Pulling up American Thinker on my phone the other day, Google offered the search suggestion: "American Thinker Conservative."  I clicked.  Why not – what harm could Google do me?  What I was treated to was a plethora of websites, touting themselves as neutral fact-checkers, indignant about American Thinker's "conservative bias."  How enlightening!  Now tell me who's buried in Grant's tomb...

What we have here is a nice illustration of a propaganda strategy that should not be underestimated – the inane idea that the reasonable position is always some compromise in the middle – the myth, in other words, that the left is the center.  Can't we all just get along – and do things my way?

Let us dispense with the naïve smiley-faced idea that compromise is automatically the best solution to all problems.  If we had rigorously pursued compromise before the American Civil War, half of the U.S. would probably still have slavery.  If we had made compromises at the end of the Second World War, instead of insisting on unconditional surrender, the Nazis and the Japanese militarists would have been left intact.  "Compromises" like the Iran deal, the Paris Climate Accord, GAT, NAFTA, and numerous other diplomatic schemes liberal administrations have concocted have been little more than giveaways at the expense of ordinary American citizens.

Compromise works only when it brings together different but still compatible interests.  It fails when it is used as a rhetorical sleight-of-hand to surrender wealth or sovereignty to parties who despise us.  As has been said before but needs to be said until people's ears ring with its repeating – compromising with leftists always amounts to agreeing to accept their entire destructive program over a longer period of time.  There is no middle ground, no compromise, between capitalism and socialism, between nationalism and globalism, or between Christianity and atheism.  The left should be invited to shove its sophisticated Hegelian dialectics into the evil sunless places where even the Podesta brothers dare not go.

Frankly, even the idea of a political continuum is a misleading bit of leftist propaganda.  It is self-destructive to accept the idea that concern for human beings is the province of the left, and that a razor's breadth to the "right" of conservatism lie racism, militarism, and the police state.  Today's leftist governments have accomplished two out of three of those vices perfectly well – in their own sweet virtue-signaling way.

There is no general political continuum.  There are only good ideas and bad ones, truths and falsehoods, the possible and the utopian.  Conservatism is fundamentally about the preservation of ideas known to work.  It makes no sense to compromise with either unproven fantasies or known failures.

We should care that liberals call us right-wing extremists, wingnuts, racists, homophobes, Islamophobes, fascists, or anything else no more than we should care if they called us grandfather clocks.  As one doesn't get one's feelings hurt by the ravings of psychotic street people, one need not be overly vexed by the insults of people who believe that there are, and have always been, fifty-odd genders.  In a world of the insane, the sane will inevitably be called extremists.  We should never agree to become insane by degrees to get along with them, or to be apologetic about our lack of sensitivity toward other people's mass hallucinations.  Call me crazy – I will wear it as a badge of honor.