Truth is a glorious but hard mistress. She never consults, bargains or compromises. — Aiden Wilson Tozer (Of God and Men)

The left’s causes require prosperity. Unfortunately, they don’t create prosperity, and often squander it.

In times of prosperity the left can create over-hyped crises, such as oversized portions, free contraception, and video gamers. They can create these crises and then milk them for support. But in times of true crisis leftist policies fail. They might continue to draw support, but they won’t solve serious problems. Neither video gamers, Big Gulp drinkers, nor a lack of government-funded condoms caused terrorists to attack us or the housing market to collapse.

A country’s ability to survive depends on its ability to throw off the policies of the anointed and become conservative again.

Surviving Nazi Germany meant that Britain had to throw off the desire to talk through their differences with Germany, to compromise other people’s rights away. It meant manning up to blood, sweat, toil, and tears. It meant discarding Chamberlain and the anointed, in favor of Churchill and the gods of the copybook headings.

Ending slavery meant that the United States had to stop trying to endlessly compromise with slave-holding states. It meant acknowledging life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and then manning up and taking up arms.

Ending communism meant that the United States had to stop trying to define tyranny down, stop the imaginary equivalency between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It meant facing up to the existence of an evil empire, and by acknowledging it, oppose it.

Stopping terrorist mass killings within the United States meant recognizing that terrorists didn’t want to negotiate with us, they wanted to destroy us—and then taking the fight to them in foreign lands.

It is human nature to waste other people’s resources and time during times of prosperity. Countries fail when they are no longer able to stop these wasteful policies in times of crisis. When they are no longer able to pivot from the vision of the anointed to the systemic processes that actually work they will enter a downward spiral at the next crisis, continually enacting bad policies that exacerbate the problems they’re facing.