Charlottesville was a shameful disaster, and the responses from America’s elites were far from encouraging. Most of them amounted to “Who started it?” That is the response of a child. But then again, “Antifa came better-armed and was more violent overall” is as morally asinine a statement as “Why didn’t Trump clearly denounce the KKK?” What was needed after Charlottesville was not a battle of Whataboutisms, of politically charged puerility, but of moral conviction and clarity—particularly from conservatives.
Despite the warnings of Russell Kirk, M.E. Bradford, Chronicles, and precious few others, conservatives yielded to the temptation of ideology a long time ago. Conservatism, the “anti-ideology,” has thus negated itself. It is now little more than a set of policy objectives that exist to the right of the radical left, on a spectrum that is apparently bounded by incest and cannibalism, on one end, and jackbooted oppression of the Other, on the other. On the left end of the spectrum, slightly to the right of incest and cannibalism, are the right to mace and bludgeon political opponents (“hate speech is not free speech!”); the taxpayer-funded emasculation of psychotic soldiers (when will you stop persecuting our legions of transgendered warriors?); and the promise of wonder drugs made from baby parts. ...