Login
Editor’s Note: This essay is the third in a symposium that, in recognition of Fidelity Month, reflects on the importance of fidelity to God, our families, and our country. You can watch a recording of Public Discourse’s recent webinar on Fidelity Month here.
As Aristotle held, human beings are by nature political or social and are ordered to community of necessarily limited size—the appropriate size being that of a polis. We come together to achieve certain ends essential to our flourishing, of which the act of being together is itself an important part. When we sense—and it most often indeed will be just a vague sense—that the communities to which we belong no longer support us in our flourishing, then we will naturally, perhaps without even knowing what we intend, redirect our attentions elsewhere.
This is exactly what many of us have begun to do. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert D. Putnam documents the ever-increasing solitude, loneliness, withdrawal, and alienation of Americans from their long traditions of communal life. Rod Dreher recommends reconnecting with one another by turning to small communities in The Benedict Option. Still, our society has made a general choice along the lines Putnam describes in favor of withdrawal, on the part of modern Americans (and modern Westerners more generally), from community. The social map, even as these new, intentional communities that Dreher describes come into being, persists in its general trend toward fragmentation and alienation.
What is missing from modern life is fidelity—and not just fidelity in general, but fidelity to those things that are given us and that we can never, at least fully, choose for ourselves. By this I mean our places of birth—our block, our neighborhood, our village, our state—and the families and communities into which we were born.
Filiation and Affiliation
The late Edward Said was known for his distinction between filiation and affiliation. Filiative relations are those that come to us naturally, those that are givens of our birth and into which we are born. Affiliative relations are those we purposefully forge. In Putnam’s America, most people withdraw increasingly into solitude—into mere loneliness. But, as Said suggested, are not many of our chosen affiliations acts of withdrawal in themselves? Are they not retreats from filiative associations into affiliative ones—with an emphasis on the word “retreats”?
They certainly are. But is there anything wrong with that?
Many years ago, I heard a lecture at Notre Dame by a former student of Alasdair MacIntyre’s. He alluded to MacIntyre’s mordant suggestion that being patriotic in regard to the United States of America was a bit like pledging one’s love to the phone company. We need to belong to smaller scale communities, said this former student; he did not want to belong to a great country, he did not want to belong to the masses of a cosmopolis, but to a polis. And then, he gestured out the window at the gorgeous campus all about us, and concluded, “I want to belong to a polis like Notre Dame.”
Filiative relations are those that come to us naturally, those that are givens of our birth and into which we are born. Affiliative relations are those we purposefully forge.
While I shared this man’s love of that university, I could not help but notice that—despite its abundant acreage, its own post office and ZIP code, its power plant, basilica, and even the great farmlands the students once tilled to raise food for their dining halls—despite all this, I say, a university can never constitute a polis. This is so not merely because its population consists largely of unmarried young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. Rather, a university, like a monastery and a bowling team, is affiliative down to its bones. This student had effectively endorsed Dreher’s proposal on MacIntyre’s terms, but he had also shown the necessary weakness of that proposal.
Affiliation is often a tragic necessity, a chosen alternative but a reluctant one, after filiation fails. Any good human life will contain chosen attachments and, most likely, many of them. What I want to defend is not filiation against affiliation but rather the relative superiority of filiation to affiliation and, furthermore, the intrinsic dependence of all affiliations on those natural attachments that Said called filiations. Those communal attachments that are given to us are greater than those we choose, and those we choose, great though they may be, depend for their quality on the priority of our given attachments. I distinguish not between good and bad, but between root and vine.
Unchosen Bonds
For this reason, fidelity to place, to the community of one’s birth, is not merely one virtue among others, but a foundational and formative source of our character. We first learn to be faithful husbands and wives from the unchosen example we witness of our own parents. We first learn to be faithful citizens as we explore the small postage stamp of terrain that we did not choose to go to, but simply awakened to with our first dawn of consciousness. Our care for our towns and cities is rooted in the upkeep of our homes.
Finite creatures that we are, these first unchosen relationships form all future ones. Their failings often mar us; their successes help us to flourish. Although it can only ever be a rule of thumb, one might think twice before allowing a young man who has been a lousy son to become one’s husband. Is it more or less likely that the young woman enrolled at Our Lady’s University will be a good citizen of that temporary “polis” if she arrives there hating the place she comes from?
Fidelity to place, to the community of one’s birth, is not merely one virtue among others, but a foundational and formative source of our character.
Fidelity to our first, natural communities is more than just a temporary schoolhouse for our future affiliations. A kind of fidelity is possible in those communities that is generally not available otherwise. When one knows a place and accepts it as given rather than chosen, its faults and weaknesses become not an occasion for leaving but for recommitment, forbearance, and reform. We are less likely to feel we have wasted our efforts in service of our natural filiations—bonds that were given with our birth and so have the strength of nature behind them.
The small communities recommended in The Benedict Option are real and beautiful communities, but they are marred as well. They have intrinsic in them the memory of prior communal failures, which can tempt their members to believe that what has been freely chosen can be just as freely and easily unchosen. Actual Benedictine congregations, of course, require of their monks a vow of stability. In a monastery, statues of the Virgin and Child always depict Mary seated—a sign by which she tells us “I am not going anywhere.” Vows can overcome some of the weaknesses built into choice. But, even here, those religious who first loved their natural community will have proportionately stronger vows.
Return to Roots
Over the years, as I have admired Robert George from afar, I have first appreciated his uncompromising commitment to God and to the everlasting country so frequently on display in his fidelity to his conscience. I have always especially treasured this anecdote David Brooks relates about George, in his essay “The Organization Kid”:
George described a moment when he and a colleague were urging their students not to commit plagiarism. The honor code goes against it, George told them; the Internet makes it easier to plagiarize, but also much easier for faculty members to catch plagiarists. Besides, he concluded, God will see you doing evil.
Little less have I appreciated his fidelity to his West Virginia roots, whether suggested by his occasional tributes to the life of his father or his accomplished banjo playing. One can sense that George, the Princeton professor, is a better Princeton Tiger for having first been a good West Virginia Mountaineer.
