What Should We Conserve?

Or rather, WHO should we serve?

Look at the polling across the western world and it’s very, very clear.

Mainstream conservative parties are in total crisis, just as much as mainstream leftist and progressive parties are.

Both have delivered chaos and failure, both have betrayed the core principles and core demographics that once defined them, and in terms of popularity, if not possession of power, both have been utterly rejected. Wherever there is a populist alternative, even a fake one, people have moved in utter despair as much as with urgent hope, to that populist alternative.

In the US this is somewhat disguised by the Trump effect and the fact that Trump and the MAGA movement gradually took over the Republican Party. This alone allowed the Republican Party to survive. If it had continued as the Bush-CIA-Uniparty, the Right Hand of Globalism, it would today be faring the exact same way as Britain’s Conservative Party in terms of polling and support.

In Britain, we have a population that if you listened to the dominant voices of the Establishment, if you looked at the mainstream news or listened to the storylines of the most popular TV soaps or took your sense of that population from the kind of policies it’s government enacts, would seem to be a radically progressive population that loves mass immigration, that despises figures like Tommy Robinson, and that really does think the multicultural experiment has created a paradise that only bigots and racists reject.

But in that same Britain, the most swiftly rising party is the one that seems most Populist, the one that rejects progressive attitudes and ideas, the one that seems most likely to defend the border, the one that promises unapologetic and unembarrassed nationalism. The rise of Reform is of course built on the utter rejection of the two main parties. Recent Reform chaos and infighting, from the removal of Rupert Lowe to the resignation and then immediate return of party chairman Zia Yusuf (now Britain’s DOGE champion, apparently, in a new role within the party) hasn’t dented Reform’s winning trajectory or poll numbers. Nor has it witnessed any sense that rightwing voters are going to go back to the Conservative Party.

A Populist Party with just a handful of MPs that descends into ridiculous, self destructive internal battles is STILL much more popular than old official Conservatism and a Labour Party that got into government purely because the vote on the Right was split and the vote on the Left works tactically. With the tiny Reform Party displaying extraordinary levels of incompetence by having massive arguments in full public glare (to the extent of calling the police on what was then their own MP) Reform are still almost twice as popular as the Conservative Party.

Why has Germany seen its official Right overtaken by the AfD? Why has Britain’s Conservative Party collapsed so thoroughly and is so unable to start building a return path to power? Why is Reform currently being forgiven for obvious disunity and the kind of infighting that was seen and associated with prior Conservative collapse? Why was Trump empowered and approved of by so many Republican voters that he was able to take over the party and crush all Establishment Republican opposition, all the Lincoln Project types, Mitch McConnell and the party hierarchy, and eventually force Republican Senators deeply opposed to his populist approach to at least pretend to be behind most of his agenda?

I think the answer lies in this: betrayal. The Official Right betrayed everything they are supposed to believe in, and supposed to exist for. That’s no great revelation, of course. It’s not exactly a betrayal I’m the first to notice. But if we frame it a slightly different way we get a slightly deeper answer.

First, what did Official and Established Conservatism do since World War Two?

In the US they aligned with the military industrial complex because that complex was very generous in funding and supporting Republican political careers. They could also tell themselves that these were big American businesses contributing trillions to US GDP and employing hundreds of thousands of US workers. They could similarly view their patronage by this complex as principled patriotism or as shrewd realpolitik, depending on which of these best justified 800 military bases around the world and constant wars, most of which were in any real sense of accounting wars that the US lost. They could say that it was good that America was projecting power and spreading US values and attitudes, and some perhaps even believed the comforting lie that these wars were all necessary and all about high moral causes like defending Democracy or opposing foreign tyranny and (from 9/11 on if not much earlier) fighting terrorism.

The reality of course is that overall these wars fuelled hatred of America, cost the US massively in terms of expenditure and building a mountain of debt, shattered rather than enforced any moral claim to be better than other nations, and outside of the most defensive Cold War moves made little to no rational sense even by their own terms of discussion. The war on terrorism, for instance, was launched by inviting Saudis to the White House the day after 9/11 (conducted by mainly Saudi terrorists)m reaffirming friendship with them, and then going to war with Iraq which had nothing to do with the attack. The majority of security provisions that followed were inward facing, aimed at the American people, rather than outward facing, protecting the American people from foreign terrorists and foreign sponsors of terrorism.

It didn’t make any sense by its own claimed reasons. There were no WMDs in Iraq. Iraq, as vile as Saddam was, was less of a sponsor of terrorism than Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Iran. Even Syria and Turkey could have been described as behind more international terrorism than Saddam was, whose primary focus (to his own destruction) was a much more traditional one of military conquest seizing territory directly from neighbours and internal repression preserving his regime.

