The Conservative “Great Wall”

Fortified Against the Right and the Left

By guest contributor Baptized Barbarian.

If you’ve ever seen the Great Wall of China, either in media or in real life, you’ll notice the battlements or castellations on both sides. If you’re having a hard time visualizing it, think of a gear. Slots to position archers. It’s kind of strange. It was originally finalized under the Ming and Qing dynasties as a bulwark to secure peace and prosperity. The accepted theory is that it was built to keep the hordes of the Steppe out, and you start to wonder why it also had fortifications on the inside too, but we’re not going to waste any time thinking about that because it’s the perfect metaphor for “Conservatism” in the West.

William F. Buckley, Jr., infamously said that “Conservatism” was “Standing athwart history, yelling, ‘STOP!’” It’s a ridiculous quote demonstrating the ineffectuality of Conservatism, and I wonder why Buckley ever uttered it. Yet, he did. Sometimes, people speak the truth in fits of absent-mindedness. The Conservative man yelling, “Stop!” is standing atop the double-fortified wall.

The running joke is asking the question “What has Conservatism conserved?” They always seem stuck in the position of adamantly defending the last victory of the Left as the last bastion of Conservatism. “The Conservative Case for X” has become so true that it’s beyond farce. The American Enterprise Institute published “The Conservative Case for Teaching about ‘Gender Identity’” in 2023, and the Tory Reform Group in the U.K. published “The Conservative Case for Trans Rights” in 2020. We’re beyond parody.

The clear observation is of their attempts to contest the machinations of the Left, but only the initiated may recognize their attempts to thwart the Right. When Buckley was yelling, “Stop!” from the parapets, he yelled in both directions. Conservatism is at least as fortified against right-wing sentiment as it is against left-wing. Buckley was thrust into his position with the exact intention to kill the Birchers. National Review purged all of the people who weren’t manning the Great Wall of Conservatism, and it continued tossing people off the wall through 2012, when they tossed off John Derbyshire.

Anybody who has a passing familiarity with military history knows that a two-front war is a recipe for defeat. And the long defeat of Conservatism is that they’ve been dragged left at every interval, and they save most of their arrows for the people on the Right. Tucker Carlson is the latest person under fire. Before him, it was Pat Buchanan. Neither of these men are unreasonable, and we should extend enough charity to their predecessors to understand that they likely weren’t unreasonable, either.

The ranks of the walls grow thin. They won’t receive reinforcements. The Boomer generation, raised for the wall, expire at increasing rates. The subcontinental foreigners they’ve imported seem to rush through the gates to bolster the left side of the wall. This preservation of the “peace” and the status quo cannot last another decade.

William Butler Yeats once wrote in “The Second Coming” that “the centre cannot hold.” The poem spoke about a new beginning. We’re watching this wall collapse. Something new is coming.