Fidelity to the places and communities of our birth is an irreplaceable good, one that may beget other kinds of goods, but for which there can be no adequate substitute.
I believe it thus, at any rate. When two years ago I had the opportunity to move back to my region of birth, Michigan, I had been waiting a dozen years and jumped without reservation. I knew, when growing up, the trials and failings of the place, but also was able to see its goodness through and despite those failings. I could be a faithful citizen not only because I loved the place with good reason, but because I could love it even when the reasons were not so good.
Perhaps in an age such as ours, the withdrawal from the failing, dominant institutions of society, and the attempt to build up smaller, intentional ones, may seem the best available option. I would suggest, however, that there is something even richer in the “unoptioned” and the “optionless.” Fidelity to the places and communities of our birth is an irreplaceable good, one that may beget other kinds of goods, but for which there can be no adequate substitute. Learn to be faithful to what was first given to you, even when the roots are sick and the prospects seem dreary.
Matt and Sam explore the “crisis of masculinity” in America through books on the subject by Senator Josh Hawley and Harvard political theorist Harvey Mansfield.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at a bill-signing event this month.
After Houghton University fired two employees for listing their pronouns in emails, some alumni have protested the decision as un-Christian.
Note from the editor: this essay is based on a recent talk our editor-in-chief R. J. Snell gave to an audience of college-age conservatives about the current moment. It also includes some commentary on the students’ response, as well as Snell’s advice for them and for conservatives more broadly. For a bit of context, the first part of the talk, not included in this essay, was a summary and exposition of Russell Kirk’s 1974 book, The Roots of American Order. A version of that excised section, first written in 2014, is available to read here.
We know that conservatives find themselves in a fractious moment. The old alliances of the Reagan era have frayed. New ideas and schools of thought abound, with all the tensions and arguments and (sometimes) exasperations natural to moments of rethinking and rebuilding. It is no longer 2014, and the conversation in conservative circles has changed considerably since then. In 2014 no one said “President Trump,” and the smart money was on Jeb. The Flight 93 essay was still two years in the future. No one thought David French-ism was either good or bad. The consensus might have died but people were polite enough not to mention it, and we wouldn’t know why liberalism had failed for another four years. Drag Time Story Hour hadn’t yet formally begun. There was a bronze age pervert but no one cared, and integralism existed only in dusty, unread manuals. A lot has happened in these years, to put it mildly.
In fact, so much has changed that the story told by Russell Kirk in The Roots of America Order reads a bit like a eulogy for America. When we hear a eulogy, after all, we expect an emphasis on the virtues of the deceased and a bit of window dressing on their shortcomings. But given the current mood, Kirk’s story can read like a sanitized account of an America that no longer exists, if it ever did. Rather than “ordered liberty,” the terms which might better describe reality would include the following: carnage, emergency, crisis, depravity, degradation, decadence, collapse, malaise, illegitimacy, and Benedict Option. Many believe it is time for conservatives to reject civility, neutrality, free speech, originalism, fusionism, separation of Church and state, liberalism, right liberalism (and especially boomer liberalism), little platoons, localism, and bow ties. Neither Great Books nor the Constitution are going to save us, and politics isn’t downstream of culture. Moreover, instead of Locke, Madison, and Jefferson, we ought (apparently) to read Donoso Cortes, Julius Evola, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, and the Hungarians. (If those names are unfamiliar to you, trust me when I say they are familiar to young, restless conservatives of the moment.)
The young experience not order, but disorder: drugs, deaths of despair, tent camps, fatherlessness, the lowest rates of marriage ever, non-replacement levels of birthrates, ubiquitous pornography (and of the most violent and vulgar sort), corrupt and rotten institutions, failed education systems, pointless (but utterly expensive) colleges and universities, crushing student loan debt and inability to purchase a house, gig economies, rust belt towns, miserably incompetent elites, wokism, DEI, the collapse of religion, the absence of marriageable men, the suppression of the Latin Mass, endless war, the national debt, and open borders and open markets. Zombie Reaganism and the neocons are not going to help us now, they think.
We are no longer the yeoman farmers of Jefferson or the commercial republicans of Hamilton but instead an unhealthy, enervated, exhausted, alienated, numbed populace zoned out on the filth produced by our anti-culture. Only the blind, the foolish, the RINO, the Boomer, and the cuck think otherwise. It’s time to get red-pilled, Claremonstered, #tradwifed, and out of the Longhouse! (That last line received quite a cheer from a sizable group of young men at the event. So sizable I read the line again, to another cheer, and then chastised them for doing so; they shouldn’t cheer for such ideas. The women, notably, did not cheer.) Some of this is perhaps understandable, but some of it leads to accepting vile ideas beyond the pale of decency.
When many, especially many of the young, feel the status quo is failing, a variety of new theories and positions will emerge, each attempting to reframe the story, capture imaginations, and win arguments and votes.
Conservatism has fractured into many stories, each vying tremendously with each other. All these ideas are being embraced or repudiated, and there is much passion about it all. It makes sense that this is so. Things do seem to have fallen apart, the center does seem wobbly, and some older conservative institutions and policies are non-responsive to current needs. This is natural: when many, especially many of the young, feel the status quo is failing, a variety of new theories and positions will emerge, each attempting to reframe the story, capture imaginations, and win arguments and votes. This is to be expected, even welcomed. Fences need to be painted from time to time so they don’t rot; conservatives shouldn’t refuse to paint out of some strange nostalgia for the status quo. Conservatives are not ideologues, but inclined to cautious empiricism in politics, embracing what is sensible, workable, moral and decent, but without demanding perfection or stasis. If what we’ve been doing and thinking no longer responds, the genuine conservative does something better. The creation of a decent society never stops, and didn’t stop in 1776, 1989 or 2014.
With schools and camps arguing and competing, times like ours can be exciting, or exasperating, or enraging. That, too, is perfectly normal, and can even end up being a source of new life, energy, alliances, and policies if we manage to avoid tearing ourselves to shreds. I, for one, mostly welcome it, although I do wish we could dispute arguments rather than persons—but ad hominems are also to be expected. Conservatives realize we live in a time of revolution, of wildness, and as the revolution continues its monstrous but endless destruction, our own responses will be incomplete and even confused. That is to be expected. Conservatives don’t long nostalgically for a world no longer existing, but attempt to live in ordered liberty, find the truth of being, realize the common good, and embrace a disposition of joy, gratitude, and delight.
