IMF has become a must-read. The essays are not always polished, and you will need your blood pressure medications at times, but there is at least some passion there.

And sometimes you get something ripe for fisking. Yetzer Hara has just argued against conservatism from a neo-Marxist point of view. Let’s have a look at his logic.

Liberals have had a steady streak of policy victories for the whole 20th century even in periods where Americans overwhelmingly identified as conservative.

True, but America is a republic that was set up to distrust the Mob. It was run by a Democratic machine (holding at least two of the three areas of power) for most of the last century. It is completely unsurprising that the policies promoted were liberal.

So why the heck is this? I can speculate a few reasons:

1. Conservatism is not exciting. Humans are hard wired to like new things…even if their life will be objectively worse, most people can be persuaded to vote for something different just for a change in political scenery.

Sort of true. This cuts both ways. Some people will vote for any populist who promises the earth — from Peron, to the Kingish, to JFK (of those three, Peron was the least corrupt). The weakness demagogues have is delivering on their promises, which requires an understanding of how the world really works. Liberals tend to believe their delusions over reality.

2. In rhetoric, attack is always easier than defense. Consider any policy…it is always easier to argue why something doesn’t work than why something does work. People are never happy with what they have, so it is not difficult to persuade them that “our ideas are better.” Conservatism, being inherently defensive, is not favored by this principle.

Rhetoric is not reality. Political skill is not governance — in fact, the most politically skilled politicians in my live (Muldoon and Clarke in NZ, Nixon and Clinton in the US) worsened the condition of the nation (for any US readers, Muldoon and Clarke virtually bankrupted New Zealand in their last term of office).

3. Conservatism is myopic. Conservatives have one eye on the past and one eye on the present. Radicals of any stripe have both eyes looking towards the future. It is a characteristic of conservatism that the enemy is always moving the battlefield. The legal history of conservatism is one of repeatedly abandoning an old position and retrenching around a new one, then doing it all over once the new position become similarly untenable.

Two words. Margaret Thatcher.

If you are radical enough, you can change the terms of debate. The progressive left are afraid to undo Thatcher’s reforms, even though she is despised by generations who recall her as Prime Minister.

4. Lack of moral courage…this is going to be the hardest for you all to understand. Consider World War II…when we bombed Germany, did we try to separate the “good Germans” from the “bad Germans?” Hell no…we bombed them all. We terror-bombed their population centers and killed hundreds of thousands of innocents. We beat them into submission to win the war. This is the opposite of conservatism. The conservative in his mind places principle over policy. Since he doesn’t believe in any new policy, he places his faith in amorphous values such as “freedom” or “limited government.” Non-conservatism by contrast is unprincipled…their goal is victory and they will go to any extreme to attain it. To achieve policy goals, they are willing to bend or break their principles. The will to accept the consequences of going for what you really want is moral courage.

This is the coldest version of the end justifies the means I have read recently, I disagree with this. Your end or result is a consequence of the means you have.

What Liberals do is beleive their models, and that if they only can get the people to do their actions. This belief led to the deaths of millions — but did not succed.

Conservatives lack moral courage. If you really wanted limited government you would be shooting people…history clearly indicates that conservatism has never withstood the democratic process. Consider every conservative movement that actually did get what they wanted…they went radical and started slitting throats. If the other side is willing to shed blood and you aren’t then you lose…simple as that.

via Conservatism: History’s Losing Strategy.

Again, no. If you review your history, there have been radical conservatives that did slash throats and repress — from the White Terror that followed the French Revolution to the death squads in Argentina.

In the end, violence, power and lies — which are the tools of the left — yield to the the truth. The grand project of the left — to redistribute all resources through the mighty and worshipped hand of the state — has failed in both it’s “hard” form (Marxism-Leninism) and its “soft” form (Social Democracy).

The author is wrong. Marxism is a strategy of failure. Indeed, in New Zealand the Marxists are the new conservatives, and the right is where the radical thought occurs.