There has been much discussion in the political and chattering classes in recent years, as the GOP has embraced a more nationalist and populist hue, about the imperative of more aggressively wielding political power to undo the decades of leftist institutional capture and to restore a modicum of civilizational sanity. I and many other national conservatives, postliberals and “New Right” fellow travelers have written countless words urging the Right to “know what time it is” in America and get more comfortable with a more robust conception of power. But a necessary precondition of wielding power, no matter how one intends to do so, is to attain it in the first place.

And therein lies the rub.

Ironically, considering it was Donald Trump’s breakthrough victory in the 2016 Republican presidential primary that caused many on the Right to engage in deep introspection, it is his prolonged persecution at the hands of our ruling class and loss in the 2020 presidential election that has acculturated Trump and many of his followers to a very different, decisively non-victorious mentality: loserdom. As elites have serially abused their authority since the infamous 2015 gilded escalator descent at Trump Tower, from the Russia-collusion hoax to the Robert Mueller probe to two silly impeachments to the deep-sixing of the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story on bogus “Russian disinformation” grounds to the unprecedented current criminal prosecutions of an ex-president, far too many on the Right have decided that losing is, well, actually just fine.

[It’s not so much the losing itself but the victimhood status that denial brings. That allows for two different outcomes. First, it removes the accountability for losing a national election to a near-corpse mainly hiding in his basement in 2020. Second, it responds to the incentives of victimology, the same incentives that conservatives used to fight to remove. And as we said all along, those incentives produce mediocrity and incompetence, not excellence and rational progress. — Ed]