Permanence

That, in a nutshell, is what ought to be our first priority

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FreedomWorks is shutting its doors.

President Adam Brandon attributes it to the toxic effects of the introduction of Trumpism into the body politic. FreedomWorks has a noble pedigree, with a chain of antecedents going back to Empower America, which was launched in 1993 by Jean Kirkpatrick, Jack Kemp and other respected conservative leaders. It came into its own as one of the main organizational embodiments of the Tea Party spirit.

But in recent times

Brandon said . . a “huge gap” opened up between the libertarian principles of FreedomWorks leadership and the MAGA-style populism of its members. FreedomWorks leaders, for example, still believed in free trade, small government and a robust merit-based immigration system. Increasingly, however, those positions clashed with a Trump-aligned membership who called for tariffs on imported goods and a wall to keep immigrants out but were willing, in Brandon’s view, to remain silent as Trump’s administration added $8 trillion to the national debt.

“A lot of our base aged, and so the new activists that have come in [with] Trump, they tend to be much more populist,” Brandon said. “So you look at the base and that just kind of shifted.”

This same split was creating headaches in other parts of the organization as well. “Our staff became divided into MAGA and Never Trump factions,” Brandon said in an internal document reviewed by POLITICO Magazine. It also impacted fundraising.

“Now I think donors are saying, ‘What are you doing for Trump today?’” said Paul Beckner, a member of FreedomWorks’ board. “And we’re not for or against Trump. We’re for Trump if he’s doing what we agree with, and we’re against him if he’s not. And so I think we’ve seen an erosion of conservative donors.”

Thus does another force for recognizable conservatism succumb to an enthusiasm for incoherence and personality worship.

There’s still a lot of interest in enhancing the viability of actual conservatism. There’s Precipice, for instance. The Freemen News-letter, where I’m a Senior Freelance Contributor, is about that work. Commentary, National Review and The Dispatch are still reliable delineators of the Narrow Sliver of Terrain.

In some cases, drift - not toward Trumpism, but in the other direction - has diluted the original purposes of some projects. I’ve written before about how Principles First has become somewhat preoccupied with broad appeal at the expense of the tenets it originally put front and center. The Lincoln Project doesn’t seem to be able to take a more elevated view than that of its smart-aleck ads knocking Trump.

I recently taped an episode of the Saving Elephants podcast. It will be available in a couple of weeks; I’ll keep you posted. Host Josh Lewis - one of the good guys; he understands that a lot of the West’s problems go back to Rousseau - started out our conversation with some music-related questions. He asked about my essay “Taylor Swift and the Purpose of Music.” I hope we adequately covered any kind of elaboration of what I said in that piece. I did some vigorous peeling back of the onion there, gong back to what Socrates and Glaucon had to say in Plato’s Republic about what scales were proper and improper for the youth of their ideal state to learn and internalize.

I really don’t know any other way to proceed when it comes to talking about music. There has to be some way to break through the modern mindset which regards music as a tool for validating one’s mood and/or self-identity. As music has become more portable and genres have proliferated over the past century and a quarter, standards for basic seriousness have faded. We now have no kind of arbiter regarding what constitutes good music made with an elevated purpose.

I’m the representative Booomer wherever I go in my interactions with other inhabitants of the Narrow Sliver of Terrain. It was the case in my conversation with Josh. It becomes apparent when I check in with the latest chat among organizers of the New Reagan Caucus, many of whom are my fellow Freemen News-letter contributors.

Now, it’s apparent that these folks have well-burnished chops. They all know about Frank Meyer and fusionism. They understand the nuances that distinguish conservatism from classical liberalism. They know their Tocqueville and their Burke.

But they discovered and embraced their worldview in a landscape in which even basic conventions, norms and assumptions that had defined human existence for aeons were now just one available set of boutique principles among many.

I keep coming back to the June 2022 piece I wrote here titled “On Entering Adolescence During the Tectonic Shift,” about turning 13 in 1968.

The West has had some inflection points before and since, but that was the one that marked the abrupt erosion of the norm of stable two-parent families, the emptying of mainline Protestant pews, widespread doubt about America’s national purpose, the untethering of the arts from any kind of standards, and the coarsening of our customs and language.

Conservatism always had as its mission demonstrating to anyone interested that its principles were impervious to social trends. Free-market economics, the rule of law that has been legislated by sober and thoughtful citizens, and a civilization that prioritizes nobility, beauty, truth and reverence are right in times of peace and war, in times of prosperity and decline, and in spite of any technological advancements.

But even more basic markings of a human life - the aforementioned family, the understanding of what women and men are, the hierarchy and authority that are necessary for liberty and order to coexist - are permanent. Or at least those of us of a certain age were raised to believe.

My younger friends and associates on the narrow sliver have their work cut out for them, because they didn’t have firsthand experience with these things being assumed to be society’s default position.

They’re having to do their defending and persuading in a more abstract way than those of us whose formative years preceded the tectonic shift.

I’d like to think that that’s where I can be of help. I’ve seen common sense and human warmth in action. There was a time when institutions venerated such things.

I may not have a clear idea of what restoration might look like - the best minds of subsequent generations are on the case - but I can provide a picture of a society in which things that are always true and good were valued by most folks. I lived in it.