How many conservative organizations exist in the United States? Is it hundreds? Thousands? Whatever the ultimate number, if you add up the think tanks, advocacy and activist groups, news sites, opinion sites, YouTube and other video channels, it has to be in the thousands. To be sure, the number of important organizations—i.e., ones featuring multiple salaried employees—is probably only in the hundreds. But that’s still a hefty number. Some of these organizations get grants and subsidies from corporations and private wealth; some of the news and opinion sites raise revenue from advertisements; and there exist a handful of magazines and a number of websites that eke out a living through subscriptions. I would hazard to guess, however, that the majority of funding for these hundreds of conservative organizations comes from private donations. My household must receive hundreds of letters a year from various conservative-related “charities,” including such organizations as Focus on the Family, Judicial Watch and the Heritage Foundation, begging for lucre. If you throw in the hordes of cash that yearly flows into the coffers of the Republican Party, hundreds of millions of dollars must go to various conservative and quasi-conservative organizations every calendar year.
Despite these hundreds, if not thousands of conservative organizations and the enormous sums of money that flow into their coffers every year, this hasn’t prevented the left from “winning.” In a previous post, I quoted Congressman Jim Jordan acknowledging that “the left controls almost everything.”
The left controls big media, the left controls big tech, the left controls Hollywood, the left controls higher education, the left controls corporations, the left controls big sports, … the left controls the Congress, the left controls the White House.”
How is it that, with all these well-funded conservative organizations, the left has become so dominant? How can so many organizations, so many people, and so much money misfire so badly? These are questions conservatives and anti-leftists of all stripes need to start asking. Conservatism is spinning its collective wheels. Millions of dollars have been donated with little to show for it. It is about time these failures are acknowledged and confronted.
Despite the provocative title of this article, I’m not seeking to impugn the motives of conservative intellectuals and activists. While there exist actual bonafide grifters on the fringes—you really have to be careful who you donate money to—most of these conservative organizations are not involved in consciously intended grift. It’s more subtle than that. There are certain people who take up conservatism as a kind of calling, almost a ministry. Such individuals sincerely wish to promote conservative causes. But since they are mostly scholars, journalists, intellectuals, they only know one way of contributing to the cause: namely, through the dissemination of conservative values and principles. They are expositors and preachers and shopkeepers of ideas. If through selling their wares and asking for donations they can earn a living at it, then that’s what they do. But if we look at the broader conservative movement, it’s not clear that this approach is working. More Americans identify as conservative than as liberal (36% to 25%), yet the left keeps winning. Only five to eight percent of the country identifies as radical or “woke” left, but consider the degree of their influence in the culture and in society. How does a minority of eight percent harass and bully the other ninety-two percent and get away with it? How can a small minority tyrannize over a much larger majority, especially in a “democracy''?
There is no way to get around it: conservative organizations have, by and large (there are a few exceptions), failed. The emphasis on the promulgation of ideas—of trying to convince a majority of the country to elect conservative politicians—has been a signal failure. There are rather severe limits to what persuasion, no matter how logical or compelling, can accomplish. Such giants in sociology as William Graham Sumner and Vilfredo Pareto discovered in their research that ideas play only a minor role in determining the culture and politics of a society. As Pareto explains:
When one reads Voltaire, it is natural enough to conclude that he was the artisan of the unbelief so prominent in the people of his time. But pondering the matter a little more closely, we can only wonder how it could have come about, if that is the general rule, that the writings of Lucian, which are in no way inferior to Voltaire’s on the side of literary quality and logical effectiveness, failed to have an influence as great as Voltaire’s, that Lucian stood alone in his unbelief while faith and superstition were increasing all about him. There is no way of explaining such facts, and many others of the kind, except by assuming that the seed that is sown bears fruit, or fails to bear fruit, according as it falls on congenial or uncongenial soil. The philosophes of the eighteenth century in France revived arguments that had already been used against Christianity by Celsus and the Emperor Julian. Why did they succeed where their predecessors failed? Obviously