Official US ‘conservatism’ suborned patriotism to be the servant of a few narrow corporate interests, rather as if the whole US military infrastructure had become a version of the 19th century adventurer and mercenary William Walker or the actions of the United Fruit Company in the same period both sponsoring and toppling various South American regimes depending on which best served the companies interests. In modern times ‘Defending Democracy’ has served the same purpose as calls to Manifest Destiny once served, which is to give corporate selfish interests in foreign war entanglements (directly contrary to Washington’s warnings regarding these) a patina of glamour, glory and patriotism and a claim of high moral purpose rather than low commercial interest.

As the cost to America itself became more and more evident, and the hollow nature of war hawk crooks more and more obvious when these wars only profited them and not America as a whole, the rightwing voter moved towards a rejection of military interventionism and a recognition of the way so many of their representatives used the national flag as a disguise for their base corruption rather than as a symbol for a true loyalty, especially when the overarching Cold War (which genuinely did represent a civilisational clash with a morally inferior foe) was removed from the equation. With the post 9/11 wars focused on the Middle East it became incredibly evident that these conflicts were not increasing US security and power, but rather draining both in ways that made short term profit for corrupt interests in return for a long term burden on the US taxpayer.

There was no positive end result from Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria to point to as the justification for the interference, and in Ukraine too vast spending has simply purchased, as Lindsey Graham notoriously boasted, Russian corpses. It’s not actually preserved anything moral or secured anything real, even if in that case some Republicans are still fooled by the ‘moral argument’ in spite of the squalid nature of the Ukrainian regime and the financial dealings various US political crime families had there.

Other Western nations have long been dragged in the wake of this use of America as ‘world’s policeman’ which always claims a moral mission for what is in reality a World War Two established purely commercial enterprise of bomb them to ruin then build them up again, doling out fat contracts at both ends of the ‘moral war’. Yet even the justification process entangles these western nations in parasitic networks actually now inimical to genuine western interests. While it’s US taxpayer spending, and to a lesser extent UK and other nations spending likewise that funds the latest ‘moral war’, these are usually conducted with the approving nod of the UN and reference to UN declarations-a process which on the surface seems like the UN lending ‘ international rules based’ legitimacy to the US military interventionism, but which in actuality sees the US forced to defer to and prop up this non elected, transnational body stuffed full of people who are quite literally serving and representing foreign enemies.

To say that your military action is valid because the UN endorses it, is to say that your national self interest is less important than this global organisation. Honest conquest and colonialism would actually be more moral than this, or even 19th century filibustering too, since at least those things tended to include some genuine degree of popular support at home and not be exactly contrary to what a voting majority would decide. To wage war and consider war only moral when given UN approval, is actually to say that your nation is subordinate to the transnational organisation, as well as to ensure that (yet again) your taxpayer has to keep funding this foreign interest. The same really applies to deference and respect given to NATO, which now serves its own existence as a powerful bureaucracy far more than it serves western military and security interests thar genuinely are to the advantage and defence of the populations of its member states.

The reality is that if the remit of NATO was to secure the safety of the citizenry of member states and defend the integrity of their borders against foreign aggression, it’s post Soviet role might have turned to dealing with repelling mass migration flows, breaking up trafficking gangs, and ensuring that foreign nations or organisations were not behind mass migration in the first place. Rather than calling for war with Russia and extending ever further to the East, it might have recognised that borders had already been opened, enemies already invited in, and geopolitical realities shifted in ways that made old Cold War priorities redundant. It seems absurd to posit this for a military alliance once focused on the Soviet threat, but it’s actually far less absurd than a ‘North Atlantic’ alliance that includes landlocked Hungary or Turkey in the East, which has 8,000km of coastline, not one cm of which abuts the Atlantic. Clearly, the nuclear capacity of NATO member states and perhaps a large amount of its more serious weaponry would not be required or useful for anti migration defence, but it’s equally clear that a very strong argument could be made that the security of western nations and their borders are far more threatened by mass migration, today, than they are by Russian military invasion.

It’s certainly absurd to pretend that Russia is about to invade France, should it succeed in Ukraine, or that NATO has even a legalistic duty, let alone a moral one, to defend a non member like Ukraine. For the US or UK citizen whose borders have been breached by foreign invaders often with the active assistance of their own governments, asking what a body like NATO is actually protecting us from is a natural question, as is asking why the borders of Ukraine call for a sacred defence, and our own do not. For all that a foreign military invasion is a different thing to a foreign migrant invasion, when your streets are burning and your government has helped that happen, what kind of citizen considers it his sacred duty to fight for someone else in a war not of his choosing? It’s perfectly reasonable, I think, for a citizen to want the US or the UK defended before we spend billions defending Ukraine.

