Conservatives still have much more to lose

There’s a tendency on the right to assume that we have basically lost. The left controls the media, the universities, and the pulpit. They even managed to turn public health—previously the most boring and staid element of state power—into an ideological instrument.  

They hold the Megaphone. Their civil rights-based approach to power does an end run around democratic institutions by bringing an ever-expanding circle of behaviors and identities under the shield of protected classes. The seemingly preposterous Kendian principle that we must impose new racial discrimination to cure past racial discrimination is gradually becoming the new common sense.

It is necessary however to consider what the left has still not succeeded in seizing or destroying, not so much because we have been so resolute in defending it but because they are still getting around to it. “Look what they are doing to us this time!” has been the lame rallying cry of the Right since the 1950s or so. We need to ringfence our existing territory so we aren’t taken by surprise in the next five years when we get outflanked.

For instance, though it sounds picayune, the left is actively seeking to override the ancient principle that local communities ought to have some say over what goes on there. Zoning laws are notorious eye-glazers, but leftists are using them as a lever and cudgel. Arguing that restrictions on what can be built are a vestige of redlining, Jim Crow, and ultimately slave-catching, and asserting that “ZIP code is destiny,” leftists in states like Minnesota, Washington, and California either have or are desperately trying to establish state laws that override local zoning. Getting rid of single-family only zoning restrictions in the name of affordability, racial justice, and environmental sustainability is in fact an effort to impose density on local communities, and urbanify the political complexion of suburbs and exurbs.

This effort will raise the costs of the classic American dream of having a private house with a yard and a two-car garage. It will encourage everyone to live near mass transit, in quadruplex apartments, and discourage large families. It is a backdoor strategy to end what leftists call American apartheid, the supposed legacy of racial segregation that persists in residential demographics…..

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Continue reading this article, published July 12, 2021 at American Mindset.