A long expected rift bursts
This is an unedited transcript from Harry Binswanger’s Letter posted here. If interested in content from an Objectivist perspective, feel free to visit his website for a two-week free trial here. Enjoy.
Recently, a new culture war among conservatives, particularly between old guards and young provocateurs, has come to a head, most notably between Ben Shaprio and Nick Fuentes respectively.
For those unaware on this forum, Nick Fuentes is an alt-right ideologue. Ever since October 7th, and the subsequent moral concession of the West toward Islamists, Nick has been able to take advantage of this newfound antisemitism to further his agenda among young conservatives, with striking effectiveness. More and more prominent young conservatives, such as Brett Cooper and Amir Odom, are open to criticizing Israel for their conduct against Hamas and are defending Fuentes on the grounds that conservatives shouldn’t be “hypocrites” calling for the cancellation of people like Fuentes, as Mark Levin has done.
But why has the conservative movement allowed this outgrowth to metastasize in the first place? In my view, I think a major reason is that the better voices in the conservative movement, like Ben Shapiro, have continuously made concessions to the worst people within his own base. The best example of this I have found personally is when Sam Harris debated Ben Shapiro over who should be elected in the 2024 presidental election hosted by The Free Press.
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Ben Shapiro claimed that January 6th was a peaceful transfer of power because the transfer of power occurred. That concession alone crosses a red line, and it was done so to justify supporting the front runner within the Republican Party. In other words, Ben calculated that remaining in good standing within the Republican Party was more important than the principle of the rule of law.
This pragmatic approach to politics is what carves out room for bad actors like Fuentes to leech into the movement. After all, if supporting the president requires apologizing for his authoritarian excesses and delusional conspiracies, why stop with just election fraud? Perhaps the Jews have caused every war throughout history, as Nick Fuentes has claimed. The moral mainstream has been wrong on many controversial issues, like the transgender movement or statist COVID policy, so why shouldn’t the official historical account of events like 9/11, World War 2, the Iraq War, the Holocaust, etc., also be called into question?
Ben Shapiro dug his own grave with this omission, and has no right to complain how the conservative movement is being infiltrated by bad actors, given he assisted opening the doors to them in the first place. According to mainstream conservatism, adhering to principles is seen as an impediment to political expediency, which is why there is little to no uproar within the conservative movement for authoritarian policies such as having a standing military across large cities across the US to “police” them (a.k.a. apprehend and deport without due process individuals suspected of being aliens).
So, while I am glad there is finally push-back from the better voices within the conservative movement against people like Nick Fuentes, it is too little, too late. By supporting the president in the wake of the fallout from the presidential election of 2020, they are conceding a principled ideology as such, full stop. And if conservatives have no foundation to ground their ideology, and if everything they once stood for can now be put on the table, why then would they be surprised when ideologues take advantage of these concessions?
Worse than all of this, I predict that Ben Shapiro will ultimately lose this war, since he agrees, in principle, with the eradication of principle. He has become a pragmatic supporter of an authoritarian he should never have endorsed. And, as Ayn Rand says, “In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.”
The conspiracy-driven, arbitrary-asserting, isolationist and nationalist wing of the Republican Party is the most consistent group within this conflict, thus they will be the ones who win.
