Reconciling Principles with Politics

I. The Theater of Noble Defeat

The Right goes out of its way to lose.

There is a species of political impotence that disguises itself as virtue. It thrives on the American Right, especially among libertarians and legacy conservatives. They lose, and then speak as if losing were proof of their righteousness. Every electoral collapse, every institutional surrender, every cultural loss is reframed as a moral triumph. They stood firm, they say. They refused to compromise. They upheld principle.

But they also lost.

This self-congratulating moral theater confuses impotence with fidelity. It allows people to feel principled while they surrender the world to their enemies. Worse, it creates a false dichotomy: that to pursue victory is to abandon principle, and to adhere to principle is to forfeit the fight. This mindset lets them stay pure in theory while being useless in practice.

This is not honor. It is rationalized failure.

A principle that cannot be enacted is not a principle at all. It is an aesthetic preference. A belief that never manifests in law, culture, or power is inert. It has no presence in the world, and so it can do no good. A man who believes in freedom but cannot secure it is indistinguishable from the man who opposes it. The result is the same.

To treat defeat as virtue is to reverse the moral order. The first duty of principle is survival. The second is dominion. A belief that remains abstract, sentimental, and powerless is not sacred. It is sentimentalism. It belongs in a diary, not a republic.

II. The False Dichotomy of Power and Principle

The only thing standing between conservatives and influence is their own cowardice.

Conservatives and libertarians often speak as if power were inherently corrupting. They warn that to seek it is to risk losing one’s soul. That to wield it is to betray one’s ideals. And so they avoid power, resist organization, and reject institutional conquest. They build private moral systems and then leave the public square to their enemies.

This posture is not humility. It is cowardice dressed up as wisdom.

The claim that power and principle are mutually exclusive serves a purpose. It lets the powerless feel virtuous. It allows them to denounce those who win as compromised, while imagining their own defeat as evidence of greater moral clarity. This is a coping mechanism. A man who cannot win finds dignity in believing that winning would corrupt him anyway.

The reality is simpler. Power is not opposed to principle. It is subordinate to it. But it is still necessary. You cannot shape the world through private conviction. You need leverage. You need institutional force. You need the means to impose what you believe, or you will be ruled by people who believe in nothing but themselves.

A principle that cannot enter the world as law or custom is unfinished. It is frozen in the mind, unable to move history. Power is the vessel. It is the bridge between belief and consequence.

Those who reject power in the name of principle misunderstand both. They do not preserve virtue. They abandon it. Because virtue that cannot defend itself will be replaced—by something louder, simpler, and worse.

III. Power as the Prerequisite of Morality

A starving man can’t be generous, and a powerless one can’t be good.

Morality without agency is theater. A starving man may dream of generosity, but he cannot give. A conquered people may cherish liberty, but they cannot enact it. Power is not the highest good, but it is the gate through which all goods must pass.

The modern Right often forgets this. It behaves as though the moral order exists in abstraction, untouched by material conditions. It praises freedom while relinquishing the courts. It lectures about tradition while ceding the schools. It invokes the Constitution while failing to govern. It acts as if principles exist in a realm above the battlefield—unsullied, eternal, immune to defeat.

But principles are not eternal unless they are defended. They do not linger in the air; they are written in laws, traditions, rituals, architecture, and flesh. Without power, they are memories. And memories do not survive contact with the will of others.

The Left understands this. That is why it takes institutions. It knows the first step in moral transformation is not persuasion—it is control. Control over language, education, enforcement, prestige. It shapes the environment in which people think, speak, and act. It imposes its values through systems, not sermons.

The Right continues to believe that truth will win on its own. It will not. Truth does not prevail by default. It must be advanced, defended, embedded. This requires the will to rule, and the tools to rule well.

Until power is secured, morality remains a wish. A noble one, perhaps—but still a wish.

IV. The Moral Cowardice of “Losing Well”

Losing gracefully is still collaborating with decline.

There is a long tradition on the Right of losing with eloquence. The speeches are polished. The essays are mournful. The tone is grave, contemplative, almost proud. The defeat is explained as the price of integrity. The campaign was lost, but the principle was preserved. They will go down in history as men who refused to sell out.

They will also go down in history as men who lost.

This posture is appealing because it flatters the ego. It turns failure into a moral high ground. But losing well is still losing. A movement that consistently fails to shape policy, institutions, or culture cannot pretend to be righteous. It can only admit to being irrelevant. And irrelevance, in a world ruled by power, is not innocent. It is complicit.

The enemy does not care how beautiful your principles are. He cares whether you can stop him. And if you cannot, he will erase your values, your heritage, and your memory—while you recite Burke and quote Scripture to a shrinking crowd.

Moral cowardice often wears the costume of restraint. But the refusal to contest power is not virtue. It is surrender. And when power is surrendered, the culture is not preserved—it is replaced.

The real measure of moral seriousness is not how movingly you fail. It is how effectively you act. A belief is only sacred if you are willing to fight for it. Anything less is sentiment. And sentiment, when it governs men, ends in ruin.

V. The Real Sequence: Power Then Principle

I can’t live in a house of good intentions.

-Flanders

There is a sequence to things. Power precedes principle—not in worth, but in execution. You must gain control before you can apply a vision. You cannot govern a people whose laws you do not write, or preserve a culture whose institutions you do not command.

This is where conservatives and libertarians lose the plot. They mistake the chronological for the moral. They think that because principle is higher, it must come first. But principle is the destination. Power is the road. If you reverse the order, you never arrive. You speak endlessly of what is right while being ruled by those who have no such concerns.

The Founding Fathers did not begin with theory. They began with war. They did not write the Constitution under the protection of ideas—they secured ideas with guns, ships, and steel. Only once power was taken did they articulate the moral structure of a free republic. That is how history works. First you win. Then you define what winning means.

Those who cling to principle without grasping power are not defenders of the good. They are obstacles to its survival. Their role in history is tragic and brief. They are remembered, if at all, as the ones who knew what should be but never understood how to make it real.

Power is not the end. But it is the beginning of every end that matters. To bring principle into being, you must first acquire the means. Anything else is fantasy dressed in righteousness.

VI. Toward a Culture of Action

To be conservative is to watch things fall apart and prolong the decay.

If the Right wants to stop losing, it must stop moralizing its impotence. It must discard the fantasy that the purity of its principles will somehow shame its enemies into surrender. The world does not yield to the best ideas. It yields to the strongest wills.

That strength must be built. It does not arrive through outrage or nostalgia. It comes from organization, discipline, and long-term effort. It means building institutions rather than complaining about their capture. It means running for offices rather than mocking the process. It means funding artists, training bureaucrats, founding schools, writing laws, and staying long enough to enforce them.

None of this will feel romantic. There are no stirring speeches in committee meetings. No applause for regulatory reform. No monuments for a well-executed budget. But this is what power actually looks like. Not fire and fury, but pressure applied over time.

The culture must shift from lamentation to labor. A politics of competence, not catharsis. The Right has spent decades pretending it is too good for the world it lost. Now it must become capable of taking it back.

Power is not the enemy. It is the requirement. Principle is not the excuse for inaction. It is the reason to act. You do not prove your fidelity to what is good by retreating from the field. You prove it by fighting—and winning.

The time for mourning is over. The time for machinery has begun. Let those who believe in truth build something strong enough to carry it.