I have to admit, sometimes it becomes tiresome: Every time I attend a supposedly “grand summit” of (mostly Anglosphere) conservatism like Jordan Peterson’s ARC Conference, what do I hear? The usual grand declarations on identity, biology, and the “defence of the West,” but all too often, I have only discovered a room full of people using the language of opposition while having no plan of how finally to occupy the seats of power. They endlessly rehearse what they are against, as if this alone will suffice.
While being in opposition can be entertaining, ultimately politics and culture are about power: As we can see in Germany and France, or as we could see in the UK under the former Tory government, merely being in office is not enough. Conservatives (or those labelling themselves as such) also need to have a will to be in power and not just to be in office. The power truly to change things can be found not just in the realm of politics but also in culture, education, and entertainment. The Left fights wars—cultural, ideological, total—while conservatives content themselves with fighting single-issue battles. The Left controls culture, media, education—it is, essentially, always in power. Conservatives, meanwhile, take office now and again, but rarely shape the culture.
I do not often write about the events in the Middle East, but very often what happens in this region and how Western elites react to it is a good reflection of what is going on within the West: What October 7, 2023 unveiled was more than the bankruptcy of Hamas’s ideology which should be obvious to anybody. It was also the unmasking of a virulent, anti-Western undercurrent running through much of modern multiculturalism, which remains the favoured ideology of Western elites.
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