Finally being ‘owned’

Over the past four years the modern “conservative” movement has fallen to new depths as for what it really stands for. Or perhaps more accurately, what it stands against.

Because, as much as it tried to put a positive spin on what it believed, such as “less government,” it really wasn’t at all descriptive of not just its agenda but also its intent — which, as things turned out, is capsulized in just one phrase that became popular since Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016.

That phrase?  “Owning the libs.” That sounds like an effective rallying cry, and it has been over the years, but it also epitomizes what its focus has always been.

Modern conservatism has always been at bottom a reactionary movement, enviously pushing back against the progressivism that first reared its head in the 1960s. In other words, it’s based almost exclusively on bitterness and resentment toward what it sees as the “left,” though that side of the political fence is far more diverse that it believes (e.g., “liberals,” the hard left and the powers that be in the Democratic Party are not the same people) and tends to equate anyone not on its team as an existential threat. Not for nothing does it target those agitating for social change — it takes personally any challenge to its own desire for power and refuses to listen to anyone else. This is why, for example, it tried to besmirch the Black Lives Matter movement that dominated many news cycles over the summer, saying falsely that it was inherently violent and fostering riots.

And then we see government in general and the “deep state” — that is, bureaucrats who actually run things professionally — in particular and the mainstream media as two more groups that in such a mindset need to be denigrated. (The reality, however, is that you simply can’t run a functional society without those two institutions.)

Conservatism is especially poisonous when combined with religion, the dominant faith in the United States being Christianity. That’s because the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is reconciliation through Him, is necessarily excised for the sake of dominating others — in other words, the faith itself becomes liberal.

Yes, liberal, in that certain “liberties” are taken with the Word of God and reinterpreted to mean things that He never said or authorized.

Such as the riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, as electoral votes were about to be counted that would confirm Joe Biden’s legitimate election as president. It broke my heart to learn that Christians were not only involved in it but even trying to justify it, with the singing of Christian songs and the offering of prayers that the vote would be stopped to allow now-former-President Donald Trump another term in office. And make no mistake — that attitude is how he got to be president in the first place.

It’s also why he lost last year, however, as when you focus on power for its own sake you lose the reason why you seek office in the first place — to serve, not to dominate, everyone else. We saw that with COVID-19, which Trump tried to ignore because the idea of responsibility was always foreign to him. (This is a place where the Bible’s commands were in fact tossed out.) Basically, he wanted to rule, not govern, which is why he ended up being “owned” by those same “liberals” that he denounced.

Oh, sure, you did have a school of intellectualism in conservatism, which I did respect despite my disagreements with it, in such publications as National Review and the late Weekly Standard, the latter of which went under because of its opposition to Trump. But as Pat Buchanan said in 2008 in The New Yorker, “You can write columns and all that, but they don’t engage the heart.”

And in this case, the “heart” represents denying others the same status as what folks want for themselves. In essence, the conservative movement in practice wanted to turn those that didn’t agree with it into second- or third-class citizens not even worthy of an ear. As such, I can’t see why we can have any sense of unity and reconciliation in a post-Trump country — when the opposition is labeled as “socialist,” as it has been, there’s nothing more to say.

To wit, “owning the libs” has been a good rallying slogan but one that actually helped to make this country virtually ungovernable. To our eternal shame.