Conservatives Don't Win Stuff

The annual gathering of virtue-signaling liberals, otherwise known as the Academy Awards, was reminder of a phenomenon I have noticed for some time: conservatives don’t win stuff - that is, for pretty much anything (except maybe for sports, awards for which are presumably non-political).

Recently, I wrote a novel, Campusland, a satire about PC insanity on college campuses. Dipping my toes in the literary world for the first time, I noticed something: there are book awards, lots and lots of them, for any category and sub-category you can imagine. But don’t hold your breath for Campusland. A modest search of book award winners shows that winners overwhelmingly tow the progressive line, particularly in the area of identity politics. Michelle Obama will need a wheel barrow to take home all her awards for Becoming.

This phenomenon holds rigidly true throughout the entertainment world. But this comes as no real surprise, does it?

Greta, anticipating a lifetime of awards

But what about elsewhere? Greta Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Don’t bet against her. Barack Obama won it before he’d even had a chance to remove Winston Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office. He won it for just being so…wonderful.

Check out who’s winning Rhodes Scholarships these days. (Seriously, please do - their bios are all on the internet.) They are virtually all social justice warriors. One of this years’s winners, for example, focuses her studies on the “criminalization of Central American asylum seekers and the trend towards closed borders.” Another is committed to “Asian diasporic speculative fiction and its intersections with queerness and biopolitcs.”

Yeah, that apparently means something, to somebody.

This never happens

All this is why it was a complete shock to see Rush Limbaugh awarded the Medal of Freedom. People like Rush have always understood they don’t get awards. Conservatives are expected to know their place in the cultural firmament. I’m sure Rush had long come to peace with this, which is likely why he was so emotional.

Overwhelmingly, it’s organizations that give awards; the media, academia, 501c3s, and foundations - it’s all one big bubble of self-congratulation. 

Why is this? Ever hear of O’Sullivan’s Law? It states that any all organizations that are not explicitly right wing will, over time, become left wing. This is almost unfailingly true. Left-leaning activists are attracted to positions of cultural leverage like bees to honey. Yes, they are a relatively small percentage of the population, but they are the tail that wags our cultural dog. They are brutish and unapologetic, but they aren’t stupid.

They had no idea

Exhibit A: the Mellon Foundation just gave $4 million to Yale to further “racial studies across the humanities.” Setting aside the fact that Yale already obsesses about identity politics, I submit that de-colonizing Yale’s English Department was not what Andrew Mellon, a staunch Coolidge Republican, had in mind when he set up the foundation years ago. I urge you to go to their website and look at their grant history. It’s full-on woke. While you’re there, check out their Board of Trustees. It includes the usual rogues gallery of academics, people like Richard Brodhead. You remember him, the former president of Duke who presided over the shameful handling of the lacrosse team a decade ago.

Brodhead - let's put at least one face on this

Alas. I know of no simple, or even complicated, way to stop this. Conservatives just don’t share liberals’ zeal for moving the cultural needle, and thus, over time, the Prize Givers have become dues paying members of the coastal elite. The populist revolt that is re-aligning our politics is in no small way due to their condescending smugness. Most of us have just started tuning it out. We don’t care who won the Nobel Peace Prize or Best Picture. We don’t know or care who won a Pulitzer or a Palme d’Or. 

Hey, libs: you are all just congratulating each other, and your bubble is shrinking every day.