Has the Right Lost 2020?

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Has the Right Lost 2020?

Adam Garrie • 16 November 2020

The right has failed to consolidate electoral victory.

Upon the Brexit victory in 2016, many believed that this was the end when it was indeed only the end of the beginning. 2020 has been a bad year in every sense. For those to the right of the globalist/internationalist centre, this year has been particularly disheartening. There are very strong arguments that Donald Trump did indeed outpoll Joe Biden in the US election, but this is now for the courts to decide – not the Biden supporting mainstream media and not me, an individual who agrees with Donald Trump’s policies.

If in fact, Donald Trump ends up out of the White House and if Brexit ends up being watered down into a BRINO that can only be described as “Norway Minus”, we to the right of centre will only have ourselves to blame.

In the 1960s, the New Left movements did something that was very wise from the point of long-term strategy. They did not attempt to stake their claim to victory on winning multiple elections, but instead decided to wholly ignore the old world’s values, customs and institutions. In their place, the young leftists of that era created their own alternative culture, alternative values and organised themselves in such a way that prepared them to run major institutions in the future.

Just consider some early electoral failures of the left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In June of 1968, Gaullists and other traditionalists won a large victory in French parliamentary elections. That same year, Richard Nixon, the symbol of everything the American left hated, swept to victory, eight years after he lost to the young and less conservative John F. Kennedy. Then in 1970, the Conservatives won the general election, largely due to the personal popularity of Enoch Powell.

But whilst conservative forces won these short term electoral victories, the left were readying themselves for a more important victory. By ignoring the old institutions and cultural mores, such institutions and the traditional overseers of cultural mores were deprived of oxygen. As such, they were suffocated and the left moved forward to take their places in mass media, entertainment, academia, major corporations, the civil service and houses of worship.

By the end of the 20th century, it was unthinkable that men like Richard Nixon, Enoch Powell or Charles de Gaulle would ever attain power again, not because their policies seemed wildly out of touch, but because they came to represent cultural traditions that had been abolished by stealth.

But then the left made a tactical error. The left which by the year 2000 controlled not only major non-political institutions but also political ones, ended up alienating ordinary people by putting a lead foot on the revolutionary throttle. Suddenly, people began to wake from their slumber and realised that for decades, everything they valued had been eroded or expunged. The biggest pushbacks against an erstwhile invisible revolution came in the form of the Brexit victory and Donald Trump’s victory in 2016.

Of course, the left did not take either of these things to mean they had to resign themselves to a loss of influence. Instead they doubled down in the areas they continued to control (mass media, cultural institutions, academic, etc.). This more than made up for their temporary political setbacks in 2016.

Between 2016 and 2020, those to the right of centre moaned and moaned and moaned about bias in the media, corporations “going woke” and ideologically driven education. During this time, however, such people continued to watch and listen to the biased media, continued to offer their custom to anti-patriotic corporations and continued to desire an ascent through a left leaning cursus honorum.

The left in the 1960s realised that there was no point trying to get their teachers to grow their hair, no point in trying to get major corporations to embrace their drugged out culture and knew there was no hope of getting a position in mass media if they didn’t put on a suit and tie and speak in manner that was free from obscene language. In other words, the left in the 1960s were aware of their limitations and decided to forge ahead with the creation of an alternative culture, one which at first ran parallel to the mainstream culture and later overtook it. In the year 2020, the centre-right are aware of their limitations, but they have done nothing about it.

There is no point in voting if one continues to spend money in shops owned by corporations that dislike you and your morals. There is no point in joining a sincere political party if one’s goal is to be treated with respect by the BBC. There is no point in shouting about “remoaners” if one fails to see that one is still debating them on their terms rather than one’s own.

The centre-right may have won key battles but the war is being lost. Rather than moan endlessly about yet another set of losses, the centre-right ought to take their support for political parties whose policies correspond with that of their conscience and combine it with a concerted effort to simply ignore leftist media and institutions. If such institutions are deprived of an audience, of a customer base and of attention, they will have to give way, just as those of the old world gave way to the brave new leftist world born in the 1960s.

If this lesson is not learned, all the election victories in the world will count for naught.

Image: Chatham House, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia

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