Late last week, the New York State Senate voted to legalize homosexual marriage, giving  equality with heterosexual marriage, the foundational unit of every single human society in the last 5,000 years of recorded history.

This is an enormous victory for the gay rights movement and for the American left.  Like most of the left's victories in recent years, it could not have happened without the support of the Republican Party (which controls the New York State Senate).  Republican fingerprints are all over Roe v. Wade, No Child Left Behind, affirmative action, amnesty for illegals, and the expansion of Medicare.  Indeed, gay marriage failed in New York when the Democrats controlled the State Senate in 2009.

It's time for conservatives to face the truth: there is no conservative party in the United States.  There is a leftist party, and a slightly-less-leftist party.

Forty percent of Americans self-identify as conservatives.  Yet conservatives could not muster enough political support to defend traditional, heterosexual marriage against homosexuals, who comprise less than five percent of the population.  But the gays -- whose campaign in New York was fronted by the circus freak Lady Gaga -- have been everywhere, French-kissing on the steps of state capitols from Sacramento to Albany, marching through the streets of San Francisco in bondage leather, throwing condoms and hosts at priests celebrating Mass in New York City, running television ads advocating gay marriage, donating pro bono legal representation to their cause, and enacting vendettas, protests, and boycotts against anyone who disagrees with them. 

Gays, a tiny fraction of the population, have been organized and militant.  This is true of the left in general.  Unions are barely ten percent of the workforce, but (aside from the recent exception of Wisconsin) they almost always get what they want, because they are always ready to strike, demonstrate, protest, intimidate politicians, and threaten violence.  Blacks are a mere thirteen percent of the population, but they have practiced the arts of militant organizing, bloc voting, public rioting, and suing everybody in sight for the last fifty years.  Consequently, they are given preferential treatment in hiring and university admissions, they are overrepresented in advertising campaigns, they have their own caucus in the House of Representatives, and they have received hundreds of billions in Federal aid programs.  It is just about impossible to speak ill of blacks in a nation that supposedly guarantees free speech, no matter what the black-on-white crime rate is, the black homicide rate is, the black dropout rate is, or how many blacks are born out of wedlock and raised in single-parent homes.  Blacks and gays are given special legal protection by "hate crimes" legislation that is almost never applied on behalf of white victims of black perpetrators or straight victims of gay perpetrators.

The combined numbers of gays, blacks, unions, and other groups comprising the left fail to outnumber conservatives.  Yet conservatives have suffered defeat after defeat on almost every major issue for decades.  Conservatives have been disorganized and passive, while leftists have been militant and united in their fifty-year quest to destroy every single traditional, bourgeois norm and value in American life -- while smugly enjoying the security and economic prosperity that was created by those very same bourgeois norms and values.

Leftists have a nearly religious, cult-like devotion to their cause that conservatives don't.  They control the K-12 public-school curriculum.  They have purged conservatives from the universities and from Hollywood; they patronize leftist businesses and contribute to leftist causes; they refuse to associate with conservatives socially or vote for them.  They hire fellow leftists and fire conservatives.  They have co-opted the power of government to give themselves preferential treatment by law and access to tax dollars paid into government coffers by the conservatives they despise.  Conservatives have stupidly accepted all of this without retaliating. 

The political strategy of conservatives and Republicans for the last several decades has been purely reactionary -- to wait for leftists in power to screw up, then reap the electoral rewards.  Every major political victory by conservative Republicans in recent memory -- Reagan's election in 1980, the Republican House sweep in 1994, and the Republican House takeover in 2010 -- has been entirely dependent on the overreach or incompetence of Democratic Party leftists in power.  But this strategy concedes the agenda to the left.  At no time has the right actually been in control of the national agenda in any meaningful sense.

By failing to form a militant conservative movement, defend bourgeois values, and suppress leftist radicalism, the right has created a monster.  The left has already gotten nearly everything it wanted -- abortion, pornography, welfare, homosexual marriage, socialized medicine, a submissive and internationalist foreign policy, out-of-control federal spending, and federal interference in virtually every facet of American life.  We are now a nation $14 trillion in debt, $1.5 trillion in deficit, our currency devalued, our manufacturing base destroyed, our obese citizens awaiting their next government benefit, our moral character sapped.  We are fighting three undeclared wars simultaneously with what are essentially mercenary soldiers because the left opposes conscription.  Our left-wing president, whose constitutional duty is to execute the laws of Congress, ignores the laws he dislikes -- such as the Defense of Marriage Act and the War Powers Act -- but the supposedly "conservative" Republican Speaker of the House makes a golf date with him rather than asserting constitutional checks and balances.  (Can anyone imagine radical leftists like Reps. Maxine Waters and Sheila Jackson Lee golfing with President Bush after the invasion of Iraq?)

The right's strategy of conceding the national agenda to the left is exceedingly dangerous.  The left's solutions to any one of a number of issues on the table -- deficit spending, cap-and-trade, energy security, Iran's nuclear program, illegal immigration -- could deal a mortal blow to the nation.

There is a historical precedent for the collapse of conservatism, and it isn't a good one.  During the 1920s and 1930s, communists and radical leftists sought to subvert Italy, Germany, and Spain, three of Europe's great nations, in the aftermath of World War I.  Social democratic and liberal internationalist governments placed their faith in social welfare programs and pie-in-the-sky schemes like the League of Nations rather than sound economic policies and concrete national security interests.  Currency values collapsed, economies were ruined; social deviance flourished.  When the "trains would no longer run on time," conservatives were no alternative.  They had long been discredited by their arrogance, incompetence, and impotence.  Instead of a firm assertion of sober, bourgeois, stable conservatism, these countries got full-throated, unrestrained, paramilitary nationalist movements, the excesses of which are well-known and unworthy of emulation.

I hope that that sort of thing won't happen here.

One can hope.