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Conservatives are angry at the world. Listening to conservative politicians and media figures, one is bombarded with other enemies that we must be ready to face down: NGOs, Big Tech, the UN, Anthony Fauci, China, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood…the list is endless. Frederick the Great once said, “He who defends everything defends nothing.” This quote was adapted by Pat Buchanan to argue against the American global empire. The US tries to be everywhere, and this has led to foreign policy failures throughout Asia and the Middle East. Yet, listening to conservatives today, one gets the impression that we must go to war with every institution in the country. By appealing to “regular Americans,” we will somehow come together and overcome the combined power of the media, big business, and government.

Such a view represents a naïve understanding of politics. Every movement has political capital that it must use wisely. Even if you win both houses of congress and the presidency, there is usually only one or two bills you can pass in an administration. For Obama, it was healthcare; for Trump it was taxes. Everything else has to go on the back burner. To accomplish things through the executive branch also requires the administration to spend its political capital wisely. A movement that adopts too many unpopular causes at once—and anything that challenges established interests or is seen as too radical will become unpopular—will accomplish nothing and burn itself out.

Here’s the point. If a politician agrees with you on a topic, but makes it his last priority, then he is no better than someone who disagrees with you. In neither case will he do what you want, especially if the things you want him to do are politically difficult.

This is the problem with conservatives’ “us against the world” mentality. Impotently flailing at every institution that stand against your values is good for fundraising, and can be cathartic for the masses. But it’s not the way to effect change. Cultural conservatives will always give way to groups that have a narrow focus on the things they want to accomplish. Little wonder that groups pushing for tax cuts and war have been the only factions of conservatism that have gotten what they wanted from recent presidents.

If there is going to be any hope of changing the culture, conservatives will have to focus on the most important institutions for shaping public and elite opinion. To understand where the focus should be, let’s begin by investigating where it shouldn’t. “Woke capital” is a lagging indicator; big corporations worry about lawsuits and bad publicity, and will blow with the cultural winds. Lenin reportedly said that capitalists would sell communists the rope they would hang them with. While some businesses are staffed by true woke believers, most just want to make money, and are taking the path of least resistance. It’s not a coincidence that businesses started adopting radical rhetoric with regards to issues of gender, race, and sexuality, years or even decades after the institutions that actually shape the culture.

Likewise, those who believe that Americans need to stand up to foreign threats, whether nations such as China or organizations like the UN, are also on the wrong track. Today, the threat is not “globalism.” It is the US that exports the worst parts of its political culture abroad, as the State Department did when it trained minorities in France to engage in identity politics. Politicians complain about China demanding that Tom Cruz take the Taiwanese flag off his jacket in Top Gun, but is this really the biggest threat in a country in which your family members can be fired for your “wrong” opinions, or where you can be arrested for defending your own property?

A more intelligent conservatism would spend its capital at leverage points, reforming the institutions that will have the broadest impact once they are reformed or destroyed. The first place to start is the civil rights bureaucracy. As Chris Caldwell showed in The Age of Entitlement, it was federal bureaucrats who, with no input from the voters, interpreted the Civil Rights Act in ways that restricted speech and all but required quotas. Afraid of potentially ruinous lawsuits and a government that saw statistical disparities as evidence of discrimination, businesses across the country began engaging in diversity training and hiring human resources departments as a self-defense mechanism against the state.

Republicans have had control of the executive branch and provided practically no push back against the civil rights infrastructure, for the obvious reason that any president that tried to do so would be portrayed as having taken us back to Jim Crow. Nonetheless, the cost of inaction has been the placement of political commissars in every corporation and educational institution in the country, and a gradual radicalization in what is considered the bare minimum “anti-racist”or woke activism a company must engage in. Removing the legal underpinnings of the system won’t reform the culture overnight, but would at least remove the financial and bureaucratic incentives for institutions to engage in discrimination and promote the worst ideas coming out of the academy. There is therefore a clear path through which one can reform civil rights law.

The other leverage points one might attack are big tech, the media, and academia. Reasonable minds can disagree on where to start, but the last of these is easiest to isolate and probably the most difficult to reform. Half of Americans never go to college, and those that do spend four or five years there at most; yet we are all exposed to big tech and the news media throughout our entire lives. The idea that conservatives should do something about internet censorship is not new; what is necessary, however, is to focus on that issue to the exclusion of all others. Conservatives must also have a willingness to hold politicians who do not act on the issue as accountable as they did when it appeared that some congressional Republicans might have the temerity to oppose repealing Obamacare.

Those who blame the profit motive or foreign powers for what is a homegrown totalitarianism are grifters at best, they need to be cast aside and shamed for trying to distract from the real problems the country faces. Conservatives are right to despair. Five years ago, most institutions were liberal. After the BLM revolution, practically all were, and not even individuals within those institutions could dissent from the party line. Ask Drew Brees, who found out that it only took a few years for kneeling during the national anthem to go from being prohibited to all but mandatory.

Practically every demographic that is growing supports Democrats, as do young people. Conservatives will be lucky to accomplish anything in the next few decades. The only hope for them taking their country back will involve starting with the things most likely to have downstream effects, and making the few political successes they manage to have actually matter. Choose wisely, or watch your country continue to decline.

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