Did you know that the Trump campaign’s charges of election fraud are “unsubstantiated”; that there is simply “no evidence” to back them up? You surely ought to know by now, since that’s been the liturgical formula, repeated by the mainstream media (including Fox News, whose primetime anchors now resemble the proverbial rats abandoning the sinking ship) at least a thousand times a day. By the way, there is “no evidence” of Hunter Biden’s emails either (another Russian disinformation campaign); “no evidence” of the Biden crime family’s influence-peddling enrichment scheme; hell, there’s no evidence that Hunter Biden even exists.
The liberal press, which ludicrously applauds itself for its “hard-hitting investigative journalism” and its vocation of “speaking truth to power”, is evidently as dumbstruck as the hapless victims of the Gorgon Medusa whenever the truth is inconvenient to the acquisition or preservation of power by Democrats. When the President asserted four years ago that he was being “spied on” by the Clinton-Obama police apparatus, the press dismissed it as another habitual Trumpian stretcher; and even after all the banana-republic machinations of the Democrat coup attempt had been exposed and proven, they continued to stick to their story (notwithstanding that there really was “no evidence” for the four-year-long investigation into “Russia collusion”). On the other hand, there was apparently lots of evidence that Brett Kavanaugh was at a party some month, some year, and at some geographical locus somewhere within the continental United States around, oh, approximately, give or take, 30 years ago.
The agnosticism of the mainstream media in the face of blatant leftist wrongdoing is by now an ancient tradition, going back to Walter Duranty’s repeated declarations in The New York Times that there was apodictically “no evidence” of dissidents’ being sent to the Gulag during Comrade Stalin’s paradisal reign. If CNN and The New York Times had been around in Roman antiquity, they would have found no evidence of the Catiline Conspiracy, the persecution of Christians under Diocletian, or Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents.
On the subject of election fraud, you’ve no doubt heard another venerable trope that is making the rounds among the media herd of independent minds: that political corruption being universal, both parties are, at least occasionally, guilty of it — another of those cleverly-cynical-sounding expressions of moral equivalency with which everyone in the beau monde is expected to agree.
Of course, it should be obvious that electoral fraud is rather more than “occasional” for the Democrat Party. (They have a long history of it, if anyone cares to check the court record.) It is hardly, in any case, an aberration when leftists lie and cheat to obtain and maintain power, treat the rule of law as a bourgeois atavism, censor or consign their political opponents to prison. That is what the apologists for communism used to say about the Soviet Union, which they argued was a perversion of the authentic, humane, and benevolent essence of the original socialist idea; which (they continued) had never been anywhere reified.
But the “evidence” is overwhelming that leftist ideology is inherently malignant, inasmuch it is grounded in the monstrous arrogance according to which the State, which invariably means the few who have wrested control of the government and its monopoly of force, knows better than you or I how to live our lives and how our societies should be organized; and that it is justified in using the full might at its disposal to compel its subjects to accept its superior wisdom.
What I am describing here is not merely the discredited and superannuated totalitarian despotisms of the past century (the Soviet Union, Maoist China, etc.). I am describing a perennially corrupt moral disposition — the antiquated terms “vainglory”and “lust for power” still seem apposite –, an attitude of such moral and intellectual presumption that it deems it not only excusable, but ethically imperative, to use all means necessary, legal or illegal, in order to effect and enforce its enlightened vision.
Have we not seen enough of the poisoned fruits of that criminal attitude at work in progressive circles here and in the United States? The suborning by the Obama administration and its loyalists of putatively independent agencies of government to overthrow a duly elected President because his views, as judged by the inquisitors of progressive orthodoxy, are retrograde and “deplorable”. The violent (though in the case of the media and the academy, violence is no longer necessary) suppression of heterodox thought, by means of the Maoist shaming, dismissal, and ostracism of nonconformist thinkers. The riots in Democrat-controlled cities, condoned by Democrat legislators and indeed incited by Democrat rhetoric, in which defenceless residents and business owners (many of them black and Latino) were fire-bombed, maimed, and killed, and had their livelihoods destroyed—atrocities that were exhorted and celebrated as heroic acts in the cause of “racial justice”. The threats of violence or financial ruin that successfully intimidated otherwise sane and rational citizens and corporations to excuse and support the above. The morally and psychologically toxic cult of victimhood, which has long been the fundamental plank in the Democrats’ platform, though it foments only hatred, self-exculpation, dependency, and the resultant panoply of sociopathologies that have inevitably wrecked the lives of their client victim-groups. The murder of babies under the auspices of feminist abstractions. The extra-judicial conviction of men by Believe-the-Women feminist witch-hunters. The modern-day persecution of Christians by the LGBT Ministries of Truth. One could go on, of course. In any case, honesty demands that we no longer shrink from the obvious conclusion that an ideology that has inflicted such wholesale carnage upon the ancient principles of law and justice — all for the sake of power and under the vainglorious illusion that it knows best — is evil, full stop, and those who impose it on the rest of us can hardly, at this stage in that ideology’s ruinous career, plead ignorance.
Doesn’t the Right also, when it serves them, bend the rules? It would be platitudinous—just as the evenhanded imputation of good and evil to all political philosophies is platitudinous—to say that many politicians who have identified themselves as “on the Right” have been malicious. But in all such cases with which I am familiar, it has been their defection from conservative principles — usually by succumbing to the temptation to be befriended by liberals –, that has betrayed them.
For that reason, it’s facile to conflate conservatism with Republicanism, or any other nominally conservative party. I know of no party at this juncture that can still call itself “conservative” with a straight face. But so far as titularly “conservative” politicians dedicate themselves to the defence of traditional conservative principles (the smallest government possible, equality before the law, rule by right not might, the guarantee of public safety, the protection and promotion of freedom of thought, expression, association, and religious conscience, and the preservation of the traditions and moral norms that the “deplorable” majority has anciently agreed upon)—in the service of those principles, I can’t see how it’s possible to transgress.