More Thrilling Tales of True Conservatism! Vol 19: Lysenkoism Cannot Fail

Once again The New York Times hands some of its most valuable real estate over to yet another Conservative guest columnist so that they can pimp their book --

Is this simply an aberration, or are there some deep links that tie the president to the great tradition of thought that I describe in my recent book, “Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition”?

-- and once again pitch one of the two most ridiculous Beltway fairy tales of all.  

What Trump Doesn’t Get About Conservatism

That Lysenkoism cannot fail.  Lysenkoism can only be failed. 

I have devoted a substantial part of my intellectual life to defining and defending conservatism, as a social philosophy and a political program. Each time I think I have hit the nail on the head, the nail slips to one side and the hammer blow falls on my fingers.

Like many others, both conservative and liberal, I did not foresee the political career of Donald Trump, nor did I imagine that such a man could occupy the highest office of state, in the name of a party that specifically makes appeal to conservative voters...

... [Trump] is a product of the cultural decline that is rapidly consigning our artistic and philosophical inheritance to oblivion. And perhaps the principal reason for doubting Mr. Trump’s conservative credentials is that being a creation of social media, he has lost the sense that there is a civilization out there that stands above his deals and his tweets in a posture of disinterested judgment.

Donald Trump is not a  "creation of social media".

Donald Trump is a creation of the Republican party.

Donald Trump is what American Conservatism has always looked like when it thought no one was watching.

But we vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers of the Left have been watching.  Watching and warning for decades.  There was no trick to seeing the trajectory the Right has been taking all this time: it was all happening right out in the open, plain as day. 

The real trick was always on the other side.  A grand and possibly fatal act of legerdemain, one costing billions of dollars and requiring that thousands of professionals on teevee, on the radio and in print lie about what was going on in American politics, year after year after year.  A conspiracy to pretend that the Conservative cancer which has been running wildly and publicly out of control in this country since before the days of All in the Family wasn't really happening at all.  Or, when some specific Republican atrocity was too monstrous to ignore, pretending that Both Sides were somehow equally to blame.

But Both Sides Don't.

From Wikipedia:

Lysenko's political success was mostly due to his appeal to the Communist Party and Soviet ideology. Following the disastrous collectivization efforts of the late 1920s, Lysenko's "new" methods were seen by Soviet officials as paving the way to an "agricultural revolution." Lysenko himself was from a peasant family, and was an enthusiastic advocate of Leninism. During a period which saw a series of man-made agricultural disasters, he was also extremely fast in responding to problems, although not with real solutions. Whenever the Party announced plans to plant a new crop or cultivate a new area, Lysenko had immediate practical suggestions on how to proceed.

So quickly did he develop his prescriptions—from the cold treatment of grain, to the plucking of leaves from cotton plants, to the cluster planting of trees, to unusual fertilizer mixes—that academic biologists did not have time to demonstrate that one technique was valueless or harmful before a new one was adopted. The Party-controlled newspapers applauded Lysenko's "practical" efforts and questioned the motives of his critics. Lysenko's "revolution in agriculture" had a powerful propaganda advantage over the academics, who urged the patience and observation required for science.

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