Timothy Birdnow

By Selwyn Duke

"Republicans are conservatives,” said author and CEO Kenin Spivak recently. "Conservatives are conservative.” This tautology was uttered to answer a question: Why do Republicans lose social and cultural wars despite winning elections?

The topic was raised on the Wednesday edition of Bill Martinez Live. (Note: Bill, on whose show I’ve appeared numerous times, is one of the really good guys in media.) Spivak, who’s also a financier, attorney, and consultant, addressed a line he penned in a June 15 RealClear Politics article. He’d written that

despite an edge in winning elections and appointing 60% of Supreme Court justices confirmed over the last 65 years, since the 1960s conservatives have been on the losing end of nearly every social and cultural battle and most policy disputes.

Explaining how this happened (and is happening) on Martinez’s program, he stated:

The Democrats, and progressives in particular, have spent 75 years advancing themselves…throughout all of our major institutions: education, federal government, state government, the media. And they’ve really gotten a hammerlock on those institutions. And they’ve used their control to pass regulations, not laws, where someone else in another institution has to comply with a rule they issue for a benefit to accrue. And then in the other institution they pass that rule, and it goes back and forth. …And that’s what’s given them their victory on all of these cultural and other policies.

How does this work? Grok artificial intelligence provided the following example and explanation (which I evaluated for accuracy):

Government Pressure on Social Media Platforms (Media/Tech/Information Flow)

Mechanism: White House officials, the Surgeon General, CDC, and FBI engaged in repeated communications, meetings, and demands with platforms (Twitter, Facebook/Meta, YouTube, etc.) to censor or suppress content on topics like COVID-19 origins/treatments/vaccines, the Hunter Biden laptop story, election integrity, and certain conservative viewpoints. This was often framed as combating "misinformation” or "disinformation,” backed by implicit or explicit threats of regulatory consequences (e.g., changes to Section 230 liability protections or antitrust scrutiny).

Cross-institution cycle: Platforms modified content moderation policies, algorithms (visibility filtering/shadowbanning), and enforcement to align with government priorities to maintain access to officials, avoid penalties, or preserve "partnerships.” This affected what millions saw, influencing public opinion, elections, and trust in institutions. Documented extensively in the Twitter Files and related congressional investigations/court cases (e.g., Missouri v. Biden).

Outcome: Reduced visibility or outright removal of dissenting views on major cultural/political issues, effectively shaping the information environment in ways aligned with progressive priorities — without new laws from Congress.

The above is especially egregious because, since it inhibited people’s ability to discuss cultural issues, it could affect the culture. Speaking of which…

Win the Culture, Own the Future

Spivak is singing my tune, and his point about regulatory institutional cross-infection is a good one. Yet there’s still more to it.

Spivak’s line "Conservatives are conservative” is a legitimate warning. It’s why I long ago ceased identifying as conservative. And no one explained the issue better than philosopher G.K. Chesterton.

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives,” he wrote in 1924. "The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”

Yes, I’ve often quoted the above (and will continue doing so until everyone gets it!) It relates, too, to conservatism’s and liberalism’s true natures.

These two isms are not ideologies so much, but processes. This is why the actual positions each term represents vary with time and place. (For example, conservatives in Sweden largely accept the "LGBTQ+” agenda; American conservatives largely reject it.) Liberalism is the process of ever trying to change the status quo. Conservatism is the process of ever trying to maintain it. The upshot:

As the status quo changes, so will the positions the conservatives are trying to conserve. Of course, the liberals are the change agents, the catalysts for status-quo alteration. Conclusion?

Conservatives are simply defending yesterday’s liberals’ social and cultural victories insofar as today’s status quo reflects them.

"The Best Defense is a Good Offense”

Imagine this as a lib-con war for cultural territory — except, only one side ever takes the offense. The libs come and attack the cons’ land. The latter resist, of course, but there’s pressure to be "reasonable,” to "compromise.” Oh, the cons may not relinquish their entire territory immediately, perhaps not even half. But whether ceding 10 percent, three percent, or one, the ultimate outcome is identical.

The libs capture 95 acres today, 505 the next year, 387 later, etc. As the process continues, the libs will have eventually conned the cons out of Traditionland entirely. It will still be called Traditionland, though, and the cons will still defend it, oblivious to how it’s not their ancestors’ realm anymore except in name.

A real-world example: Leftists demanded same-sex "marriage’s” official recognition. Conservatives eventually softened (in the head) on the issue and capitulated. True warriors for tradition would’ve proceeded differently. They wouldn’t have merely rejected the marriage attack.

