Was an honor to attend @arc_forum in London. This is what I said: thefp.com/p/against-the-vand…

What can we learn from our recent history? Of the way that the far left destroyed the center left? One big takeaway is that if a political movement does not police its ranks, does not draw lines, if it neglects to protect its borders, if it does not defend its sacred values, it cannot long endure. What are those values? They include the rule of the law. The belief in the inalienable rights of each individual. That we are all created in the image of God and it is that—and not our ethnicity or our IQ score—that gives us our worth and that makes us all equal. It is a rejection of mob violence. It is the view that the West is good and that America is good, and that we deserve our heroes along with our whole complex history. These values are not left or right. They are foundational. They are civilizational. And they have always required constant vigilance to preserve. But that’s not the sense you get online these days—and some places offline, too—where power is celebrated instead of principle. Where power is quickly becoming the only principle. If that continues without being challenged, we may wind up spending the next few years watching the same story we just lived through on the other side, as the far right (not the one defined by cable news, which includes many in this room) devours what remains of the center-right. If you aren’t aware of the dangers that come with apparent victory, if you think, That’s impossible, I believe you are as naive as the professors at Harvard who still email me to say, “Can you believe what’s happening?!” What does this group, which differs from the rest of the right in its open embrace of illiberalism, sound like? An awful lot like the far left. This group says that we are in a war—a war here at home—and that because it’s war, because the stakes are life and death, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. They say those who don’t go along are squishes or traitors or were secret leftists all along. Or they accuse them of being conservative or Republican in name only, which is a version of the “false consciousness” Marxists were so fond of telling people they suffer from. They say that it’s not enough to return to normal—that returning to normal isn’t an option—and instead it’s time to give the other side a taste of their own medicine. They say we were treated cruelly. And so cruelty is the necessary response. They say that the thing we are trying to conserve has already been destroyed—and perhaps never even existed at all. They say that reform is a losers’ strategy, and that the whole thing needs to be burned down. Like the far left, they have no use for history, but judge people living and dead in the ideological light of presentism, or simply reimagine them from scratch. As the left defaced and desecrated statues of Churchill, the vandals on the right desecrate his name and his memory. Again, it’s a question of borders. In this case, they actively erase the line between good and evil, and between past and present—looking backward to a place where “things went wrong,” as if it’s possible to turn back the clock. While the left, long sympathetic with Stalin, today sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas—this new right eulogizes the original ones. And in rehabilitating Hitler they are not merely demonizing Jews, but demonizing America, Britain, and the millions who fought and died to preserve our freedoms. All of this seems as obvious to me as the notion that a girl cannot become a boy. But a lot of people seem to have a hard time saying these things out loud right now. Why?