This is why conservatives lose, all the time, year after year, for decades

Last week some kid in Colorado—oh, it feels just stupid even writing those words, like the activities of some random 12-year-old are relevant even within the irrelevant confines of this blog. But some kid in Colorado wore a Gadsden Flag patch on his backpack to school, and naturally he got in trouble because public schools are all run by hard-left ideologues, and he got called to the principal’s office, and a teacher was threatening him with consequences over it, and naturally his mom was there filming it because everything is filmed these days, and it went viral or whatever, with conservatives going nuts over this young man—newly christened as the “Gadsden Flag kid” in the familiar sobriquetal style of social media—as some sort of symbol of proud conservative defiance and American independent spirit.

He’s not any of that, of course. He’s 12 years old. Twelve-year-olds are not symbols of anything. They are famous for changing their minds many times as they grow up. And I mean, he’s in public school in Colorado Springs. He’s got a really good chance of ending up extremely liberal. But even if he stays “conservative,” it doesn’t matter. All of this is a crude, useless Internet distraction, just another entry in an endless stream of content iterations the only purpose of which is to briefly distract you for, max, three minutes before you move on to the next three-minute thing.

The Internet is such a curiously rootless thing, isn’t it? It really lacks the contours of meaningful participation that we associate with better media. Think of the good books you’ve read over time, fiction or nonfiction. They stick with you; you think about them; you ponder them; they have an effect on your life beyond your relatively fleeting direct engagement with them. The same is true with good movies, or good music, and even well-reported newspaper articles and magazine essays. These things linger and impress; they sort of tap against your brain and stimulate it to newer and more interesting neural pathways and ways of thinking. Now think of all the stupid, useless stuff you read about and/or got agitated about online last week. Does any of it matter anymore? You’ve forgotten about it already. You’ll forget about the Gadsden Flag kid, too, because his story is not relevant to your life; it’s not relevant to anyone’s life outside of the narrow band of people it directly and very briefly impacted in Colorado.

In any case, it’s really interesting that this useless fixation on Internet life is such a pervasive phenomenon on the Right. Conservatives just eat this stuff up. This should be outside of our ken; we are the natural constituency for rejecting the spoon-fed slop of the Algorithm in favor of something better and richer and more rewarding. But every time some Gadsden Flag kid comes along, the conservative economy just goes nuts for it. This kid was all over conservative media last week and I don’t get that. I mean, what’s the story here? Public schools are extremely liberal, extremely intolerant of dissent, and contemptuous of American history and historical American values? What? Is that news? This has been obvious for decades and the only surprising thing is that there are still any conservative parents left who subject their kids to this poisonous environment. I don’t understand why there is such a desperate need for conservatives to have this obvious fact validated for them over and over again. It’s the plainest and most self-evident thing in the world at this point, an established fact. Why get all excited over it?

Part of the problem could be that, for all its mainstream trappings, conservatism—real, honest-to-goodness, nuts-and-bolts conservatism—is still something of a fringe movement, and thus it can be richly satisfying to see your priors play out on a trending list when they’re not allowed to play out anywhere else. That’s a powerful motivator; social media is designed to reward it. But ultimately none of it is helpful. I mean, the “conservative” angle to this story isn’t even that conservative at all. Hey, the kid gets to wear a flag on his backpack—well done, everyone! A victory for liberty! But he’s still in public school in a Denver bedroom community. He’s still being subject to a merciless barrage of communist propaganda every day. His parents have abandoned him to be crammed full of this slop even after having indisputable proof that the place is being run by ahistorical, anti-conservative commies. Congratulations, conservatives: We still lost this one. This is why we’ve been losing for decades and why we’ll continue to lose: Because few people are willing to really walk the walk on this stuff. It is much easier to just spend three minutes reading about Gadsden Flag kid and then forget about him than it is to advocate for a system and a way of life in which he wouldn’t have even been in the school in the first place.

Progressives have built something big. It works exactly as it’s supposed to. The base presumptions of modern American life are pretty much all progressive. This is why we have over $30 trillion in debt; it’s why mentally ill men who believe they are women are being allowed access to prepubescent girls’ bathrooms; it’s why it was so passingly easy to shut down the entire economy in 2020 and then inflate our way into oblivion; it’s why conservatives can get all agitated about some random kid in a random Colorado school, day after day, year after year, without really affecting any meaningful change on anything. Here’s a tip: Change is hard. Building an actual culture is hard. Doing the work of raising your own children is a good bit more difficult, in the short-term, then just sending them to school five days a week for nine months out of the year to be educated by people who hate you and everything you believe in. Homeschooling, direct engagement, patient formation, careful instruction, day after day, week after week, year after year—these things are work. They take a lot out of you. The upside is, what’s taken out of you gets put to good use, ideally making your child into someone better and more poised to do good.

Conservatives, broadly speaking, aren’t really interested in that sort of thing. They are increasingly just chronically fixated on these stupid cultural disputes, this endless loop of relentless whininess: “Public schools are absolute cesspools now,” they say with shock every time something happens, then they shrug and send their children to public schools and act shocked when their children emerge from these schools exactly as you expect them to. This is what losing looks like. I don’t need to tell conservatives to get used to it; plainly we already are.