Why we shouldn’t call ourselves Conservatives

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It’s an oft stated observation but no less a true one that Conservatives in Australia have demonstrably failed to conserve much of anything. They have allowed almost every cultural bastion from education to the media to be taken over by the left, to the point that almost every eighteen year old fresh out of school in the country today has seldom, if ever, been exposed to any worldview other than that of the Greens. The average University student currently starting their undergraduate has almost no need of further indoctrination by the creepy denizens of the tertiary education faculty lounges. The job has already been done.

In every schoolroom, be it state run or independent, the same assumptions about our country and its place in the world will have been drummed into the impressionable minds of the students from kindergarten to year twelve. Nearly every teacher now teaching has been manufactured in a system to indoctrinate your children into the ideology of the ruling elite.

While conservatives in parliament have obsessed over tax cuts, budget deficits, free trade deals and incremental increases in GDP, the left has been fighting and winning a massive cultural war.

But then it’s easy to win a war when you’re running almost unopposed.

When John Howard, supposedly the most evil and right wing Prime Minister ever [if you listened to the ABC] won a landslide in 2004 and took control of both houses of Parliament, he had perhaps the greatest chance of any conservative government in Australian history to fight back against the machine. Instead he spent his political capital trying to push for comparatively meaningless and easily reversed Industrial relations reform.

As a result we have since had ten years of University graduates who overwhelmingly genuflect before the altar of the left on every issue, from climate change to multiculturalism, from same sex marriage to immigration, with no sight of any future relief. Even those who later break the conditioning do so from within a leftist mindset.

The process of recognising and scouring from one’s mind the left-wing assumptions about globalism and equality can take years of painful self reflection. Most people who move from the left to the right as they age, take on the responsibilities of adulthood and slip back towards logic and rationality as reality sinks in, simply don’t do it.

While this happens we hear calls from prominent conservatives for calm and civilised discussion, we hear them lament the incivility of the left while cursing anyone on the right who tries to fight the enemy at their own game. Both in Australia and overseas, establishment conservatives seem more concerned with being nice than winning. They have taken the losing maxim of the ultimate civilised loser William F Buckley to heart, resigning themselves to “Standing athwart history yelling stop”.

As the recent debates over same sex marriage and transexuality have shown us, the modern Australian “Conservative” is just the leftist of ten years ago, if that. Why should we describe ourselves with the same moniker used by such utterly empty, soulless losers who quite clearly believe in nothing?

I know some on the thinking side of Australian politics that have come to the same conclusion; they call themselves Patriots, or Right-wingers, Nationalists or Reactionaries, anything to distance them from the failure draped firmament that modern conservatism has become.

Conservatives in Australia don’t want to win; they want to lose politely while getting guest spots on Sky News or a column in the Australian. It’s time the rest of us cut loose the weight of their “Respectability” from around our necks.Photo by Christian Haugen