There’s another reason why the DCC attitude is so damaging to the conservative movement: most people aren’t political obsessives. They don’t care about your 14-point refutation of Obamacare. They want to hear things that relate to their own experiences, not abstract policy debates.
One comment from Ben Shapiro, made on The Rubin Report in February 2016, sums up this conservative myopia.
The problem with Trump is he fails to distinguish political incorrectness from just being a jackass… There’s a difference between being rude and being politically incorrect. Being rude is telling Megyn Kelly she’s bleeding from her wherever. Being politically incorrect is saying some immigrants coming across our southern border are criminals. That’s politically incorrect but it’s not rude.
Shapiro is thinking of a world where only politics matter. To him, political correctness is a problem because it suppresses facts relevant to current affairs—and that’s it. For most other people, the stultifying rules of political correctness go far beyond the suppression of facts; it’s the suppression of jokes, banter, and yes, the suppression of rudeness.
Political correctness interrupts everyday human experiences, threatening to turn every single personal matter into a public one. You can no longer slip up in conversation without worrying if the person you’re talking to is going to tell the whole world what you said, potentially ruining your life forever (need I provide a personal example?). The internet’s erosion of privacy with the resurgence of politically correct taboos is a terrifying combination. That’s why so many people are drawn to Trump.
DCCs don’t understand this because they think politics is, well, a debate club. In their imagined political ideal, elections are fought issue-by-issue, with each candidate presenting his arguments on foreign and domestic policy in neat little 30-minute segments. In reality, politics doesn’t work like that—and if it did, voter turnout would be in even greater crisis.
There’s perhaps no better example of DCCs being outplayed by aggressive hellraisers than the replacement of Megyn Kelly, formerly the face of FOX News, with Tucker Carlson. Kelly, now at NBC, is a milquetoast moderate conservative who, during the election campaign, attracted attention for playing the resident feminist, going after Donald Trump for making demeaning comments about women. Carlson, on the other hand, is a badass warrior of the airwaves, who lives to skewer progressives in front of a national audience. In his first week, Carlson almost doubled Kelly’s ratings, including a 45% increase in the all-important 25-54 age demographic.158 His show is great, that’s why he got Bill O’Reilly’s job. FOX News has provided the roadmap for conservative media organizations seeking to rescue themselves from decline: bring in someone who isn’t a total cuck.
Politics isn’t won by commanding the facts, but by connecting with people’s experiences. That’s why it’s so important for conservatives to re-engage with culture and entertainment, which are the commanding heights of people’s experiences in the modern world. All our brilliant political victories will come to an end if we don’t win the culture war. Indeed, the fact that Donald Trump’s signature election promise—enforcing immigration laws—was seen as so controversial, is a testament to how well progressives have ingrained their views on our culture. As recently as the 1990s, such a suggestion was completely mainstream. This is how progressives manage to keep winning the battle for America’s soul, despite occasional temporary setbacks on Election Day.
And that’s why, in a society increasingly frustrated by political correctness, conservatives need to grit their teeth and come to terms with the necessity of gauche, bragging provocateurs like Donald Trump…and me.
BRINGING CONSERVATISM TOGETHER
I’ll be the first to admit that we need Debate Club Conservatives. It is immensely valuable to have people who can utterly dominate the Left in an argument—just compare the power and rigor of a George Will column with one by Jessica Valenti. The strongest mind on the Left today is probably Slavoj ?i?ek—and he supported Trump over Clinton! When the public ignores the Left’s entreaties not to watch or read or listen to conservatives because of their “bigotry,” they are often swayed by our arguments.
But arguments aren’t enough. We can’t let the Left continue to dominate culture, entertainment, and the norms of everyday language itself and expect to win elections. We can’t hope that every member of the public will see through the Left’s lies and eventually discover George Will’s columns at The Washington Post. Much of conservatism is kept hidden from the public, especially in schools and colleges, where young people are figuring out who they are and what their principles are.
As Ann Coulter says, “We don’t have time for an elegant person right now. The country is at stake.” We need our brawlers and our fighters. Whether establishment conservatives like it or not, the culture war will be won by men like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump, who use straightforward language and never apologize.
One man who has long understood what Republicans need to do in order to win is Roger Stone. A legendary political operative known for pulling dirty tricks, he has been described as a “henchman,” “hit man” and a master of the “dark arts”—all in the same article.159 Although he made his career in the Nixon administration, Stone has been backing anti-establishment figures for decades, including Ronald Reagan in 1976 and Donald Trump in 2016. Stone knows how to pick a winner, and given that he named me on his 2016 “Best Dressed List,” it’s clear the man has good taste in more than just political candidates.
We need all our attention focused on conservative issues, not leftist ones. Stop following the agenda of The Daily Beast and New York Times. Let the Left worry about insignificant “threats” like Pepe the Frog and the six or so remaining Klansmen in America. We need to turn our attention to issues that the Left either doesn’t care about, or doesn’t want us to notice—like their domination of academia and pop culture. I’m sure I sound like a broken record by this point, but until we make serious progress on those fronts, everything else is just noise.
Politics is more complicated than assembling facts and writing good arguments. It’s a brutal battle for the attention of the public, and always has been, even before the era of Donald Trump. That’s why fabulous, irrepressible faggots like myself, so original and compelling compared to the run of the mill copycat leftist celebrity, are so perturbatious to the Left. Much as it might irk DCCs, politics is showbiz today—and if we want to win, there will need to be more people like me in the future.