As younger conservatives know, conservatism cannot simply continue as it has been operating. Rather than “natural conservatism,” something else is required of us:
. . . [A] conscious conservatism, a clearly principled restatement in new circumstances of philosophical and political truth. This conscious conservatism cannot be a simple piety, although in a deep sense it must have piety towards the constitution of being. Nevertheless in its consciousness it necessarily reflects a reaction to the rude break the revolution has made in the continuity of human wisdom. It is called forth by a sense of the loss which that cutting off has created. It cannot now be identical with the natural conservatism towards which it yearns. The world in which it exists is the revolutionary world. … [T]he revolution has destroyed … that tradition; the delicate fabric can never be re-created in the identical form; its integral character has been destroyed. The conscious conservatism of a revolutionary or post-revolutionary era faces problems inconceivable to the natural conservatism of a prerevolutionary time.
We have the burden and vocation of living in a moment of revolution; it can very much seem there is not much left to conserve, at times. Our task is to constitute a more self-aware, conscious, articulate account of who we are and what it is we are trying to do; to be intelligent rather than committed to the status quo, to be forward looking rather than attempting to instantiate a supposedly glorious past. Doing so will feel disorienting, experimental, and more risk-taking than conservatives find comfortable. It will also require us to argue with each other, making our case with each other—which will be also against each other, in many ways. But unless the revolution simply collapses under its own illogic, devours itself, fails to stop converting our children, loses its monopoly on our institutions, or decides to play fair—and none of this looks very likely—then we find ourselves in a position of rebuilding.
We live in the midst of a terrible revolution, and struggle to form a new, intelligent, responsive, and responsible conservatism to preserve the most precious things against those who wish to rend and tear and ruin.
The author I quoted above is Frank Meyer, the famous fusionist who worked tirelessly, along with William F. Buckley, Jr. and others, to put together a fusion of anticommunists, antistatists, and social conservatives in the 1950s through 1970s. It is precisely his fusionism that has fallen apart, which became the so-called dead consensus many young conservatives find zombified. I am not trying to sneak in the old fusionism as if it were new again, not at all. Perhaps the old fusionism is dead and buried, and not a moment too soon; perhaps many moments too late. But if you read a history of that time, say by George Nash, you realize the arguments and inventions of theories, personas, and schools happening now is not so different from then. They were dealing with Revolution and so could not simply repeat what they had been doing; so, too, us. They had to decide who could be legitimate conversation partners and who, like Ayn Rand or the Birchers, were not going to be acceptable interlocutors; so, too, us. They had to decide what was principle and what was preference, what could be compromised and what must be maintained; so, too, us. I’m not suggesting we take Meyer’s solution, but, rather, that we acknowledge we live in the midst of a terrible revolution, and struggle to form a new, intelligent, responsive, and responsible conservatism to preserve the most precious things against those who wish to rend and tear and ruin.
In our experiments we can expect post-liberalism, and post-post-liberalism; we can expect originalism, in new and varied forms, but also common good constitutionalism. There will be variants of traditionalism. We can expect proponents of national industrial policy as well as those who roll their eyes. Natalists will look to support the having and rearing of children, and others see governmental action as inefficient and a moral hazard. All this is to be expected; all of this is to be welcomed, in some ways. We are thinking again. We are attempting to respond. We are attempting a struggle against a dehumanizing revolution—but we are all attempting to overcome the same common threat. City building isn’t pretty, and it isn’t all that calm.
At the same time, in our efforts against revolution, we should not respond with our own. Guardrails are required, and some positions should not be legitimized. We should react with uncompromising scorn when we hear proposals to overturn the Nineteenth Amendment or disenfranchise Jewish people. These are not acceptable proposals. Kinism and ethnic nationalism are not acceptable proposals and should be rejected root and branch. Sneering references about the longhouse or satirical tones about the dignity of women are not acceptable. Any form of Nietzscheanism, the metaphysics of violence, and aristocrats of the soul is not acceptable. Revolution is not overcome with revolution. Wildness not undone with wildness.
Also, we’re not rationalists. We certainly believe in reason and reason’s capacity to know the good and true, but we realize the domains of metaphysics and logic differ from the domain of politics. Axioms and geometrical deductions work well in some human endeavors, but not at all in the political—or at least not without tyranny, violence, totalization, and the trampling down of the very thing conservatives most value, the integrity of the human person and the drama of their own responsible action. There are no five-year plans to perpetual justice or the messianic age; no theories of the city in speech which simply map on to actual cities; no common good to instantiate without the long, difficult, tentative, and modest work of reality-based governance. This kind of governance seeks the common good in a way it can actually exist in this city, in this time, with these people, under these conditions. There’s no magical solution, no panacea, no scheme of rationality, no blueprint, and no merely human ruler sent by God to bring about the eschaton in this vale of tears. It is as it ever was: prudence, seriousness, intelligence, gratitude, reverence, law, virtue, patience, forgiveness, forbearance, dependence, order, and responsible freedom. Those are good things. Think on them.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, whose hero is Robert Kennedy, wants to build a multiracial progressive coalition.
One year ago, Russia launched an illegal war on Ukraine, committing horrific war crimes against the people of Ukraine. Analyses and memorials abound, and I’m probably not the only person writing about this on the Duck today.
I wanted to address a specific aspect of this war, though: why Russia’s carefully cultivated ties with far-right forces in Western Europe and the United States failed to undermine Western opposition to the war.
Last year, as Russia was about to launch its invasion of Ukraine, I was finishing a chapter on Russia in my new book. The book, forthcoming with Cornell University Press, explores how states use religious appeals as a tool in power politics (Religious Appeals in Power Politics is the working title).
As Goddard and Nexon discussed in an article on power politics—or the efforts to form or break apart international coalitions—states use more than just military and economic tools. They also turn to cultural and symbolic instruments of power. Appeals to religion—shared faith, shared religiosity—I argue, are one such instrument of power.
