The reaction of the conservative establishment to the Senate race in Texas has given new meaning to a Chronicles writer’s observation that “the conservative movement has conserved nothing.” Well, not quite nothing. It has maintained control over authorized conservative opinion and continues to gatekeep the right. It just doesn’t care that much about cultural and social issues, as opposed to telling us that the Democrats are driving corporations out of the Big Apple, that we should stand behind the Likud government in Israel, and that minorities are mobbing the RNC to register as Republicans.

In April, I listened to Greg Gutfeld on Fox News’ The Five explain to his colleagues, who nodded in agreement, that the RNC should carefully avoid bringing up social questions in Ken Paxton’s battle with James Talarico. If Republicans don’t heed this advice, he said, they would be acting foolishly and could lose in November. The focus in the Senate race should be on the cost of living, because that’s what the voters care about most, and presumably that’s what they should care about most.

These talking heads, it would seem, have no problem surrendering moral and social issues to the woke left. This is acceptable even if Paxton is running against someone who believes there are six genders, that we should be performing “gender-affirming surgery” on children, that whites are inherently racist, and (oh yes!) that “God is nonbinary.”

Apparently, these issues are all unconcerning, and we should be willing to concede them to the woke left and concentrate on questions like “affordability.” But there are some questions that an even minimally decent society cannot afford to concede to lunatics. Let us imagine, counterfactually, that a candidate who sounded like Nick Fuentes were running for the U.S. Senate in a major state. Would our “conservative” spokespersons insist that we ignore Nick’s social views and instead talk about the price of gasoline or eggs? One would be a fool to believe that. The same people who are willing to indulge woke madness would be rising in indignation against “right-wing extremism.” Yes, I know there is a double standard at work here, but the conservative movement and its donors have allowed it to flourish. And right now, their eagerness to abandon social issues in the Texas race indicates how little they care about what real conservatives should care about the most.

The point is not whether voters who have been drugged for decades with the poison of political correctness are eager to discuss moral questions. Those claiming to be on the right cannot afford to gift those issues to the left. Talarico’s unsettling positions and those of other woke Democrats are not harmless eccentricities. They are likely to be forced down the throats of those who resist, through public administration, public education, the media, and gutless employers. And they should concern us even more than whether Mayor Mamdani refused to participate in an Israeli Independence Day march.

Equally noteworthy are editorial comments by Nicole Russell in USA Today, berating both Republicans and Democrats in Texas for eschewing “bipartisanship.” Supposedly, Talarico and Republican candidate Ken Paxton both represent “polarization” and have “a talent for embodying the excesses in their respective parties.” These “flawed candidates” don’t represent the “daily lives of most Americans,” who apparently are alienated from both polarizing candidates, even as they won their respective parties’ nominations.

If this neoconservative editorial is correct, how is it that about 45 percent of Texas voters have already declared for the “polarizing” Talarico? Even in a supposedly red state like Texas, there are many people who applaud Talarico’s stances and don’t find them at all alien. Even more questionable is Russell’s moral equating of the two candidates’ “excesses.” Are the two candidates equally polarizing? While Paxton represents Trump’s MAGA positions, Talarico has spoken contemptuously about white people and supports the mind-boggling positions of the intersectional left. Someone embodying this degree of “excess” on the right would have to be an outspoken and unequivocal theocratic white nationalist.

Obviously, what is culturally acceptable in American political culture skews far, far left and would not even be recognizable by the general social and moral standards of either of our two national parties as late as the 1980s. Paxton may be rowdy and, no doubt, carries baggage from his marital breakup, but he’s running against someone who would have been declared certifiable (and properly so) when I was growing up in the 1950s.

It is noteworthy that our conservative media can’t even consistently recognize this difference and is still calling for “bipartisanship” with people like Talarico. Perhaps it doesn’t find the woke left’s social views all that obnoxious. After all, some people on that side may still support Israel and, like Jeff Bezos, complain about Mayor Mamdani’s new tax on the rich. And with some luck, a Fox News celebrity may even land an interview with Talarico or AOC, or perhaps get invited onto CNN or MSNBC.

As I noted at the beginning of this rant, Patrick Casey was entirely correct to observe that Conservatism Inc. has conserved nothing of value. One might hope that, at the very least, the official movement would cease harming the true right.