The following exerpt is from a speech recently given by John Derbyshire:
John Derbyshire Via (vdare.com)   […] Mainstream Conservatism, like any other kind of Conservatism, is up against a very formidable foe. Because of my own professional background as a systems analyst, I think of that foe as “the installed base.”
Imagine you are hired in with a team of computer specialists to give a bank a computerized system for running its books. The job would be pretty easy if you could start from scratch, with a bank that had nothing but paper record-keeping—or better still, with a new-founded bank that had no established system of record-keeping at all.
Unfortunately things are rarely like that. The bank you are contracted to already has a computer system. It’s been in use for years, and it’s a mess. The databases are festooned with redundancies and contradictions, the code is unreadable, and the users have to do time-wasting work-arounds to deal with all the anomalies.
Everyone’s used to this creaking, leaking old system, though, and comfortable with it. They know its faults, but they know how to cope with them, like an old married couple. They resent you coming in and imposing new methods on them.
Their resentment, their conservatism in clinging to the familiar, blinds them to the fact that they don’t have a choice. The manufacturer no longer supports their software, the hardware’s blowing fuses, and the regulators are frowning. Gotta have a new system. Without a new system, the bank will sink into ruination.
That old system is called “the installed base.” Ancient systems analysts’ joke:

Q: How was God able to create the world in just six days?
A: No installed base!

Mainstream Conservatism is up against an installed base.
Who installed the installed base? Well, you could argue that it was installed by the Great Depression, by FDR, by WW2, by the postwar consensus, by Walter Cronkite and John F. Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger and the Hollywood studio bosses and the broadsheet newspapers, and any number of other events and names.
The truth is, it was installed by the American people, pursuing comfort and security for themselves—not very deplorable pursuits, surely— and by our business establishment pursuing profits, which is what a business establishment ought to do.
I’ve mentioned the unhappy effects of business pressure on Mainstream Conservatism in the context of the 1986 Immigration Act. To illustrate the other half of the problem, the consequences that flow from our pursuit of comfort and security, here’s another data point from that same year.
In some discussions of Obamacare I was engaged in recently, the subject of EMTALA came up. That’s the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986, a law requiring practically all hospitals to provide unreimbursed care to anyone needing emergency treatment regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay.
Pure socialism. Yet EMTALA was signed into law by . . . Ronald Reagan!—another block of concrete set into the installed base, by a man generally acknowledged to be as conservative a president as modern Americans can reasonably hope for.
So this installed base of socialism, inevitably accompanied by a suitable conceptual apparatus of liberal egalitarianism, is what Mainstream Conservatism is constantly dashing itself against. It’s like watching the Charge of the Light Brigade.
I often think in fact that modern American Conservatism has a Tennysonian character to it—hopeless charges into the enemy’s guns. Perhaps that’s why it’s strong in the South: another Lost Cause to lament.
When I find myself in this mood, I am encouraged to remember that the Light Brigade actually reached its objective and did considerable damage to the enemy, killing many and forcing them back from their positions. The officer who led the charge made it back to his own lines unscathed.
You don’t win wars with operations like the Charge of the Light Brigade, but there are satisfactions to be found none the less, and minor triumphs in making the enemy squeal and run . . . unless, of course (ahem) you’re unlucky enough stop a cannonball.
As you can tell by now, I am not ill-disposed to Mainstream Conservatism. I know and like too many of these people. To be sure, I also know some who, in my opinion, ought to be tarred and feathered and run out of town; but I am a poor hater, and if the decision came to me, I’d probably let even the worst of them off with an appearance ticket.
There are qualifications and subtractions to be stated, though— most seriously, those relating to Mainstream Conservatvatism’s self-inflicted impotence on population policy. I have pegged that impotence two factors: subservience to business interests unrestrained by thoughts of demographic harm, and the collection of widespread popular notions and sentiments known as “political correctness” that accompany socialism.
Mainstream Conservatism suffers from two built-in weaknesses. Like any other large political movement, it needs money to support its operations; and it needs rewards to offer to its functionaries.
In a capitalist country the money must come ultimately from commerce. Commercial enterprises always seek to maintain—and, they hope, increase—their market share by presenting their wares to the public in an appealing way.
The rewards for Mainstream Conservatives are political—access to those in power, and in the case of writers for Conservative publications, actual positions in the government apparatus: presidential speechwriters, press secretaries, and so on. There are more of these jobs than is commonly known: the Vice President’s wife, for example, has a press secretary. The Vice President’s wife!
Both sides of this equation, the money coming in and the rewards going out, are restraining and sometimes corrupting. Both rest ultimately in the quicksands of public taste. You can’t get money from a firm that’s fallen out of favor with consumers; you can’t get a job as presidential speechwriter if your guy didn’t get elected by the voters.
And public taste is saturated with socialism and egalitarianism. It won’t do to say that this is because the general public are helpless puppets of malign forces. In some sense, to some degree, socialism and egalitarianism are what the mass of people want.
Out here in the non-Mainstream Conservative movement you will hear the word “sheeple.” The implication is that the great mass of citizens are like sheep, a flock easily directed this way or that by wily politicians, media barons, the Jews etc. etc.
I don’t believe any of that, and I don’t like this word “sheeple.” In well over a million words of opinion commentary this past thirty years, I have never used it once.

The worst charge that can be laid against the general public, in my opinion, is that it prefers not to think much about big social and political issues, and wants accredited experts to do its thinking for it.
But what do you expect? Most of us exhaust our powers of thinking in dealing with our families, our jobs, our associations, our hobbies. Who has mental energy left over to wrestle with remote abstractions like educational policy or international diplomacy?
In this regard, Political Correctness is an ideal social dogma. It is full of bogus fellowship and warmth—see how much its propagandists like the word “community.” It offers easy formulas and taboos that obviate the need to think for more than a few seconds.
It also offers status markers by which we can easily and quickly calibrate ourselves against our fellow citizens.
What, after all, is happening when, for example, someone calls you a racist? What is happening is, the accuser is claiming moral purity: “My soul is pure and spotless, washed in the blood of the Lamb. Your soul, on the other hand, is dirty—stained, blotched, sticky and icky. Eiuw!”
Anti-racism is really an infantile conceit, a childish vanity: but what are we, most of us most of the time, but great children?
So Mainstream Conservatism must work not only against the installed base of liberal egalitarianism in the Main Stream Media, the universities, the bureaucracy, business, the churches, the international organizations to which we are yoked; it must also swim against mighty currents of public taste and perceptions.  (continue reading)