One chapter looks at Saudi appeals to Islam to form an anti-Egyptian alliance in the 1960s. Another explores US appeals to “moderate Islam” and religious engagement in the Global War on Terrorism. One includes brief discussions of several other cases, such as China’s Confucius Institutes, the Pope’s mobilization against military intervention in Syria, and the early 2000s border dispute between Cambodia and Thailand.
The chapter that ended up being most relevant to current events, however, is the one on Russia.
Putin has expressed desire to control his “near abroad” connected to Russia as former Soviet states and ethnic Russian ties; this is often referred to as the Russky Mir, or Russian world. As part of this, he fostered ties with far-right groups in the West, presenting Russia as a like-minded power.
Some refers to these efforts as “civilizational,” “sharp power,” “soft power,” or “traditional values” (for my related complaint about the stretching of the term soft power, see my article in International Studies Perspectives).
I prefer to call them what they are: religious appeals (I have a whole other post planned about scholars and policy experts’ allergy to just calling religion religion). For example, in a December 2013 speech, Putin pushed back on Western criticism of Russia’s anti-LGBTQ laws, attacking the West for “treating good and evil equally;” he argued that Russia’s “traditional family values” were “the foundation of Russia’s greatness and a bulwark against ‘so-called tolerance.’”
These religious appeals seemed to have worked. US conservatives see Putin as a defender of “traditional Christian values.” Far-right forces in Europe see Putin as a defender of “true” Western values.
But this hoped-for transnational far-right coalition didn’t fracture the West and give Putin an easy victory in Ukraine. Western European states, which had struggled to unite on many issues, came together to oppose Putin’s victory. Many Orthodox figures criticized Putin.
So what happened?
Some could argue this shows that cultural and symbolic instruments of power (we need a better name for that) like religious appeals ultimately matter less than material concerns. Western Europe is militarily threatened by Russia’s aggression, so even right-leaning figures won’t support Putin.
This is partly true. As I argue in the book, religious appeals’ effects depend on the interaction between the credibility of their wielder and the material incentives facing the target. I based this on Busby’s work on moral movements in foreign policy.
It could also just be bad timing (for Putin). If Putin had invaded Ukraine while Trump was still the U.S. President (or if Trump had won in 2020) the outcome may have been much different. Trump and his allies have been much more antagonistic towards Ukraine, so the US-led aid to Ukraine may not have materialized.
But I’d argue (and expand on this in the book) that it has to do with the nature of religious appeals themselves.
Religion is a powerful force (it’s hard to find a good single article overview, but you could read my summary of research on religion and terrorism). This makes it a useful tool when it mobilizes domestic publics or persuades leaders to change their policies.
But this power also makes it unwieldy and unpredictable.
Religion increases the stakes of any interaction (just think of that old joke about never discussing religion and politics at dinner). Religious arguments are complex, and can easily be reinterpreted to suit conflicting interests or even turned back on their originator. And conventional statecraft tends to be based on secular language, so religious appeals are confusing and produce uncertainty.
In my book, I break slightly with Busby, and argue that the intermediate combinations of material incentives and credibility still matter.
Material incentives to cooperate combined with a lack of credibility on religious appeals (the situation during the US Global War on Terrorism), produce convenient coalitions that can easily fall apart or be redirected against the interests of the originator. Credibility on religious appeals combined with material disincentives to cooperate lead to a tense, unsettled situation in which the appeals roil international relations.
I’d suggest this is what happened with Putin’s religious appeals, and explains their limited effect on the Ukraine war.
First, they still had some effect. As I discussed above, Putin did gain some political benefits from his appeals. And there are lower-level benefits he’s still enjoying. The recent arrest of a German government agent spying for Russia seems to be tied to his right-wing views. It’s likely Putin’s appeals generated sympathy and made it easier to recruit him.
Moreover, Putin’s appeals may have led some to sympathize with Russia, but they increased mistrust of Russia among many others. U.S. Democrats previously supported engagement with Russia, but they have grown increasingly hawkish on such efforts. Moreover, some of the opposition to Putin has drawn on appeals to Western values, suggesting part of the reaction has to do with Putin’s religious appeals.
Putin’s failure to break apart Western opposition to the war on Ukraine prevented the easy victory he hoped for. This failure arguably occurred due to the issues arising from religious appeals in power politics. I’d even argue that if Putin had stuck to conventional geopolitical discussions, Western mistrust would have been more minimal (he may have lost domestic support, but that’s another post).
We shouldn’t relax yet, however.
If it is true that the German spy is tied to right-wing parties, and if he was radicalized through Putin’s religious appeals, this is cause for concern. Even if Putin’s religious appeals never form a durable pro-Russian coalition, they will continue to disrupt and roil Western politics.
Of the ideologically-motivated mass killings in 2022, 100% of them were committed by right-wing extremists. They've "heavily dominated" the figures since the 1980s, according to the ADL, but last year they aced it.
— Read the restAll the extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds, who typically commit most such killings each year but only occasionally are responsible for all (the last time this occurred was 2012).
“Conservatism” is a notoriously slippery word. Much of the confusion comes from the question “What exactly are we conserving?” Traditionalists and libertarians have long debated whether the conservative emphasis should be on virtue or freedom, for instance.
Other conservatives seek to return America to a “golden era,” a time before a fall from grace. The Norman Rockwell aesthetics of the 1950s have become a nostalgic touchstone for a certain kind of traditionalist politics. Postwar America is often remembered as some sort of utopia, where men were men, families were strong, and everybody went to church. Increasingly, right-wing technocrats—mostly gathered in a few Washington think tanks and magazines—are looking back on the social and economic policies of that time for models to imitate today.
But the 1950s were no golden era. Racial segregation and misogyny marred America’s victory over fascism. Social alienation was widespread, despite the popular image of suburban families with white-picket fences remembered from Leave It to Beaver. And the centralization imposed by the New Deal—which contributed to the hollowing out of communities and homogenization of American life—only made things worse.
Conservatives who lived through the 1950s did not view this decade as particularly conservative. In National Review’s mission statement, written in 1955, William F. Buckley said that “There never was an age of conformity quite like this one.” The founders of that magazine and others present at the creation of the conservative movement would be horrified by their intellectual heirs’ embrace of the conformity they so vehemently disliked.
