I know many people who have had their lives wrecked by “cancel culture.” They lost jobs, spouses, houses, friends, and social networks. Some are permanently unemployable for anything but manual labor.

This has real consequences. Politics revolves around the friend/enemy distinction and patron/client relationships. Those on the Right learn quickly that few on “their side” will defend them from an attack by antifa magnified by media. Few institutions or leaders will protect them. Progressives can count on a network of nonprofits, lawyers, and friendly media to ensure that even “extremists” find new berths.

Van Jones was dropped by the Obama White House after conservatives publicized his connections to communists and conspiracy theorists. Today, he lectures Americans about what is acceptable discourse from his perch at CNN. There is no right-wing equivalent to left-wing terrorists like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn getting prestigious university posts.

Such recoveries are hard to imagine for conservative dissidents. We have made progress advancing our issues within the Right, but that’s not much benefit to people who were the vanguard. There will be no tributes at CPAC to Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, or even Pat Buchanan. Metaphorically speaking, the vanguard chokes the rivers with the corpses of their careers so respectable conservatives can walk across and pretend they led the fight the entire time. The limited professional success Steve Sailer now enjoys may be a sign this is changing, but within careful limits.

This ”imagine if the roles were reversed” situation is obvious, but the reasons for it are less clear.

One reason is political will. For most on the Right, politics isn’t their top priority. It’s not their religion. Some Christians even seem to believe there is a kind of virtue in losing, because it proves their virtue and ensures a heavenly reward.

"We have no place of our own."

Yes we do. It's called the Heavenly Jerusalem. https://t.co/IZoGP3GnHD

— sᴄᴏᴛᴛ ᴀɴɪᴏʟ (@ScottAniol) July 5, 2024

"[Christians] don’t win down here, we lose. You ready for that? … It killed Jesus. It killed all the apostles. We’re all going to be persecuted." -Pastor John MacArthurhttps://t.co/13SYES65nb

— American Vision (@AmericanVision) March 5, 2024

More broadly, a conservatism is based on “limited government” can lead to a belief that power is inherently bad and that it is immoral to use it. Of course, any political movement that believes this is not really a political movement, because politics is competition for power. A movement that tells its followers that power is bad is preparing them for endless defeat.

In contrast, it is because progressive goals are utopian and impossible that they can motivate people to fight. Human equality is impossible. Different groups will never perform at the same level. There will always be classes. Human differences do not come just from education, social conditions, or luck, but from biology. It is more accurate to say that class is a biological construct than that race is a social construct.

Stalin sent millions of people to the Gulag.

Among them were the "Enemies of the people"—the bourgeois educated elite.

Despite having everything taken from them, their descendants are more educated than their peers today.

Short