Never mind that the conservative movement is dead, writes Michael Walsh, because conservatism isn't a movement anyway; its job is to "conserve."  So a movement with political goals is beside the point.  Instead, conservatism is:

... a simple acknowledgement of timeless verities and a willingness to defend them against malevolent faddishness masquerading as "progress," whose object is the destruction of our culture and its replacement with…well, nothing.

But that has been the problem all along.  If you have already retreated to defending the citadels of timeless verities, the other side has the strategic advantage of keeping you under siege.

For instance, the Marxist secular religious movement has always had the simple advantage of declaring that its members were on the side of the angels because they were fighting oppression.  That's a much better strategy than defending timeless verities.

And Ed Kilgore points out that the Sarah Jeong affair shows that the Marxists are already in the citadel.  If Sarah Jeong and her racism are normal, then if you are getting "married to the opposite sex, starting a family early, having more than two kids, worshipping in church every Sunday, revering the nation's founders" in today's public square, that makes you kinda weird, as in Vice President Pence.

So I say the best defense is a good offense.  It is not good enough to defend the citadel, or revere marriage, family, and children.  We need to seed every American mind with the notion that the left's century-long attack on the bourgeois culture is evil; that the marginalization of work, family, and the rule of law is unjust; and that it is right and proper for every American to resist the left with every fiber of his being.

I say the whole Marxian worldview is a Great Reaction, a cruel attempt to return humans to a world that never was.  For I mildly say the welfare state is neo-feudalism, identity politics is neo-tribalism, and taxing people up to 36% of GDP is neo-piracy.

It is not just that socialism fails whenever it is tried because the economy is no longer a feudal agriculture that is simple enough for dull warrior-nobles to keep going.  It is not just that the left's culture of revolution is nothing less than a religious war to the death that blows society apart.

No, the left's monumental blunder is to suppose that politics is a saving truth rather than a necessary evil, and that political power is a force for good rather than a battering ram that all too easily demolishes the fragile structures of social cooperation.

Here is the ground I stand on.  I simply say that if you lefties demand that the middle class, the bourgeoisie, has to make allowances for the poor helpless working class, and now women and minorities, because they don't have the power, then we say the same.

We deplorables demand that you godly, educated, and evolved ruling class make allowances for us, who don't have the education, the connections, the inside track, and the advanced culture to devise personal journeys of discovery along the arc of history for ourselves.  Because we don't have the power.  All we want is to live honorable lives obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.

To put things into the language of rights, we deplorables demand the right to live our ordinary, responsible lives and not be stigmatized by the enlightened ones as bigots and bitter clingers.

We might go a step farther and appropriate the language of the philosopher Lina Lamont, that we demand the right to live our humdrum little lives, and to feel as though our hard work ain't been in vain for nothin'.

Oh, I understand what is really going on; it is the conceit of the ruling class that they are better than we are and therefore get to tell us what to do.  No doubt, you remember that the philosopher Lamont had their number on that one, too.  She said:

Peo-ple?  I ain't peo-ple!  I am a...'a shimmering glowing star in the cinema firm-a-mint!'  It says so – right there [in the New York Times].

If you are a shimmering glowing star in the MSM firm-a-mint, you find it easy to sneer at a rude, crude mortal like President Trump.  Your Olympian gods are like that; they tend to treat ordinary humans as garbage.

So I would say the left's program of attacking the middle class and our responsibility culture is a vile injustice and that we will never rest until the left cries "uncle" and abandons its monstrous and inhuman program.

See what I am saying?  It is not enough to defend our timeless verities.  We need to defeat the Democrats in the midterms, and the next presidential election, and on and on until the pussy hats cry "uncle."

Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) runs the go-to site on U.S. government finances, usgovernmentspending.com.  Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.