On Twitter and Conservatives

From the Z-man

The one sour note will be seeing so many of our guys rush back to Twitter so they can once again perform for the enemy. Generations of conditioning have trained them to think they need the attention of lefty in order to live. They will abandon the various alternative platforms just so they can carry on like precocious children for their masters on the other side. It is the slave’s mentality.

It gets at the heart of being a conservative. The whole point of the enterprise was to get the attention of lefty and one day get him to agree. It is what Robert Lewis Dabney was getting at with this famous quote. Going back long before anyone alive can recall, the people we call the left have been training their opposition to grovel for the hope of some positive recognition by lefty.

The people racing back to Twitter will deny this. They will say they are doing it because they seek a broader audience for our ideas. Conservatives used to say this long before the internet existed. They would crawl on their belly to get on lefty talk shows, only to be humiliated. They would mew about the unfairness of it all, but then crawl right back at the first opportunity. It was shameful then and it is shameful now.

It is a reminder that even though someone crosses the great divide to this side, they bring with them the habits of mind of the other side. Good salesmen know that you have to keep reselling your accounts in order to reduce attrition. Dissidents have to accept that crossing the great divide is just the first step. The initiates need to be reconditioned to have a positive identity, rather than a negative one.

And the Dabney quote he refers to. All the way back to 1897, which is depressing:

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent: Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. . . . Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always when about to enter a protest very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance: The only practical purpose which it now serves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy, from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.