Conservatives, at least official conservatives, got these priorities the wrong way round. They took the false lesson from WWII onwards that what they existed to conserve was the 1945 settlement. They took from the defeat of Nazism an embarrassment regarding being firm nationalists (accepting the leftist narrative of a line from nationalism to Nazism). They heavily invested in a foreign policy of continuing the battle against Nazism and Cold War battle against the Soviets into the neocon global mission of ‘spreading our values’ and ‘defending Democracy’ when really these things were giving public money through debt and war to a handful of private interests.

If it had been genuinely moral we would have intervened just as often and just as obviously in Africa as in the Middle East when African nations descended into tyranny, long term war, and full blown genocide. We did not do so. Our alleged sacred mission to defend Democracy never applied there.

If it had been genuinely moral we would have been as disgusted and averse to growing tyranny at home, in fact MORE disgusted and averse to it at home, than we were by distant foreign wars threatening others with tyranny abroad. But of course we aren’t, and the very people claiming we should die or risk nuclear Armageddon for Ukrainian freedom are quite happy to strip freedom from their own citizens at the exact same time.

But what official Conservatism did was act as if rightwing meant nothing more than serving as cheerleaders of foreign wars while simultaneously doing nothing about the treasonous destruction of everything they were supposed to conserve at home. Always ready to march behind the flag abroad, they let it be removed from the classroom and the national consciousness at home. Defending other borders, they conceded their own. Voicing moral reasons for war, they became embarrassed by moral social arguments in domestic politics. Fighting communists abroad, and treating them with respect in the education sector. Talking about values, but never opposing those values becoming a sick mockery of real conservative ones. Accepting and deferring to every social engineering project and institutional capture the Left achieved when the Right stopped fighting.

Heroes on foreign soil, and cowards in their own land.

And here we get to the bigger problem for Conservatism or for Libertarianism too which suffers the same issue in a slightly different way. There is a reason that official Conservatism became deeply unpopular, and a reason too why Libertarianism did not replace it as the first choice of the rightwing voter. Populism did. A reason more profound than just saying that they abandoned their core or core principles and core vote. Why was the betrayal so complete?

The Nation State does not exist to serve universal rights.

It doesn’t exist to serve Democracy as a universal system of rule.

It doesn’t exist to protect everyone.

It doesn’t exist to serve the UN, the EU, NATO or the World Bank.

It doesn’t exist to protect foreign nationals of any kind.

It doesn’t exist to welcome those fleeing from elsewhere.

It doesn’t exist to maintain an international rules based system.

It doesn’t exist to ensure that a military industrial complex is fed State funding.

It doesn’t exist to equally feed charities, NGOs, or thousands upon thousands of leftist voters in State funded jobs.

The Nation State isn’t there to police the world.

It isn’t there to ensure free trade.

The Nation State exists solely to conserve a particular People in a particular place.

To serve a SPECIFIC People. To defend THEM. To protect THEIR OWN borders. To save THEIR OWN citizens from foreign rule. To give peace, security, development, progress, freedom, inalienable rights….EXCLUSIVELY to their OWN PEOPLE.

The only thing a Conservative should conserve is his own People. Your economic principles are only valuable so far as they help your own people.

The only Liberty a libertarian should be concerned with is that of himself and his own People. Your abstract principles are only valuable so far as they help your own people.

Any ideology of the Right becomes meaningless when it becomes internationalist. Internationalism is solely about the ideology of the Left. The idea that authority crosses borders or bows to anything outside one’s own nation is inherently denying what a nation state is for and WHO a nation state is supposed to serve.

Of course you can have allies and friends, enemies and opponents too. But the only authority in your house, is you. The People are paramount, and the Citizen is King. That’s the only ‘democracy’ that means anything, and a claimed democracy that places the foreign interest and the alien arrival and the corporate profit above the obvious and clear interests of the People, the existing citizenry, is worthless, as is any abstract principle or claimed high morality that does the same.

There is not a nation on Earth of any age or worth thar was not formed by and for a SPECIFIC People.

Only your own people are what you, as a conservative, should want to conserve. Conserving the rights and freedom of other people in other places is none of your concern if your people are being replaced and destroyed, ignored and harmed. You are as urgently morally required to prioritise your own as a father is to save his child before he saves someone else’s.

Look at the latest LA Riots and tell me that a Mexican illegal entrant who waves a Mexican flag while burning the US has the same inalienable rights as a US citizen in the US and I will know you are a fool. He does not. Wisdom discriminates between the deserving and the undeserving and between the citizen and the non citizen.

Look at never integrated Muslim hordes in any Western nation and tell me that they have the same rights and claims as my specific People to live in England and be protected more than my English fellows and I will know you for a fool or a traitor.

There is no shame in knowing that your own People come first. There is no shame in putting your own citizens first. All the shame is in denying and abusing them or in facilitating their suffering and their replacement. All the shame is in caring more about those from elsewhere, or those still elsewhere, than you care about your own.

To thine own people be true.

Conserve that, or be judged worthless.