But the 1950s were no golden era. Racial segregation and misogyny marred America’s victory over fascism. Social alienation was widespread.
The Nostalgia Trap
The 1950s have two main nostalgic pulls on conservatives: aesthetic and technocratic. Both rely on a constructed past that has little to do with the realities of American history—and therefore neither type of ’50s nostalgia offers serious solutions to the country’s problems.
Especially online, ’50s-era images of white, nuclear families will circulate as depictions of a past “they took away from us” and to which we must “RETVRN.” The problem is that these idealized images represent a past that never really existed, except in advertisements and the near-socialist realist illustrations of Norman Rockwell. It was never real, and “returning” to an unreal past is not a legitimate program of cultural renewal.
Sadly, edgelords and meme-posters are not the only right-wingers who idolize the 1950s. Another group of young people on the right hold up the ’50s as an aspirational example in public policy debates: the technocrats.
Over the last six years or so, a cottage industry has arisen issuing calls for a “conservative welfare state.” Instead of undoing the New Deal and the Great Society, this group of right-wing technocrats argues that Americans ought to use the tools of the administrative state to revive the social, political, and economic arrangements of the 1950s. “That was the last time things were really great in America,” the logic runs, “so we need to return to those conditions.”
Some of these technocrats have contributed essays to economic historian David Cowan’s “American System” series that first appeared in The American Conservative. In one recent edition, for instance, the Niskanen Center’s Samuel Hammond argued that conservatives should look to the New Deal for policy inspiration. He says that Roosevelt’s programs were examples of “collective action in the general, rather than special, interest,” and worthy of emulation today.
Some of the policies promoted by the contributors to the project make a great deal of sense. Repealing no-fault divorce laws, for example, and extending tax relief to families are commonsense changes conservatives should be happy to support. But overall, the technocrats writing for Cowan are promoting a vision of federal power that has far more in common with New Deal liberalism than traditional conservatism.
Beyond just Cowan and his collaborators, right-wing technocrats often seem like they want to preserve the social and economic conditions of the ’50s in amber. They consider it an “imperative” to “re-shore” the kind of manufacturing jobs that employed many in the era. They idolize the “single-income families” depicted on the sitcoms of early television. And they are willing to countenance a dramatic expansion of the already vast federal bureaucracy to achieve this end.
At the end of the day, though, the technocrats’ proposals for tinkering with the welfare state share the same nostalgia as the meme accounts. We cannot force workers back into factories, or spend our way into a new baby boom. Revival cannot come from the center, and regeneration will not be sparked by tinkering on the edges of federal power. Conservatives ought to be offering America a more radical alternative than repackaging the dominant liberalism.
We cannot force workers back into factories, or spend our way into a new baby boom. Revival cannot come from the center, and regeneration will not be sparked by tinkering on the edges of federal power.
Early Opposition to the New Deal
The early leaders of the conservative movement would never have held up the era in which they lived as some sort of social ideal. The most famous line in National Review’s mission statement indicates just how alienated conservatives felt in the 1950s: “[The magazine] stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” National Review saw itself as a voice crying out in the wilderness—not as a prop for the establishment.
Buckley wrote that National Review “is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation. Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the United States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.”
Conservatives saw the postwar liberal settlement of the ’50s as a betrayal, not an embodiment, of the best of the American political tradition. Instead of protecting local communities and natural rights, the New Deal’s vast bureaucratic apparatus ran roughshod over those traditional American values.
Buckley’s mission statement targets the WASP establishment lionized by the politics of nostalgia. For example, Buckley condemned rampant progressivism on college campuses long before the radicals of the ’60s and ’70s got tenure. In his view, New Deal liberals were stifling any serious dissent from the postwar consensus.
In those early days, National Review contended that the social conditions of the 1950s were a struggle against the “weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy” upheld by “a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups” and corroding really traditional American values with “a cynical contempt for human freedom.”
Conservatives saw the postwar liberal settlement of the ’50s as a betrayal, not an embodiment, of the best of the American political tradition.
Nisbet’s Alternative to the “Age of Conformity”
Robert Nisbet was one early conservative who offered a serious alternative to the postwar, post–New Deal liberal establishment. His book The Quest for Community was published in 1953, and many of his ideas contributed to the development of a new kind of sociology with more humble aims than the utopianism of its left-wing counterparts.
Even in the 1950s, Nisbet sensed that something was very wrong in the United States. Church attendance and participation in voluntary groups may have been on the rise, but Nisbet understood that despite these apparent trends, community was on the decline. “In the twentieth century, there have arisen, under the guise of humanitarian purposes,” he wrote, “intensities of tyranny and stultifications of human personality that are unprecedented in human history.”
Nisbet disapproved of both nineteenth-century individualism and twentieth-century New Dealism. Though they may have differed in their aesthetics and philosophical justifications, both kinds of liberalism led to the growth of an “omnicompetent State” which intruded into every aspect of citizens’ lives. Both individualism and collectivism hollow out communities.
Toward the end of the book, Nisbet argues:
Too often in our intellectual defenses of freedom, in our sermons and manifestoes for democracy, we have fixed attention only on the more obvious historical threats to popular freedom: kings, military dictators, popes, and financial titans. We have tended to miss the subtler but infinitely more potent threats bound up with the diminution of authorities and allegiances in the smaller areas of association and with the centralization and standardization that takes place in the name of, and on behalf of, the people.
Nisbet preferred what he called a “new philosophy of laissez faire” and the creation of “conditions within which autonomous groups may prosper.” He did not believe new welfare programs could increase birth rates, or that the New Deal spent America back into prosperity after the Depression. Technocrats tinkering away at the edges of American life could not restore what communities had been gradually losing to both the Scylla of “expressive individualism” and the Charybdis of an administrative state.
Instead, Nisbet thought the best way to address social alienation was to smash the administrative state built up by liberals old and new alike, thereby recovering the things that made democracy worthwhile in the first place—“diversity of culture, plurality of association, and division of authority.”