because there was a difference in the minds of the people whom they were addressed. But that is not all. Had Voltaire been the chief artisan of the ideas prevalent among his countrymen, those ideas should not have weakened in intensity so long as his literary labors continued. Yet toward the end of Voltaire’s life, while his fame was still soaring, one notes a movement directly opposite his tendencies: the educated classes were turning to Rousseau. Rousseau, in his turn, was doing little more, on the whole, that to state [rationalizations] that corresponded to [mental states] that Voltaire had left unstirred…. These writers did not create the public sentiments of their day. The sentiments created the reputations of those writers. So much for the main element of the phenomenon; for the facts clearly show that the writing of such men was not entirely and absolutely without effect, that it did amount to something. But, as compared with the other, this latter effect seems something quite secondary. [Mind and Society, §1763]
One hundred years later, experimental and social psychology provided scientific evidence to back Pareto’s historical analysis. Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind, summarizes the main findings of more recent psychological experiments as follows:
People don’t adopt their ideologies at random, or by soaking up whatever ideas are around them. People whose genes give them brains that get a special pleasure from novelty, variety, and diversity, while simultaneously less sensitive to signs of danger, are predisposed (but not predestined) to become liberals. They tend to develop certain “characteristic adaptations” and “life narratives” that make them resonate—unconsciously and intuitively—with the grand narratives told by political movements of the left (such as the liberal progress narrative). People whose genes give them brains with the opposite settings are predisposed, for the same reasons, to resonate with the grand narratives of the right (such as the Reagan narrative). [316]
The science confirming all of this has only become stronger over time. It is now known, for example, that the best measurable predictor of an individual's political beliefs is his personality. Since personality is at least fifty percent genetic, this means that the individual's political predilections are, to a significant degree, hard-wired. William S. Gilbert expressed this truth in rhyme over hundred forty years ago:
I often think it's comical
How Nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal,
That's born into the world alive,
Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative
Since many human beings are predisposed toward either conservative or liberal ideologies, there are limits to what can be accomplished through the promulgation of ideas. People who are born with personalities that incline them to liberal ideologies will tend to regard any arguments made for conservative positions and policies, no matter how well supported with evidence as logic, as uncompelling. Human beings tend to be far more influenced by their innate moral sentiments and acquired economic interests than by “reason” or “evidence” or “good sense.”
Now I suspect that most people on the right, whether they identify as conservative, libertarian, populist, or dissident right, understand that it is impossible to reason with most leftists. The typical progressive is never going to admit that many of his policy prescriptions are impractical and self-destructive. From everyday experience the imperviousness to “evidence and reason” on the part of most leftists is so obvious that few with eyes to see and ears to hear would care to deny it. Yet when it comes to devising strategies on how to deal with the left—that is, how to stop “liberals” and the far left from destroying the country—many on the right keep returning to various dissemination strategies. I visited the websites of some of the most distinguished and influential conservative organizations in the country and perused their mission statements. Repeatedly I ran across declarations placing the dissemination of ideas as the primary focus of the organization in question. The Heritage Foundation, for instance, describes their mission as one of promoting “conservative public policies.” The Daily Wire, one of the leading conservative news and entertainment sites, presents itself as a “media company … with an emphasis on distribution and marketing” of conservative content (i.e., ideas). The Federalist Society, which specializes in issues relating to the law, “seeks to promote awareness” of conservative legal principles. The biblically based Family Research Council strives “to advance faith, family, and freedom” in public policy and culture. The Claremont Institute, another leading conservative think tank, seeks to provide “the missing argument in the battle to win public sentiment by teaching and promoting the philosophical reasoning that is the foundation of limited government.” Prager University presents itself as “the world's leading conservative nonprofit that is focused on changing minds through the creative use of digital media.” Turning Point USA seeks to “identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.”
