Chairman of the Psycho-Psychiatric Department of the Medical School in which he chronicled the life of what he called 'the needy prolix'

The Needy Prolix needs no introduction, for she has been all our tables, interrupting, diverting, a virtual baboon hungry for attention.  She is obtuse, obvious, and niggardly but cannot stop talking. Somewhere in childhood her personality was distorted and reconfigured into that of an incessant, intolerable bore.  That of course is the popular appraisal. Professionally she is a sick puppy, in need of a reality check and brought back to the here and now. 

For that introduction Underwood was questioned by the editorial review board for what might be considered inflammatory speech but he convinced them that such a preamble was necessary to put the illness in relief.  He didn't condemn these Needy Prolix individuals. Others did, and that was the point.  

Lena was not hauled off in a straightjacket - not that kind of mental illness - although I avoided her like the plague when I saw her coming.  Other than that devilish prolixity, she was not a bad sort, but that is not the point either. I pitied her husband and had no sympathy for her until I read the Underwood sequel which delved further into the painful 'miasma of doubt' that people like her suffered. 

I was still not convinced, but chastened for my summary dismissal of a disturbed woman. I didn't run away when I saw her coming. 

Donald Trump’s Magical Mystery Tour – A Welcome Relief From The Humdrum World Of Facts

The American Left has insisted that it has a hold on the truth, and that the President is the dissembler, the liar, the charlatan, the purveyor of untruths.  He has woven a quilt of lies, distortions, and confabulations and asked the American public to believe him - a master of deceit and legerdemain.  He is a con artist, a carny barker, a common huckster, a snake oil salesman.

Of course he is.  He is a vaudevillian, a huckster, a man of image and promise, a comic book hero, a spinner of yarns, a master of sea shanties and tall tales; and Americans like it that way. After suffering the penitential Biden years – the hectoring, the badgering, the moroseness and God-awful guilt, the Trump presidency is a welcome change.

Ironically it was always progressives who were the confabulators, insisting that men could become women, that reproduction was a technical affair, easily dispensed with and relegated to the broom closet, allowing for the full expression of the diversity of sexual choice.

The black man was not a former slave, chosen, marketed and sold for his brawn and reproductively, but the highest form of human evolution.  A sentient man of the rainforest and savannah, attuned to the environment, grouped in natural, tribal communities and not those confining, arbitrary social gulags enforced by white colonialists.  The world was everyone’s oyster, borders were artificial, racist, restrictive barriers to a universal New Age. Wealth was fungible, rightfully taken from those who earned it to those most in need. 

The Devil in D0stoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov tells Ivan that he is a vaudevillian, and without him the world would be a deadly dull place, a predictable, sanctimonious slog.  With him there is magic, mystery, romance, and intrigue.  Who wants to hear tales of a faithful marriage, an honest politician, proper little boys and chaste little girls?

‘The truth is overrated’, says the Devil. ‘Just look around you, and tell me what you see.  Nothing is what it seems.  If the truth simply stared you in the face, all guesswork gone, all pomp and circumstance retired, every bit of image, fancy, and presentation put back in the dressing room wardrobe, you would invent your own stories.  Rumor and innuendo would take the place of fact, the invented would replace the real.  An oxymoronic circle – truth turned into a confabulation which becomes truth.  I am the one who makes that all possible’.

Liberals have asked Americans to look for the inner woman and dismiss the folly of beauty.  Commonality is to rule individuality – women are a protected class, all the same because of a universal inner worth.

Donald Trump has rejected this and all other confected notions out of hand and replaced virtue with sequins, jewelry, eyeliner, and high heels.  Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but absolute.  There is no difference between Venus de Milo and the Hollywood starlets of today.  Theirs is symmetry, perfection, the lines and contours of health, wealth, and stature.

This has always been the case, of course but the Trump illusion is that this historically iconic character – the essential, universal standards of female beauty – is an apotheosis, not something irrelevant and dismissible. Hollywood is not fictitious but high reality.  Image, timeless beauty, limitless appeal and seductiveness are its stock-in-trade.

Trump has created a vision of perfection– the perpetual classic beauty of history.  His reality dismisses the fictitious assumption that everyone is beautiful.

Bill Clinton said that he wanted his Cabinet to ‘look like America’ and opened the door to DEI – Diversity Equity Inclusivity –and by the time Biden was in office, that was the cultural ethos. There was no such thing as ugly, misshapen, disorderly – all were in the same welcoming basket.

Trump said that he wanted America to look like the most beautiful of its citizens. It was his version of Camelot, JFK’s own fantastical vision of the American presidency as a royal court. No one cares about the inner workings of government – the travails of governance – but what it looks like, what it reflects; and the parade of svelte, young, blonde, blue-eyed beauties parading up and down Pennsylvania Avenue headed for the West Wing are the new reality.

So the Devil has had his due – fantasies masquerading as competing truths, all made possible by a friendly demon who only wants to brighten what Thomas Hobbes said was a short, ugly, brutish existence.

‘Fake news!’ shouts Trump to a CNN reporter whose questions reflect a progressive reality while the real truth is in the fable created by the President.  America is the greatest country in the world, hands down, and don’t you forget it, and with the spangles, fireworks, glitz and glitter of the 250^th Fourth of July the truth was writ large.

Politics has always been a smarmy affair with the truth only a febrile dream.  Politicians have lied through their teeth, inventing the most impossible cover-ups to their sexual dalliances, war records, political journeys; and since it takes two to tango, it has required a credulous audience; and the American public has been more gullible than most, perhaps because of our long history of snake oil salesmen, hucksters, and shell game tricksters.

Trump does not lie, he invents, and voila la difference. As a man of Hollywood and Las Vegas, he is a master at his trade.  Don’t lie, create. Use a kaleidoscopic lens, not a microscope.

America prefers Trump’s fantasies to those of the Left – who wouldn’t?  The progressive vision has been squeezed dry of beauty, romance, and fun.  A life in a grim, windowless basement with no exit.

Philosophers have always known that there is no such thing as absolute truth.  The moral precepts taught by Cato the Elder are not God-given and absolute, but simply a proven code of civic behavior.

Psychologists have long understood that all perception is subjective – eyewitnesses see what they want to see.  Durrell, Browning, and Kurosawa have all written about lives that had no reality but that ascribed to them by different viewers.

The truth is not all it is cracked up to be.

The contest between Left and Right is like the epic, fabulist battles between right and wrong, Siva vs Ravana in the Ramayana – pure fantasy, epic, metaphorical, and a romping good ride.

Who cares about the truth?  Who could possibly care in a world with such confabulation and storytelling?

The Trump years are satisfying for many reasons, but the most compelling is that of the impossibly diametrically opposed fabulist visions of the political combatants – magnificent, sometimes perverse, but always fodder for epic battles.

Trump will always be the master of ceremonies, the impresario, the producer- the first cause while progressives can only manage a freak show, interesting in and of itself, but nothing to match the bombast of Donald Trump.  When the Donald Show leaves town, we will all be disappointed.