Into the Great Unknown

What we can say with certainty about the incoming government is that the values it brings into office are antithetical to our own. We know that: it’s a matter of public record, and we understand the fact of it even if we may be unsure of the magnitude of our disagreement. The incoming administration and the new Democrat-controlled Senate will wish to transform the country in ways we loathe. This much is certain.

Beyond that, we don’t really know very much. Systems composed of people are complex, responding and adapting in ways that are hard, often impossible, to predict. Sometimes a single individual, event, or virus can shift the entire political equation in unforeseen ways. We just don’t know; those who speak with certitude about the future demonstrate a lack of wisdom proportionate to their confidence in the predictions they make.

How will the Democrats deal with the deep schism within their own party? Will a 50-50 Senate allow the kind of radical changes many of us fear the Democrats will try to pursue? How long will Biden be able to maintain the fiction that he’s capable of carrying out the functions of his office, and how will his seemingly inevitable departure take place? What will happen in 2022 as a result of what seems likely to be poor decision-making from the Democrats over the next two years? How will our relationship to China evolve and/or deteriorate, given the leverage our adversary quite probably has over Biden’s corrupt and degenerate son?

We don’t know. We could win in a landslide in 2022. The Senate could be stymied by one or two prudent and/or cowardly Democrats who think it wise to avoid doing something so profoundly stupid as packing the Supreme Court, bringing in a new state, or opening the borders. Or they might do everything we fear, and America could be entering a new dark age. For that matter, China could share another virus with us, the next one worse than the current one to which we’ve grotesquely over-reacted.

We don’t know. So the fight goes on.

Don’t burn bridges between yourself and true allies. Find points of agreement on the right and lean into them. Encourage optimism in the face of the unknown. Avoid people who are too quick to accept and preach defeat: they don’t know the future any better than we do, and there’s nothing to be gained, neither strategic advantage nor honor, by surrender.

Be wary of people who argue for strategic losses, who say it’s better to lose the next fight because it sets us up to win later. The future becomes exponentially harder to predict as it recedes in time and as the chain of events lengthens. Fight for the most conservative plausible win in every case, because we really don’t know where a loss will take us. Keep it simple: try to win each battle as it comes up.

Most Americans hear only one side, that of a smug technocratic left ignorant of history and consumed with hubris. It is up to conservatives — people like us — to expose normal Americans to the facts and ideas they won’t otherwise hear, but that they will usually find persuasive because conservatism is closer to the truth, closer to what actually works and has been shown to work.

So now we go into the unknown together. And there are a lot of us.