Not socialist, not female, not intersectional. Conservative.

Referring to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Congressional election victory last month, Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez said in a radio interview last week that the 28-year-old rising star from the Democratic Socialists of America represents “the future of our party.“ There is no other way to interpret this except as a direct admission that Democrats see socialism itself as the future of America, which will come as no surprise to anyone on the right.

Democrats love to dream about the future. The past is a tragic span of class oppression and the present is the workers’ revolution in progress, but the future is where it’s at. Like the proletariat heroes on Communist propaganda posters, leftists are fond of gazing off into the distance at a glorious Shangri-La on the horizon. What they tend to downplay is the genocidal totalitarianism necessary to pave the way for that new dawn – but hey, you can’t make the ideal omelet without breaking a few million eggs.

The future as conceived by the left is always a utopian vision in which inconvenient human nature has been hammered (and sickled) into compliance and in which equality of outcome – except for the political elites at the top – is brutally enforced. It’s worth reminding ourselves here that the word “utopia,” coined in the 16th century by Sir Thomas More for his political satire of the same name, was a play on Greek words meaning “no place” – for that is where utopia is to be found. That is why the left insists on ruthlessly engineering reality and human nature in order to mold them to fit the dream – or else. And that is why the left always begins by declaring “We’re on the right side of history” and ends by blithely proclaiming, “We’ll get it right next time.” In between, the utopians leave behind a wasteland, an archipelago of gulags, and untold numbers of murdered victims and crushed spirits.

Let’s look at a few ways in which the left envisions America’s future. Consider, for example, failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s slogan that “the future is female.” Writing off half the population as irrelevant seems like an odd way to win voters, and most women in America reject the label “feminist” as well, but there is a certain pussy hat-wearing element among the left which fantasizes that if women ran the world, there would be peace on earth and good will toward men overnight. As Donald Trump bluntly told Hillary in a presidential debate: “Wrong.” The future will never be just female because it can never be just female. Sorry Hillary, but men aren’t going away nor moving to the back of the bus. We’re all in this together.

And yet some on the left consider even Hillary’s vision of the future to be not radical and illogical enough. The so-called “intersectional” feminists declare, as one headline put it, that “The Future is Not Female - It is Two-Spirit, Trans and Non-Binary.” I hate to be the bearer of bad news to them, but the narcissistic, gender-blending fantasies of naïve millennials have no future at all beyond the safe spaces of academe. They will quickly learn that the real world has no patience for preferred-pronoun petulance.

Another example. The leftist site HuffPost tweeted recently about Desmond is Amazing, a 10-year-old drag queen (yes, you read that right) who calls himself an LGBT advocate. “As Pride month comes to a close, Desmond Is Amazing, the ten-year-old drag kid from New York, is proof that the future is queer,” crowed HuffPost. Sorry, but a single manipulated child is hardly evidence that the future is queer, whatever that even means. It should be clear to anyone upon a moment’s reflection that if the future is queer, then the future is a dead end in a single generation.

In response to this, clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, author of the bestselling 12 Rules for Life and certainly the most popular public intellectual since Joseph “Follow your bliss” Campbell in the 1980s, tweeted, “In what moral universe is it acceptable to encourage a 10 yr old boy to dress like an adult male mimicking a sexualized adult female, use that as a ticket to fame and then claim it as virtue?”

In what moral universe is it acceptable to encourage a 10 yr old boy to dress like an adult male mimicking a sexualized adult female, use that as a ticket to fame and then claim it as virtue? https://t.co/vmEoG9hXjt — Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) July 2, 2018

The leftist moral universe, that’s which one. It is the topsy-turvy (im)moral realm in which everything perverse and criminal is celebrated, while normal (yes, normal) traditional values are deemed evil and oppressive. Jordan Peterson is not even a conservative, or so he claims, and yet he clearly recognizes that the left’s vampiric embrace of this child is not celebration but exploitation. Sorry, HuffPost virtue-signalers, but the future is not going to be queer.

As always, the leftists are wrong: the future will belong to neither socialists, nor just females, nor any identity-politics splinter group, because that future spells division and decay and doom. Of course, the left will keep trying, keep failing, and ultimately the future will be conservative.

Why is conservatism the future? The answer is simple: conservatism works. It offers not a utopian promise but a future grounded in reality and built upon the best that humanity has expressed and achieved. It is a future that protects the independence and freedom of all equally, not one which enforces equality of outcome and keeps everyone in thrall to mediocrity and to spiritual, as well as economic, impoverishment. Conservatism as a political, economic, and social worldview works because freedom works.

As Donald Trump’s provocative presidency continues to expose the hateful radicalism at the heart of the Democrat party, it becomes undeniable what the Marxists want: the tearing down of everything. They want the abolishment of ICE and borders, of law and order, of private property, of free speech, of the Constitution, of the family unit, of traditional values, of Western civilization itself. The future they envision demands the eradication of it all. As evidenced by the #WalkAway trend on social media, more and more Democrats and Independents are being driven toward the common sense of conservatism by this lunacy.

To many, the perfect future the left promises is a lie as seductive as Satan himself. But peel away the promises and what the left really offers is hate and annihilation, without a real-world plan for building anything upon the ruins. Conservatism offers a workable future for you, every one of us individually, not the same colorless dead end for everyone in the collective. And that is why conservatism is the future, and progressivism has none.

Photo by Gage Skidmore