Two Unexpected Signs Of A Coming Conservative Ascendency

The ever-more-radical left may rule in Washington, Hollywood, the media, academe, and the arts, but when an architecture of ideas is built on a San Andreas Fault of error and defiance of human nature, the inevitable failures register high on the Richter Scale.

Botching a war is one thing, but President Joe Biden turned the ending of a war into an unmitigated disaster. That’s the massively experienced-in-foreign-policy Joe Biden, first elected way back during Richard Nixon’s first term to the U.S. Senate, where he would remain for 36 years, two-time chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and ranking Democrat on it beginning in 1997, then placed in charge of Iraq policy as vice president.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Washington’s COVID-19 overreach seems to seek the permanent curtailment of personal liberties, unprecedented government spending has brought what looks to be long-term inflation unseen since Jimmy Carter, and the federal government has declared all-out war on the majority of Americans who reject the racial and sexual division Democrats are peddling.

The party’s failures make a Republican rout a foregone conclusion in the November 2022 congressional elections, barring unthinkable GOP fumbling – but far greater victories than that are actually within reach for conservatism, triumphs that spell cultural realignment and will leave delighted GOP leaders wondering why the attainments weren’t engineered many years ago.

One is the rise of black conservative political leaders. In California, talk radio titan Larry Elder, who has never held political office, has caused the hapless, hypocritical Gov. Gavin Newsom to panic in the face of a recall effort. In 2003, another political novice, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, replaced failed Democrat Gov. Gray Davis in a similar recall vote.

Even if Elder loses, he will have shown up Newsom and his ideology in a way reminiscent of William F. Buckley Jr.’s humiliation of the liberal Republican who beat him in the 1965 New York City mayoral race, John Lindsey. Lindsey’s big spending would ultimately bankrupt the Big Apple, but Buckley’s attacks on Lindsey’s left-leaning fundamentals exposed his intellectual bankruptcy via a fiery campaign that gained national attention.

In the wake of the 2016 election of Donald Trump, never-elected outsiders with years of heavy media visibility, such as Elder, must now be taken seriously in contests for high office. In May, Daily Wire commentator and author Candace Owens interviewed Trump and they discussed Owens being tapped as his 2024 running mate. Perhaps more likely is staunch conservative and fiery debater Owens, who is 32, running for president herself.

It was known all the way back in the 1980s that the left in America feared no political development more than the rise of black conservative leaders like Elder and Owens. It is why Democrats sacrificed all decorum and decided it was worth conducting a nationally televised X-rated circus in 1991 to prevent Clarence Thomas from succeeding the iconic Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court – a slanderous and ultimately unsuccessful spectacle presided over by then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden.

The Uncle Tom taunts against Elder began immediately after he threw his hat into the ring. The most infamous slur against him (so far) tellingly remarks that “it’s often best just to ignore people like Elder.”

But black conservatives know how to take such fully expected punches, as Owens proved last year by fearlessly striking back against a profanity-laced attack from a celebrity Biden supporter. An unrelenting Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., in May even demonstrated how such attacks can be self-destructive for the Democrats who launch them, with a Democrat county chairman forced to resign after using a racial epithet against Scott, after Scott was tapped to respond to Biden’s first address to Congress. Scott’s sin? Declaring the self-evident truth that “America is not a racist country.”

There have already been non-white governors who have achieved sustained popularity with successful free-market policies, most notably the eight years of Indian-American Bobby Jindal in Louisiana. But both Elder and Owens, in the spirit of Donald Trump, are far more rhetorically hard-edged in arguing their conservative views, and in attacking politicians of the left. They, Scott and other black leaders who fundamentally oppose the radical agenda of the Al Sharptons and the Joy Reids have it in their power to neutralize the Democratic Party’s poisonous exploitation of race, and bring to fruition a 21st-century Emancipation Proclamation from liberal social policies that have kept black Americans in chains of poverty for decades. A few examples of success under black conservative governance and the left’s “race traitor” taunts will wear thin.

Heeere’s Greg!

Another development, a very long time coming, could be equally revolutionary. Greg Gutfeld, the hip, irreverent Fox News personality, has in a matter of several months in his weeknight 11 p.m. slot succeeded in overtaking “The Tonight Show” and the other big network late-night programs, whose hosts fill the shoes of the likes of Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and Jay Leno.

If this trend continues for Gutfeld, it will be an unprecedented cultural victory for the right. Late-night talk shows helped destroy politicians, such as Nixon and sexually indiscreet 1984 Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart; it rehabilitated others, as a Carson appearance did for then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton after his interminable keynote speech at the 1988 Democratic convention bored delegates to jeers.

The Gutfeld show is fast-paced, seldom unfunny, and targeted at a young demographic. Guests almost always include professional comedians of a libertarian bent. One regular is Tyrus Brodus, a champion wrestler, former professional bodyguard, and in-your-face conservative who as a youth faced wrenching racism within his bi-racial family. Brodus and black, 28-year-old Fox commentator Lawrence Jones recently appeared together on the Gutfeld show hilariously exchanging taunts against the Democratic Party “realizing that it’s losing black folks,” as Jones put it. “They’re taking our civil liberties away,” Jones added, and “allowing violence to just run rampant.”

With Bill Buckley and, earlier this year, Rush Limbaugh gone from the scene, Gutfeld has inherited the mantle of media giant able to make audiences laugh when he touts conservative policies.

One thing Elder, Owens, and Gutfeld and his late-night companions on Fox have in common is that they know how to shoot down the specifics of the actual policies of Democrats with clarity and humor. Far too often in the past, conservative solutions have been presented in the form of policy briefs that the average American has little patience to pore into.

Watching chaotic, unfettered immigration and other long-term causes of demographic changes favoring the left often leaves conservatives in a state of despair for the future. The rise of black conservative political leadership and possible dominance of the culturally powerful late-night TV slot may make for a game-changing counter-trend.

— Written by Thomas McArdle