What we find again and again in these mission statements is the desire to “promote” conservatives policies, values, and ideas. In other words, they are engaged, at some level, in the dissemination of ideas and ideological prescriptions. Now I’m not suggesting that these organizations don’t do good work or that their contributions aren’t to some degree valuable. There is something to be said for the dissemination of ideas, even if it never goes beyond preaching to the choir (which is often the case). Promoting conservative agendas and policies has its place. But when conservative organizations are almost exclusively devoting their attention and resources to what, in the end, amounts to little more than propaganda, we have a problem. That is especially true when viewed from the broader context of the left’s dominance within our nation’s most important institutions. If we view this emphasis—or rather over-emphasis—on the promulgation of ideas as a strategy to defeat the left, then it’s quite obvious that it is the wrong strategy—and that if the left is ever to be defeated, new strategies will have to be developed—and developed very quickly, because time is running out.
Before these new strategies can be formulated, however, conservative intellectuals will have to develop a more empirically rich and sophisticated understanding of how politics actually works (rather than how purblind ideologues imagine it works). Conservative thought, like much of progressive and far left thought, is still imbued with assumptions about politics that barely rise above the sort of folk theories that inform newspaper editorials and political talk shows. In the typical narratives used to inspire conservative ideology, there exists a fair measure of naivete about the workings of government, democracy, free trade, and the relation between the ruling elite and the governed. What is needed—and badly needed at that—is what might be described as a politics of human nature: something thoroughly wide-eyed and grounded in truculent empiricism rather than in sentiment and wishful thinking. Any workable strategies formulated to prevent the left from destroying Western Civilization must be based on a fully developed theory of political realism.
Despite the millions of dollars and hundreds, if not thousands of salaried employees working around the clock to figure out why the left is winning, conservatives still have no idea what needs to be done to save the country from the progressive radicalism that seeks to destroy it. I conducted internet searches using both google and DuckDuckGo on the question of “Why is the left winning?” The handful of conservative or libertarians who have commented on this issue generally provide explanations that relate, either directly or indirectly, to the left’s superiority at promulgating their narrative. The left controls the mainstream media, social media, the public schools, the universities, and Hollywood. This monopoly on the means of the propagation of attitudes and ideas about morality and politics is supposedly what provides the left with an unassailable advantage.
Behind all such analysis lurks an unacknowledged premise. Almost all conservatives assume, as if it were a fact so obvious that it would be futile and stupid to question it, that the reason why arguing on behalf of conservative ideas is so important is because we live in a democracy, and if you can just convince, through the arts of logic and persuasion, the majority of the voting public to support “conservative” policy prescriptions, they will vote in conservative politicians who, once in office, will faithfully implement a conservative agenda. That such a view is naive beyond all description should be obvious from even the most cursory analysis. Democracy, as the expression and instrument of majority will, is an extremely flawed instrument. While it would be an exaggeration to claim that the broad majority in a democracy has no influence whatsoever on their government, they have much less influence than theories of democracy would have us believe. Sixty-nine percent of the public disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job, yet the reelection rate for members of the House in 2020 was ninety-five percent. Under the theory of democracy, the elected representatives in Congress are essentially employees working for the general public who are hired through the process of Congressional elections. Since when do employees with a sixty-nine disapproval rate get rehired at a ninety-five percent clip? No business in the private sector would hire employees who had such disapproval rates among their supervisors.
