The Game Conservatives Play Is Rigged

After a night out on the town in Tokyo and one too many Black Nikka whiskeys, I awoke early this morning. Like many of my drunken dawns, I found myself mindlessly browsing Twitter because that sometimes is just the easier thing to do rather than getting up.

There I stumbled upon this new video from The Lotus Eaters’ Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad. Carl’s videos are usually very thoughtful and great at getting me back to sleep on mornings like this (I mean this as a compliment). However this one bothered me a bit and now I’m up, being useful, doing chores and writing this. Here it is for the curious:

In the video, Carl describes a problem with conservatism: conservatives are at an eternal disadvantage. They are stuck defending a present, or recent past, which is the product of no singular ideology or plan and has very real faults. Conservatives must defend the status quo, warts and all, against ideologues seeking to drag everyone in one direction or another, often with well-reasoned arguments about why things would be better and any faults would be minor if they existed at all. This results in a gradual defeat for conservatives over time.

Carl offers two solutions to this problem: feudalism and monarchy (immediately dismissed as not very desirable or likely), and another which is best described as a kind of doubling down on the current system with a renewed zest for pursuing what conservatives want, that being whatever “feels right” to them. Unfortunately, rule by space aliens is probably more likely to both happen and work than Carl’s preferred second solution.

Pursuing what “feels right” rather than getting too hung up on the reasoning or evidence sounds pretty good. It is after all what progressives do most of the time, with their evidence and arguments cherry-picked to suit or, increasingly, absent entirely.

One problem though is conflict: What if it feels right to one large portion of the population that children should be allowed to undergo sex change surgeries while it feels right to everyone else that that practice be banned and any doctor who performs it imprisoned somewhere dark and cold, never to see the light of day again?

In our (ostensibly) one-rule-for-all societies, only one of these views can win out and neither side is likely to give up fighting for theirs as long as the possibility it will prevail remains.

So far progressives have gotten around this on other issues by persuading everyone to just move on. After some period of time, progressive changes become the status quo and are even defended by conservatives! This has led to the ever more common understanding that conservatives are just progressives driving the speed limit.

Challenging progressive changes becomes exceedingly difficult as time goes on. Imagine trying to repeal even gay marriage in 2022. Immigration reform? Hey man, this is the current year, what are you, racist or something? Heck, we’ll be lucky if Air New Zealand removes their masking requirements on flights someday.

This brings us to the ultimate problem with the way things are now: change requires not only someone brave enough to propose it, but a bunch of people willing to vote them in to do it and them having the ability to do it once they get there.

If you believed putting a halt to immigration for the time being would be good for New Zealand, good luck selling the voting public on it. That would be tough even without an opposition ideologically opposed to it. It would be tough on an even media playing field. It is unimaginable in a society where the people who run media institutions are also your ideological opponents.

Carl appears to have concluded that simply forming an alternative media institution is the way to go and good luck to him. But Carl seems to forget that a biased media landscape is not all we must grapple with.

Woke corporations, NGOs and permanent bureaucracies that barely change how they work with new governments and processes advertised as fair but where outcomes can and are routinely manipulated are even bigger obstacles.

Social media accounts and entire apps can be banned. Resource consents can be denied. Lockdown laws can be used to prosecute protestors. Medical practising certificates can be suspended for expressing the wrong opinion. Institutions with nice sounding names like the Human Rights Tribunal have the power to fine normal people, not to mention political opposition, massive sums of money over comments an immigrant thinks are racist.

If you want to change the people running these entities don’t, you had better have deep pockets and good lawyers. A minority media presence won’t save you.

I’m not sure Carl’s message to play the game harder and more intentionally is exactly the right one. The game being so rigged and the repairs necessary being so many and so difficult, it is no wonder some of us are now contemplating what other games could be played that might yield better results for us all.

Any system, of government or not, should be there to serve people and not for people to serve it. No matter how good it sounds on paper, or how good it makes you feel to participate in if it isn’t working then real change should always be on the menu.