I'm not comfortable letting this bunch assume leadership of a restoration of conservatism

The National Conservatism Statement of Principles says some of the right things, but creeps me out for a couple of reasons

Let’s start by linking to it.

And then I’d like to bring David Von Drehle’s Washington Post column about it into the discussion.

Back to the statement itself, it strikes several right notes, in my estimation. Western civilization, and, more specifically, American society, has indeed become unmoored from the Judeo-Christian pillar, which along with the Greco-Roman pillar, that makes the West identifiable as such. We’ve flouted the divinely designed architecture of the universe and exalted the individual at the expense of the transcendent. The world’s large corporations have significantly contributed to this, as well as to the erosion of the human need for rootedness in specific locality. The section on race seems innocuous enough.

Where my eyebrows start to rise is when I come across assertions such as that “where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions, both public and private.” Now, that’s not because I want to throw the whole question of a moral basis for public policy wide open. I’m no relativist. But let’s not, here in 2022, exceed the extent to which a rooting in Christianity was the case at the founding, or any other point prior to the Great Deterioration of the last 50 or so years. I’m fine with a president saying a nationally broadcast prayer before a major expedition of the nation’s armed forces, as FDR did as D-Day got underway, but let’s keep scriptural references out of the final products of legislation. If, for example, the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade and state legislatures or the federal congress start crafting laws about people who aren’t born yet, there’s plenty of room for arguments appealing to a broad-based reverence for life that doesn’t get specifically Christian.

I also bristle at this idea the a “prudent national economic policy” should “restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare.” I’m pretty damn much of a purist when when it comes to a free market, and this hints at interference with the parties involved in a particular transaction coming to an agreement about the value of good or service being exchanged. Who gets to decide what manufacturing capabilities are critical, or even how to define the public welfare?

Like the Statement of Principles, I’m none too keen on handing over national sovereignty to “supranational bodies” - I have little use for the UN, for instance - but this section’s rhetoric about “dominating other nations and trying to remake them in [a particular nation’s] own image” strikes me as a red flag. It invites a slippery slope to isolationism, it seems to me. I’m inclined to endorse a little more leeway regarding foreign policy, which sometimes is about having to do what a nation has to do.

And now, on to a look at Von Drehle’s column. His assertion that a cultural coherence of the kind the statement sees in America’s past never existed is a misreading of history, I think. We did in fact have commonly held notions of family structure and reliance on the Creator until the above-mentioned Great Deterioration got underway.

More importantly, I think it’s a stretch to say that the statement “has an awful lot in common with fascism.” That seems like the lazy and hyperbolic way of pointing out its problematic framework.

What I am creeped out by, as someone who still identifies as conservative, is the track records of many of the signatories. Lots of these people are figures I once respected but now don’t, or figures for whom I never had any. I do not want R.R. Reno, Victor Davis Hanson, Julie Kelly, Roger Kimball, Charlie Kirk or Liz Wheeler assuming leadership of a conservative movement that is going to be recognized as such by the American public at large. I think that the meat they’d put on the bones of this statement would not wind up serving the values they give lip service to in the more noble sentiments expressed in a few places therein.