There are multiple reasons, most of which go well beyond the scope of this essay, to explain why democratic institutions fail to express the will of the so-called majority. I will simply mention the most important of these, beginning with what the political scientist Robert Michels described as the “iron law of oligarchy.” As Michels explicated:
The formation of oligarchies within the various forms of democracy is the outcome of organic necessity, be it socialist or anarchist [or anything else] … The supremacy of the leaders in the democratic and revolutionary parties has to be taken into account in every historic situation present and to come, even though only a few and exceptional minds will be fully conscious of its existence. The mass will never rule except in abstracto. Consequently the question we have to discuss is not whether ideal democracy is realizable, but rather to what point and in what degree democracy is desirable, possible, and realizable at a given moment. [Political Parties, 402]
Gaetano Mosca noted some other serious issues with democracy:
What happens in other forms of government—namely, that an organized minority imposes its will on the disorganized majority—happens also and to perfection, whatever the appearances to the contrary, under the representative system. When we say that the voters “choose” their representative, we are using language that is very inexact. The truth is that the representative has himself elected by the voters, and, if that phrase should seem too inflexible and too harsh to fit some cases, we might qualify it by saying that his friends have him elected. In elections, as in all manifestations of social life, those who have the will and, especially, the moral, intellectual and material means to force their will upon others take the lead over the others and command them. [The Ruling Class, 154]
We can get a taste of the power and arrogance of elected representatives if we examine the controversy that has arisen in recent months over the teaching of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) in public schools. Seventy to eighty percent of the country opposes the brainwashing of the nation’s children with CRT. If democracy actually worked, if the will of the majority always prevailed, school boards and administrators wouldn’t be attempting to force CRT down the throats of their students. Yet that is precisely what at least some, perhaps many, schools are in the process of carrying out. Consider, as one apposite example, the Pennsbury School Board and how, during a public meeting on May 20, 2021, it treated ordinary citizens who dared to question the way it to conducted the people’s business:
For those who don’t have the time or didn’t want to bother watching the video, it simply shows three middle aged men who dared to challenge various board policies of Pennsbury School District being summarily told “their finished” by the tremendously rude and arrogant Josh Waldorf, the presiding officer of the meeting. Waldorf is an elected official—he faces a Republican challenger Victoria Czechowski this November. Yet he shows no fear or concern that his behavior could lead to his ousting in the autumn elections. Why not? Evidently, he doesn’t think it matters. And he’s probably right. Even if he loses his position on the board in November, all he has to do is wait a few years until all the passions surrounding CRT have subsided and he should have no problem returning to the board, if that is something he desire. He has friends in high places, and that’s what matters with most for elites under democratic institutions.
This is not to suggest that the controversy over CRT-based curriculum in the public schools could not lead to some fairly drastic changes over the next year or so. It’s quite possible that the elites within the public school system are overplaying their hands on a number of fronts, not just CRT. Their reaction to COVID, with all the heavy-handed insistence on masking and vaccination, could also rouse the ire of the public against them. But as usual under democratic rule, while it is possible for the broader public, when once incited to action, to win a few short term victories, in the long-run the elites will almost always prevail. As Mosca has already warned us, throughout the course of recorded history, we find organized minorities enforcing their will against disorganized majorities. Representative democracy isn’t able to fundamentally change this dismal reality. It just changes the rules which govern how this process plays out. Democracy tends to favor organized minorities made up of clever neophiles—that is people whose brains, as Jonathan Haidt has already warned us, are wired to prefer innovation and novelty to tradition and eternal verities. Democracy also favors those who get ahead through chicanery and deviousness rather than through courage and force. Over time this can create a rather unique and disturbing form of despotism. The most common form of tyranny throughout history is the oppression of the weak by the strong. However scandalous such tyranny undoubtedly is, there is nonetheless a kind of naturalness to it. In nature, the stronger animals prevail over the weaker ones. It’s the Darwinian farce playing itself out in all its horror. But the tyranny of a democracy in its most decadent phase is of another strain altogether. It constitutes a tyranny of the weak over the strong—of the psychologically deformed over the normal and the healthy.
It should be obvious from these considerations concerning the shortcomings of democracy that no permanent victory over the left will ever be achieved through the ballot box. Even if conservatives could somehow manage, via reasoning and persuasion, to convince a majority of Americans to support conservative and anti-left candidates for high office, this would likely prove but a pyrrhic victory. A quick glance at the Trump Presidency can give us an idea of the elites reach and power. With the election of Trump in 2016, the forces of anti-Globalism had finally succeeded in seizing control of the highest office in the land. It is instructive to observe how ruling elites responded to this challenge to their dominance. They first attempted an elaborate scheme to frame Trump for “collusion” with Russia. When that didn’t work, they impeached Trump because he suggested to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Hunter Biden’s employment with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma stank of corruption and should be investigated. Then in 2020 the ruling elite concentrated all its considerable resources to make certain Trump would not get a second term. As “journalist” Molly Ball explained in her article “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” published in Time magazine,
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
Ms. Ball’s article demonstrates the ruling elite’s power to manage elections in ways consistent with its own narrowly defined interests. Donald Trump was seen as an existential threat to the nation's permanent ruling class in Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. Trump sought to limit the free flow of capital and labor across borders. The plutocratic portion of the ruling class regarded this as beyond the pale. Trump also caused serious problems for leftist portion of the ruling elite through his nomination of “conservative” judges and banning critical race theory in government. Nearly everyone in the ruling elite, regardless of their ideological allegiances, believed Trump had to go. Hence the pact between the left and business interests, mentioned by Ms. Ball above. They connived to replace Trump with a career politician known, not merely for his decades of mediocrity and corruption, but as someone who was beginning to show signs of palpable dementia. Consider how cynical and irresponsible the nation’s ruling elite must be to install such a creature in the oval office. Rather than give ground on open borders and the free flow of capital, they were willing to see the office of the Presidency fall into the clutches of a man who can’t always be distinguished from a drooling moron. The ruling elite, along with their left-wing lickspittles in the media, can bitch and moan all they like about Trump’s so-called “authoritarian tendencies'' and “assault on democracy. But what about Biden’s assault on intelligence and basic competency?
