Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism

by Ed West

the Left has also developed a moral monopoly, so that those outside of the faith are under an unspoken obligation to prove their moral worth before their views can be considered, just as non-believers in highly religious societies have an air of suspicion hanging over their every word. Because of this, one of the de facto expectations for conservatives in public life is that they must denounce those to the Right of them, and so the boundary of what is acceptable shifts Leftward, bit by bit, and ideas that would have been mundane and mainstream one decade become shocking the next (or ‘controversial’, as the media use as shorthand for ‘beyond the pale’). In contrast, there are no social sanctions against proposing even extreme Left-wing ideas because those advocating them are not seen as ethically questionable for doing so – at worst misguided. In fact, there is active competition to come up with ever wilder radical ideas, a trend that has sped up with the ‘Great Awokening’ of the 2010s, the acceleration of identity politics brought about by competing victimhood narratives on social media.