The Need for Roots
Another leading conservative thinker, Russell Kirk, also published his seminal work in 1953. His conclusion was similar to Nisbet’s: “If the need of the eighteenth century was for emancipation, the need of the twentieth is for roots.”
Kirk paints a bleak picture of life in the 1950s that Norman Rockwell’s paintings cloak:
The degeneration of the family to mere common house-tenancy menaces the essence of recognizable human character; and the plague of social boredom, spreading in ever-widening circles to almost every level of civilized existence, may bring a future more dreary than the round of life in the decaying Roman system.
Kirk was concerned that the twentieth century was “proletarianizing” the great mass of Americans. Economic centralization was uprooting Americans from the social fabric that gave their lives and labor meaning. Political centralization was sapping communities’ ability to fight back against harmful policies. Cultural centralization was isolating the masses from the spiritual treasures of Western civilization. So, in The Conservative Mind, Kirk says that one of the great tasks of conservatives is to combat alienation by reminding America of an older, more traditional social organization than the New Deal liberalism of the ’50s establishment.
Economic centralization was uprooting Americans from the social fabric that gave their lives and labor meaning. Political centralization was sapping communities’ ability to fight back against harmful policies.
“To restore purpose to labor and domestic existence, to give men back old hopes and long views and thought of posterity,” he wrote, “will require bold imagination.” Restoring that purpose today will take much more work than posting memes on Twitter or Instagram glorifying a rosy view of the past. And it will take much more creativity than a few welfare programs designed to restore an outdated economic vision.
Some with ’50s nostalgia support policies that would empower the administrative state that has constantly eroded the family. But conservatives can offer a better path forward. We can articulate the deeper meaning of tradition, more rooted in genuine religious life than Madison Avenue gimmicks. And instead of trying to revive a past that never really existed, conservatives should seek to bolster and strengthen traditional communities.
To start, conservatives in public policy need to prioritize deconstructing the administrative state. But our efforts to free the American people from rule by unelected “experts” must also be wedded to a renewed social conservatism, confident in America’s heritage of ordered liberty. By disarming the federal bureaucracy, conservatives would empower states and local communities to reclaim their rightful role as guardians of the moral order.
Rather than looking to the architects of a defunct past and idolizing the narrow utopian vision of the ’50s establishment, conservatives should turn to their true intellectual forebears—the critics of those architects. Conservatives such as Buckley, Nisbet, and Kirk are far sounder guides to moral and social regeneration than New Dealers, would-be social engineers, and anonymous trolls.
The American right is in one of its periodic fits of introspection and internecine dispute. The midterm elections, which were widely anticipated to deliver victories for the “new right,” ended up being rather disappointing for the GOP as a whole. Instead of sweeping into power, Republicans not only failed to recapture but in fact lost control of the Senate, and they only narrowly secured control of the House. Moreover, political candidates aligned with nascent conservative factions plausibly bore much of the blame.
The relationship between the Republican Party and the conservative movement has never been direct. Even so, throughout the history of modern conservatism, different factions have gained dominance by securing champions in the political arena. The presence of such champions helps to mainstream a given group’s ideas, create new institutions dedicated to those ideas, and elevate actors within existing institutions who favor new currents over those who are seen as clinging to the status quo. The success of such champions, furthermore, can pave the way for the political triumph of like-minded compatriots.
The failure of such would-be champions, on the other hand, produces precisely the sort of infighting the right is seeing now. Given that the midterms failed to provide a decisive victory for any conservative faction, they all continue to advance their own priorities and interests while harshly criticizing the others. They agree, rightly, that there is much in modern American life that requires serious correction, but they differ in the prescriptions they propose.
One of the contenders for control of the movement is national conservatism, whose adherents claim to be the most fiercely agitated about modern American life and the best equipped to address what agitates them. But despite its leaders’ proclamations to the contrary, national conservatism is uniquely ill-equipped to accomplish what it sets out to do, because of its uncertain relationship to the American political tradition and its comfort with the sources of many of America’s current ills.
The Principles of National Conservatism
National conservatism can be broadly defined, as it has many adherents who hold a variety of positions on key policy questions. Last year, however, many of them signed a Statement of Principles written on behalf of national conservatism’s flagship institution, the Edmund Burke Foundation, which was meant to convey consensus on certain beliefs.
National conservatives attempt to distinguish themselves by their focus on the interests of the nation, as such; by their special attention to issues that directly concern the nation’s relation to other polities (especially immigration, trade, and foreign policy); and by their greater willingness to employ power at the national level to effect policy desiderata. The Statement—some of whose signers hail from other nations—puts it this way:
We see the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice.
In the specifically American context, it endorses “accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance.” This is all welcome, to a considerable extent, but it also sounds rather familiar. Concerns about our nation’s borders, our nation’s economy, and our nation’s presence abroad are common themes for conservatives, even in the restrictionist, protectionist, and less interventionist forms national conservatives favor.
Of course, as much as conservatives love to describe what they believe, they take equal—or perhaps even greater—joy in describing what they do not. One account, written by David Brog of the Edmund Burke Foundation, forcefully rejects alleged myths about national conservatism. Two are worth discussing here. Do national conservatives oppose the free market? No; they admire it, Brog wrote, but they “see the free market as the best means to an end and not an end in itself.” This makes them “willing to depart from orthodox laissez faire when the national interest requires it.” Are they foreign-policy isolationists? No; they reject the stale, discredited consensus of interventionism, but “see strengthening allies like Japan, South Korea, India, Israel, and Ukraine as the best way to protect our interests abroad.”
Yet these “myths” contain more truth than Brog admits. At the third National Conservatism conference in 2022, also a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation, statements praising free markets were nearly always followed by caveats large enough to call into question the first part of the statement. “Ronald Reagan’s agenda was successful because it fit the specific needs of his time. We don’t need to—and we shouldn’t—throw out all our old ideas,” Rachel Bovard said at the conference. “But we do need to reprioritize them now—when our most basic government and economic institutions are ideologically weaponized against the public.” Similarly, the conference provided evidence both for and against isolationist tendencies. Some national conservatives, such as conference chairman Christopher DeMuth, support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia as an exemplar of national sovereignty, but many others question the U.S. interest there.
