Peddlers of the ephemeral are wasting our time
Immutable principles are the only antidote to the fate that awaits us if we don't get our heads on straight
Man, it’s tough in late 2020 to make a case for the obvious truth.
I’m not only furious with my former party - the Republicans - for having taken the cult of personality into which it’s been transformed to the level of calling for Georgia’s governor to circumvent his state’s law to overturn its presidential election. I’m also disgusted with it for sullying what ought to be the same clear message Republicans ought to have had for fifty years: handing unchallenged power to Democrats means an irreversible leftward lurch for this nation that finishes off our most basic freedoms and seals the deal on the rot of our culture.
To the foaming-at-the-mouth Trumpist who would respond, “Hey, that’s exactly what our message is! We’re pointing out that George Soros, the Venezuelan government, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, squishy Republicans and Dominion Voting Systems are subverting our foundational processes,” I say: Just. Stop. It. Shut. the. hell. up.
It’s exactly because you have made a caricature out of genuine concern for what progressivism means for the continued existence of a recognizable United States that you have proven yourselves every bit as harmful as progressivism.
Biden has been elected. Any sane, mature American of any ideological stripe ought to have no problem acknowledging that reality - which is exactly the basis from which to begin to make a case for opposing what his administration is going to be about. To deny this cold, hard fact is to squander one’s power to make the case against the Democrat agenda. One concedes the field to those who conflate actual conservative principles with kooky denialism.
There’s been a lot of discussion since 2016 and the onset of Trumpism’s infection of the Republican Party about whether we’ve really had a handle on what conservatism has been about since its modern iteration got underway. It can be a healthy discussion - as long as the Trumpists are told to take a hike. It’s important to take stock of the journals of opinion, the think tanks, the political victories and setbacks, the forms of cultural activism various aspects of the movement have taken and discern what it all distills down to.
It’s not anything too esoteric. It really boils down the good old three pillars, which derived from the fusionism Frank S. Meyer posited. Meyer was seeking a balance between the prioritization of freedom and the prioritization of virtue.
Ronald Reagan used the image of a three-legged stool. I suppose that’s still an effective way of putting it, but he came up with the formulation during the Cold War, and, as we know, much has occurred on the world stage since he did so. As many who reflect on such things have noted, the threat of Communism is what sharpened conservative thinking about liberty - what it is and how to preserve it. The threats to liberty are more diffuse and diverse now, but share a basic collectivism that is exactly what conservatism ought to see itself as the diametrical opposite of.
For that reason, I’ve come up with a depiction of the three pillars, as I call them, that goes thusly:
1.) Free market economics: A good or a service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth. Period. No other entity - certainly not government - has any business being involved in reaching that agreement. Therefore, public-policy inquiries that concern themselves with macro-level phenomenon such as wealth inequality or “fair” wages are not only pointless but tyrannical by definition.
2.) The understanding that Western civilization is a unique blessing to the world: Both the Greco-Roman tradition from which the West has distilled the political structure of a representative democracy and the above-mentioned free-market economy, and the Judeo-Christian tradition from which it acquired an accurate understanding of the Creator’s nature and humankind’s proper relationship to the creator are the two most significant avenues of advancement our species has ever discovered. (And much falls under this point that needs serious discussion at this time, such as the fact that there are only two genders, male and female, and that their is no fluidity between them, and that the family structure of a husband, wife and children thereof is the overwhelmingly normal one and the one most conducive to a happy and prosperous society.)
3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature: Evil is real and always with us. A nation-state seeking a righteous world (such as the United States of America) should only form close alliances with other nations that have demonstrated a track record of common values. Regimes that are clearly tyrannical and / or expansionist should never be appeased. Indeed, foreign policy should be guided by thinking on how to at least eventually remove such regimes as problems on the world stage.
The basic crisis conservatism has been dealing with since the Trumpist phenomenon befell us is that we’ve lost sight of the very notion of a lodestar. The glorification of a loudmouth charlatan isn’t going to cut it. We need something like the above three pillars - at least something with some coherence and a grounding in freedom and virtue.
We need that because Biden most certainly does not represent some kind of “return” to decency, unity and moderation. The joint policy recommendations document that his team and Sanders’s team crafted last summer makes that clear. Like Sanders, Biden is on board with universal pre-K, the expansion of Social Security, and raising the minimum wage. Biden has - quite recently, in fact, since his election - called for the forgiveness of student loans, a move that infantilizes those who have made a choice of their own volition to incur such debt.
Most ominous among the signs of the overall contours of a Biden administration is its signing on to the Great Reset. For some time, the Great Reset was mostly a body of ideas being kicked around by Davos-type pointy-heads, calling for the world to “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions.” It mainly appealed to the big wheels of the World Economic Forum and the United Nations, and CEOs who have gleeful moved their corporations and financial institutions leftward. It’s clearly collectivism on steroids and a blatant erosion of national sovereignty.
And again, in this age of populist and nationalist usurpation of what ought to be the conservative message, derision of globalism translates into protectionism and industrial policy, in direct opposition to the free market that is proven to work wherever and whenever tried. Those trying to get a handle on what to make of it all will conflate what ought to be a proper bristling at Great Reset-type paternalism with “America first” economic policies.
We need real conservatism to be ready to take the field and all we’re getting is wacky and seditious fantasies about suitcases and algorithms peddled by the crudest, most rudderless gaggle of snake-oil salespeople to ever be an influence on American politics.
There is no new definition of conservatism in light of some kind of shifting demographic and economic dynamics. Conservatism, by definition, is concerned with immutable principles applicable to anyone anywhere.
There is no time to listen to peddlers of the ephemeral. The same antagonist we’ve faced for decades would love nothing more than for us to take that path.