I concluded my second essay in this four-essay series noting conservative sorcery doesn’t work. But what of the sorcery of the enemy? What is it, and how does it work?

Generally speaking, people turn to thaumaturgy when an important goal cannot be achieved by ordinary non-magical means. The important goal may be palpable and simple, such as defeating an entrenched enemy, warding off an unpredictable danger, or changing the hearts that refuse to requite affection. That important goal may also be intangible, culturally driven, and complex.
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In any event, with these important cultural goals established in irrational recesses of the American mind, both elite and vulgar, one finds magic. Where ordinary means are unable to achieve these goals, the public is easily bewitched; that is to say, when the public believes on a deep psychological level—what Carl Jung might have called the shadow—that it is threatened with destruction if it is not ostentatiously moral and that its principal moral flaw is its origins in slavery and the lasting vestiges of that institution, there is nothing it will not ostentatiously do to address what it can only perceive as an existential crisis.

If you have ever wondered why woke is so wildly exhibitionist, that is your answer. It has to be or the magic fails.

This is modern liberalism’s sorcery. It is based on compelling threads of American beliefs. It does not depend on a rational, Euclidian argument about the principles of the Declaration of Independence or on a pantheon of mythologized founders.

The magic works, and fantastically so. None of the abracadabra phrases like “government is the problem,” “my Constitution,” “a right to be left alone,” “taxation is theft,” “liberal fascism,” “communists,” or “German nihilism” nor necromancy with Plato, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Hegel or Heidegger can break the spell.

This does not, however, mean the spell is unbreakable. The Right needs new magic words.