Concerns about our nation’s borders, our nation’s economy, and our nation’s presence abroad are common themes for conservatives, even in the restrictionist, protectionist, and less interventionist forms national conservatives favor.
Embracing the Constitution, Rejecting the Declaration
Interestingly, there was a large Hungarian presence at the conference. This gave the proceedings a rather cosmopolitan flavor. Indeed, national conservatives sometimes drain conservatism of much of its national—that is, distinctly American—meaning. Nowhere in the Statement of Principles, for example, is the Declaration of Independence mentioned, or even implied. As one assessment of the Statement of Principles observed, “The national conservative effort to effectively write the Declaration out of American nationhood is manifest.”
Perhaps this can be attributed to the influence of Yoram Hazony. Hazony has been at the center of many recent attempts to define and advance national conservatism. Hazony is co-drafter of the Statement of Principles, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, and the author of both The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) and last year’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery. In the latter book, Hazony explicitly pits the Declaration against the American political tradition. In his view, the Declaration promoted
the Lockean doctrine of universal rights as “self-evident” before the light of reason; whereas the Constitution of 1787, drafted at a convention dominated by the conservative party, ended a decade of shocking disorder by restoring the familiar forms of the national English constitution.
Thereafter, everything bad in American politics has descended from the Declaration, and everything good in American politics has descended from the Constitution.
Hazony’s book frames this understanding of history, and the Anglo-American conservatism that emerges from it, as a rediscovery. But, as one review pointed out, it is better understood as a theory, and a flawed one at that. Start with the Declaration itself. It was not one-off twaddle by Thomas Jefferson. Although he was a primary force behind the document, he co-wrote it with John Adams, the kind of figure Hazony otherwise incorporates into his vision of what conservatism is supposed to be. Near the end of his life, Jefferson said the Declaration “was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”
It’s true that the Constitution represented a move toward stronger national authority than the earlier Articles of Confederation. But was it really a restoration of British government? As one Hazony reviewer has pointed out, the Constitution’s primary advocates said otherwise. In Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton, another figure of whom Hazony approves, argues that the ratification of the Constitution presents an opportunity for Americans to decide “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Why does Hamilton believe Americans are capable of designing a new government? Because, as he wrote in Federalist No. 9, “the science of politics . . . like most other sciences, has received great improvements,” including new ways to limit government power. And in Federalist No. 84, Hamilton explicitly distinguished the Constitution from its British precedents. In the British context, bills of rights are “stipulations between kings and their subjects” and therefore “have no application to constitutions professedly founded upon the power of the people, and executed by their immediate representatives and servants.” In our system, by contrast, “the people surrender nothing; and as they retain everything they have no need of particular reservations.”
In other words, historical evidence supports the idea that, though America owed a great deal to what came before, it was nonetheless consciously distinct. During the ratification debates, it was the Constitution’s opponents, the anti-Federalists, who believed that the document was attempting to restore British monarchical forms. As another reviewer of Hazony’s book pointed out, “Hazony argues that the anti-Federalists were right in their analysis but wrong in their value judgment.”
Most historical assessments judge the American Founding as something new. Hazony does not. “It is easy to overestimate how much of a change was involved in this establishment of republican government in America,” he writes. But in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, historian Gordon Wood argues that “the Revolution did not just eliminate monarchy and create republics; it actually reconstituted what Americans meant by public or state power and brought about an entirely new kind of popular politics and a new kind of democratic officeholder.” To be sure, the American Revolution was not the French Revolution. In important ways, it was held in check. Nonetheless, we should not underestimate the power of its change.
We should consider ourselves fortunate, not weirdly embarrassed, as Hazony seems to be, about the Declaration’s centrality in American political life.
Abraham Lincoln, likewise, confounds Hazony’s analysis. Hazony writes that, “although Lincoln comfortably mixed Jeffersonian rhetoric with his imposing biblical imagery, his policies as president were in a tradition the Federalists would have easily recognized.” But Lincoln did more than comfortably mix these things. Jeffersonian rhetoric was central to his time as a public figure. Of the Declaration, Lincoln wrote that he gave “all honor to Jefferson” for introducing “into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” He also said, “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”
Contra Hazony, Lincoln believed that the Declaration and the Constitution were inextricably linked. The Declaration, with its principle of “liberty to all,” was the “apple of gold,” around which the Constitution, “the picture of silver,” was framed. To take an example from Lincoln’s time: It took the moral force of the Declaration, together with the Constitution, to end slavery. We should consider ourselves fortunate, not weirdly embarrassed, as Hazony seems to be, about the Declaration’s centrality in American political life.
Losing Sight of American Tradition
What accounts for Hazony’s embarrassment? It seems like an attempt to create a new political tradition that he thinks better serves his current ends. But that would be at least as much a form of abstract rationalism as anything the Declaration attempted—one totally alienated from the unique American context. In its more benign forms, such thought would elide the distinctions between the American and British political traditions. We have already seen how they are distinct, though to confuse them is perhaps somewhat understandable.
But to confuse the American tradition and the Hungarian, as some national conservatives do? That’s a bit more of a stretch. Whatever popularity Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban might have with his people, why should even a good American nationalist be so invested in a European nation the size of Indiana with the population of Michigan? Any honest attempt to compare our national situations or traditions would find little overlap. Yet many conservatives praise Hungary anyway. Such praise often elides the two nations’ distinctions, and it fails to note that Orban’s government has played nice with Russia’s and has invited Chinese investment.
Still, it would be problematic for a supposedly American nationalism to be so focused on another nation even absent these other factors. This is what can result from untethering nationalism from America’s actual political tradition. That’s why that tradition is what should motivate American conservatism. At its best, America’s tradition is both concrete and accessible, powerful enough that a refugee from Cold War–era communist Hungary could say to his family that they were fleeing to America because “we were born American but in the wrong place.” National conservatism, at its worst, inverts this, redefining the American political tradition so that it somehow finds better expression elsewhere. Conservatives thinking about how best to confront our very real problems should root themselves in a proper understanding of America, and of its political history and traditions.
National conservatism often has trouble with this. The most obvious evidence comes in deviations from the American traditions of limited government ordained by the Constitution.