The 2020 election confronts us with unpleasant truths about representative democracy. Organized elites, however corrupt, dishonest, cowardly, and unwise, will nearly always prevail over the disorganized majority. Attempting to defeat such cabals with arguments and persuasions and “free and fair” elections is a pipe-dream. The best that can be hoped for is to win the occasional battle—which is all that Trump’s Presidency amounted to in the end. In 2020, America’s ruling elite, through a “well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” managed to scrounge up more votes for Joe Biden than any other Presidential candidate in our nation’s history. That may constitute something of an electoral achievement—but it hardly speaks well for democracy. Disorganized majorities are too easily manipulated by cynical elites. Democracy is an obstacle, rather than a path, to saving America from the combined forces of the left and the neo-liberal plutocracy that rules the nation.
If conservatives want to win, if they wish to control borders, protect the working class against the globalist tendency toward the equalization of wages, seize back control of the nation’s institutions of learning, and stop the medical industry from tampering with their children’s innate sexuality, they can only do this through the development of an organized minority capable of taking on and defeating the organized minority that currently enforces its will on the nation. Short of that we can expect the current ruling class (and the left) will nearly always get its way—until, that is, its innate degeneracy and nihilism destroys the nation.
It should be obvious that the vast majority of conservative organizations, as they are presently constituted, will never be able wrest control of the nation’s most important organizations from the left. These organizations, even at their best, are primarily devoted to creating a conservative majority with the thought of winning elections. But after our experience of the Trump Presidency, shouldn’t conservatives have learned their lesson. Trying to defeat the left through democratic means is nothing to the purpose. What is needed is an organized conservative minority capable of defeating the institutional power of the left. Now obviously the creation of such an entity is no easy task. Indeed, its very difficulty is probably the main reason why conservative organizations prefer to devote their resources and manpower to “promoting” conservative policy prescriptions rather than seeking political power. Since promoting values and ideas will never work, the efforts of these organizations over time begins to look more and more like a grift. Imagine if, instead of using all the money that flows into these organizations on little more than propaganda, some or even most of those funds were used to formulate effective strategies for the development of an organized minority capable of taking on the leftist hegemony and removing it from power. Perhaps then conservatives might get some measure of return on all the money they’ve donated to mostly useless conservative think tanks and activist groups that populate the landscape of center-right activism. In any case, conservatives can’t continue to keep doing the same old thing decade after decade and expect a different outcome. It’s clearly time to attempt something new. Doing the same old thing will only lead to the same old result.
Greg Nyquist is author of The Psychopathology of the Radical Left and The Faux-Rationality of Ayn Rand.
Is Conservatism a Grift?
Hi Greg,
My initial thought is to organize from the local level up. Tackle the City Councils and local School Boards. Revive respect for the 9th and 10th amendments; in particular, nullification of unconstitutional federal edicts. The office of County Sheriff is crucial in this regard. If the Supreme Court gets packed, nullification may be the last legal line of defense, along with jury nullification. There's a significant chance that continent-wide governance will collapse under the weight of both corruption and complexity, making robust local governance even more important.