They would’ve also demanded we remove government from marriage entirely and restore it as a solely religious institution. They’d have been, too as passionate about their restoration as the Left was about their degradation. And that’s what you call taking the offense.

Another factor I’ll mention, briefly, was addressed by ancient Chinese sage Confucius. "I have never seen one [person],” he said in The Analects, "who loves virtue as much as he loves sex.” (Ergo, China’s 1.4 billion population.) The left is marketing vice — a much easier sell than virtue.

And that’s why conservatives always lose cultural and social battles. Remember here that if the Founding Fathers had been conservatives they wouldn’t have been founders or fathers (of a nation). They would’ve been Loyalists, faithful to the crown.

So when pondering whether you’re conservative, always ask a question:

What, exactly, would I be conserving?

This article was originally published at The New American.

Great essay Selwyn! You nailed it on so many key issues. A few observations from me:

Selwyn I think concentrating on the politics of the matter misses the bigger picture, which is the media was leftist first - not the Democrats, and certainly not the Republicans. So too were the educational institutions, and not just the big universities but the schools. John Dewey was as big a radical as you will find and he founded public education in America to indoctrinate our children. So naturally Republicans lose these battles; we're fighting a hydra.

Grok is right about the pressures placed by the left via the authorities and regulatory agencies and using social media (which they largely created in the first place). But this goes way beyond tech and stretches back over a century.

BTW Eisenhower foresaw this and warned against it in his Farewell Address to a large degree.

I love the Chesterton quote and he's right. We need a different term for who we are, but none spring to mind. In many ways MAGA has shown the truth of this statement that conservatives protect the mistakes of the past; the coming of MAGA was a revolutionary act, a radical attempt to restore an order that had passed, murdered by the Progressives. It is counter-revolutionary. The RINO wing of the Party as we call them are simply the true conservatives, trying to maintain a status quo that is in the process of dying and rightly so, because it never should have existed in the first place. RINO Republicans are trying to hold onto the politica world created by Barack Obama and Trent Lott and John Boehner, all three of whom were losers, plain and simple. The GOPe has no interest in going back to the Reagan days. They don't want a counter-revolution, but rather a stasis. These are the same people who are still frightened of running true conservatives because they remember Goldwater and fear a repeat.

It was as if the Reagan revolution never happened. And the Trump revolution? It's a huge danger because Trump not only rejects the status quo but wants to change things in a rational way, one intended to serve the American People.

Elite Republicanism is fundamentally no different than the Democrats of the mid 2000nds, except they want a little less in taxes. But then tey spend even more.

You are dead right about the way it works. The Progressives attack and we compromise. We've about compromised ourselves to death. We need to go on the offensive.

That is the Communist dialectic. They present a thesis - say, gay marriage. We present a antithesis - marriage is traditionally one man and one woman. They martial forth arguments about fairness and decency and how mean we are. We compromise and say "well, maybe we sould allow domestic partnerships". They win! They immediately argue against domestic partnerships as unfair and eventually get gay marriage. We saw this with Bill Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" in the military. It was the intermediate stage to the final policy which was "swing whatever way you want".

You nailed it on that business about how vice sells far better than virtue. Virtue is hard - vice is easy, and more fun. But the wages of sin is death as the Bible tells us, and often something that is fun is also going to bite your posterior.

I would add another reason why the Left keeps winning is spiritual. While many conservatives are Christians or conservative Jews a great many are not and, at least in the political realm, few are Christian, except perhaps they pay lip service to it for their constituents. The reason is that amorality is a key to success in politics. Politics itself lacks virtue, being about power and money and fame. The end result is that most of those who go into it are self-aggrandizing and self-seeking scoundrels. Now that is a bad place for a Christian but it is essentially a temple for the Left, who are all worshippers of Scientism and social doctrine. They have their own religion and they enforce it very carefully and harshly. But it is a religion of this world, by this world, and for this world, and politics is mother's milk to it. They BELIEVE in it because it works; you can make things happen you want to happen. Christians are inherently other-world minded and don't want to get into the filth with these types of people, rightly so. The end result is the materialistic Left is able to control the levers of government and other institutions because they will steal them if they don't buy them or otherwise corrupt them. We won't do that. And sadly our champions are simply there to stick their noses in the trough; the people willing to get into that are usually not motivated by their Christian or Jewish faiths. And those that are eventually either leave or lose that faith as they are seduced by the system. John Boehner was a prime example; a lion before he got into leadership. Now he's a pot salesman.

So we come at this with multiple disadvantages. We have to fight our own party as well as the Democrats, the media, academia and primary education, big tech, etc.

This was a great, thoughtful essay Selwyn and I concur heartily.

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