Return to the statement of principles. It contains a section on economics that, again, contains much one can agree with. “We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition.” It continues: “We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state.” So far, there is little deviation from the recognizable tradition of American conservatism.
But here comes the caveat: “But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation.” The statement then goes on to lament that globalized markets empower America’s enemies, weaken America economically, and enable “transnational corporations” to flood the country with goods that weaken national virtue. Thus, the statement asserts:
a prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare.
It adds helpfully that “crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-making by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.”
It is true, though not very controversial, to assert that “the free market cannot be absolute.” But while globalization has presented many challenges to America, the picture the statement paints of America’s economic situation is both hyperbolic and selective. Both trade and automation have played a role in reducing manufacturing employment, yet manufacturing remains a significant driver of our economy. And while both Adam Smith and Milton Friedman would agree that national security is an acceptable free-market exception, we already have many policies in place to that end. Moreover, many people work hard to take advantage of that exception. If you want to know why sugar is so much more expensive in the United States than elsewhere, thank the Florida sugar lobby’s success in making its product a national-security priority.
It is prudent not to be completely closed off to government policy in this area, to be sure. China presents a real threat to the United States. Actions like banning TikTok, a Chinese spyware app featuring short videos (which are pointless at best and soul-destroying at worst), and reshoring certain critical industrial capacities are worth considering. Still, we should be very careful how we do such things.
Internal Contradictions
There are also contradictions in this part of the statement of principles. As one assessment of the statement has argued, the attempt to “restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare” sounds a lot like industrial policy, in which the government picks winners and losers in the economy. If we’re going to see more of that (and let’s be clear, there is already a great deal of it), based on past examples, we’re going to see more of the same “crony capitalism” the statement ostensibly condemns. And if we’re going to see an expanded role for the government economically, it’s very hard to envision how we’ll achieve a “drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state.” Yet this is a policy priority the statement explicitly invokes.
On the one hand, this framework increases the scope for political patronage. Indeed, at last year’s National Conservatism conference, one speaker explicitly called for conservatives to “be a little less principled” so that we can “build an interconnected web” of “client interests” that are “committed to our political success.” And on the other, it increases the scope for action through the administrative state, an explicitly anti-constitutional part of our government bequeathed to us by the Progressive Era and grown by subsequent deviations from our constitutional order. Senator J. D. Vance (R., Ohio), who is one of the closest things in Congress to a national conservative, has said that “we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes.”
That national conservatives would have an interest in aggrandizing this feature of modern politics is, unfortunately, consonant with their deprecation of federalism. On this subject, the national conservative statement of principles does gesture toward an appreciation. “We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers,” it reads. “We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values.” However, it includes two statements that render these appreciations somewhat empty. “We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom.” More ominously, it adds that “in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.”
This gets the relationship between the states and the national government quite wrong. The states don’t have significant powers for the sake of convenience or efficiency. The states are, rather, meant to be serious political entities in their own right. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reads that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The states are not mere administrative units. Any political movement that does not understand this will have trouble succeeding in America—or it will “succeed” in a way that will not be recognizably American.
The states don’t have significant powers for the sake of convenience or efficiency. The states are, rather, meant to be serious political entities in their own right.
Defending the Status Quo
Attempts to criticize national conservatism often invite accusations that critics are merely gatekeepers, defenders of the status quo. To the extent they have anything to say, the argument goes, all such critics can do is attack those who actually take our problems seriously.
To be clear: modern American life is dissatisfactory in all sorts of ways. Though it remains possible to live a good life in America today, and while there is much that can be achieved through our political system by ordinary means, there is also much that needs improvement, even salvaging. It is unclear, however, that national conservatives should be the ones to lead such an effort. The contradiction about cronyism and the error about federalism help explain why.
National conservatism, supposedly a challenge to the status quo, actually doubles down on it. One of the biggest failures of conservatism since the end of the Cold War is its evolution into a business headquartered in Washington, DC. Increasingly, conservatives cared more about status and power in the institutions in the DC-centered conservative movement than about their ideological commitments. Conservatism lost a focus not just on the culture but also on the political importance of the states. To the extent that conservatives achieved success in these fields, they were often afterthoughts, exceptions, or even accidents. DC was the aim. Of course, as long as DC is our national seat of government, there will always be some need for a conservative presence in it. What truly national ends this country has, let’s debate them, and then pursue them well, through a restored emphasis on the proper channels of deliberation and decision-making that the Constitution ordains. But everything else must be redistributed back to the people and to the states.
National conservatives often forget or even downplay the virtue of restoring congressional supremacy and reviving federalism as a genuine distribution of power. This defect arises, in part, from the weak relationship between national conservatism and the American political tradition. In these respects, it is not a disruption from the centralizing status quo, dependent on deviations from our constitutional order, but a continuation of it. Some of its proponents, so keen on invoking “the people,” appear to be nothing more than power-hungry status-seekers casting about for a group in whose name they can create a comfortable life in DC. It seems we have a new vanguard looking for its new proletariat. They seek not to diminish the Beltway’s grimy sinecures, but merely redistribute them.
If this is all national conservatism amounts to, then it deserves neither prominence within the right nor electoral success. Indeed, as recent midterm elections showed, national conservatism has not in fact achieved such success. For now, therefore, its Beltway entrenchment remains uncertain. As for prominence on the right, for better or worse, national conservatism is now a recognized, coherent faction. It has introduced—or, more typically, renewed—a focus on certain issues that are welcome parts of intra-conservative political discussions and debates. But as a new direction for the conservative movement, it leaves much to be desired. Any conservatism that fails “to defend what is best in America. At all costs. Against any enemy, foreign or domestic,” as National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. put it, will not be worthy of the name.
“The work of the family is real work,” said Erika Bachiochi, a legal scholar who calls herself a pro-life feminist and has written influential essays and books.
At New College of Florida, in Sarasota, Gov. Ron DeSantis removed six of the school’s 13 trustees, replacing them with allies holding strongly conservative views.
A discussion on Philip Rieff, a conservative sociologist concerned that society was being driven by therapeutic ideas and psychological institutions rather than by religious or political ones.
FreshRSS