It is always gratifying for a student when a teacher compliments his work. That is why I am flattered by Donald Devine’s engagement with recent writings of mine in The American Spectator. Assessing two essays I wrote about a year apart, he reminds us of the importance of a moral vision to sustain republican self-government. Devine contends that the two chief threats to that vision are a small and ineffective cadre of far-right extremists on the one hand, and a much more dangerous “rationalist left” on the other.
Yet it seems to me that Devine is too soft on the broader “nationalist right” I critiqued. In both pieces, I expressed concern that Americans are losing a shared sense of the common good; liberty understood as a merely “neutral” public square is worthless to my mind, but the rise of power-politics also represents a rejection of freedom’s moral vitality. Republican self-government demands citizens share a definite conception of virtue. Sadly, though, the threats to that moral vision are no longer confined to the Left or a tiny corner of the Right—they are all around us, and they demand a response.
Devine and I agree that progressivism presents a grave danger to the American Republic today. And, to be sure, populism has shaken the Washington establishment in certain salutary ways. For example, the Trumpian wrecking ball has begun the deconstruction of the administrative state and fostered a more general willingness to question the conventional wisdom of the governing elite.
While genuine conservatives may well channel elements of this insurgency in productive directions, I worry about the increasingly ideological turn that many of the New Right’s representatives have taken in recent years. The varied forms of “postliberalism” en vogue around the capital have gone beyond critiquing liberalism as a political theory. They now embrace a power politics utterly at odds with the American Founding, sacrificing both liberty and virtue on the altar of ideology. We can see this trend in the utter boorishness of the New Right’s digital influencers, the moral compromises of its elected politicians, and perhaps above all in the intellectual treason of its so-called “thought leaders.” Popularity and power are the ultimate ends of this new establishment.
In the face of this confusion, what is needed most of all is an articulation of conservatism that can meet the concerns of the present moment without abandoning the American political tradition. “The Sacred Rights of Mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in one revolutionary pamphlet. “They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” American institutions are built on the foundation of such natural, and therefore also divine, rights—not ethnic nationalism or sectarian religious doctrines. It is the conservative’s task to interpret and defend those founding principles in the public square.
To do that, it’s important to show just how far the New Right has deviated from our tradition. Its rise represents nothing less than a rejection of the core principles of American conservatism.
Some deviations are relatively benign, such as proposed “family policy” initiatives and tariffs. Though many advocates of these measures cloak them in traditionally conservative rhetoric, they are, in essence, merely right-wing forms of central planning. These tinkerers are enamored of their own brilliance, certain that their own skill and political power can steady society in a rapidly changing world. The true conservative, however, knows that our allegiance to the Permanent Things must have deeper roots than this.
Others are more malignant, such as calls for the persecution of those deemed heretics or even outright military dictatorship. At its most extreme, the New Right is an outright rejection of constitutional politics. It seeks, in the words of Federalist 10, to solve the problem of faction “by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence.” These voices are not interested in conserving the core principles of the American tradition. Instead, they seek to impose a new vision on the people—whether they want it or not.
The throughline of these new styles of right-wing politics is a faith that political and moral problems can be settled through direct coercion and that, if only “our side” controls the levers of power, everything can be set right. This is a dangerous illusion. The New Right rarely pauses to think what could happen once it has dismantled all guardrails and the Left comes back to power with the same expanded authority. Conservatives should be repulsed by this hubris.
When it comes to this faith in power, the broad New Right mirrors the “rationalist left” Devine critiques. The lust for power goes beyond isolated corners of online extremism and permeates a wider movement. As I have written elsewhere, ideology tempts both the Right and the Left with the false promise of a perfect world. Abstract political theories—whether rooted in a vague notion of “equality” or a utopic ideal of the past—are often used to justify the exercise of power beyond its constitutional limits.
This is precisely why the New Right’s impiety toward the American Founding is so concerning. When its members dismiss symbols such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, they dismiss the ideas that animate them as well. Those who look on our national history with contempt, as many postliberals do, will not lead any kind of social or political revival or wrest control away from the Left because, at the end of the day, they are no different from it. Both factions reject the uniquely American expression of Western civilization and seek to replace it with something more aligned with their ideologies.
Devine is correct to suggest that Western civilization’s roots go deeper than the Founding documents. But those documents are the American Republic’s charter of liberty: they are the particular expression of the West’s faith that we have inherited. There is no single, perfect regime we can bring down to earth from heaven, no one constitution that ably secures justice for people at all times and in all places. But our Founders were wise statesmen, and the frame of government they designed, rooted in the Declaration’s transcendent vision of human liberty, is what is best suited for this country and this people. To abandon these documents simply because the Constitution constrains the Right’s power to act as it pleases would be foolish and short-sighted, as I am sure Devine would agree.
Lest we forget, impiety is the sin of ingratitude. In a lecture delivered at the Heritage Foundation during the Reagan Revolution, “The Fraud of Multiculturalism,” Russell Kirk outlined why this Jacobinical spirit is so dangerous for free republics. “A spirit of defiance or biting criticism that may be healthful, when confined to a creative minority, can become perilous if it is taken up unimaginatively by a popular majority,” he wrote. “To the folk who rebel against their patrimony of moral and constitutional order, that legacy seems a burden—when in truth it is a footing. Cultural restoration, like charity, begins at home.” While Kirk was mostly taking aim at the Left, he also criticized contemporaries on the Right who forged radical ideologies of their own. Whatever their political persuasion, those who hate a nation’s past are the worst guardians of her future. Iconoclasm is no way to save a country; what we need is the virtue of love.
But neither can the nostalgic idolatry of “Heritage Americans” rescue our country from the Left. To be sure, we ought to stand firm against progressive distortions of our country’s history, whether we call them “wokeness,” “political correctness,” or “multiculturalism.” Genuine conservatives—that is to say, those without libertarian illusions—have rightly been willing to use legitimate authority to combat such nonsense and reassert the importance of our particular spiritual heritage. But the attempt, however veiled, to rally the Right around some kind of white identity or pride is altogether alien both to conservatism and the wider American political tradition. Bigotry is no virtue. Our aim should not be to stoke ethnic faction or racial grievance, but to defend the common good our Republic was constituted to secure for all citizens.
Important as the preservation of the moral core of republican liberty is, though, it is easy to see how it might descend into a self-defeating moralism. While there is no reason to consider the power-oriented solutions proposed by the New Right, Devine is right to counsel taking their grievances seriously. The fear and anger so many Americans feel comes from a legitimate place, and we ought to seek to understand it. A suspicion toward ideologues and politicos is entirely justified; a contempt for our fellow citizens is not.
For proof that present discontents demand a more serious response, one need look no further than the evident failures of traditional conservatives to take back the Right. At an ideological level, we have seen how the most strident condemnations of antisemitism seem to make the Young Turks of the New Right even more committed to noxious racism. At a political level, the most passionate anti-populists fail to sour the Republican base’s appetite for Trumpian vulgarity. Moralistic haranguing evidently cannot save the youth, let alone the conservative movement.
What is most needed, then, is a recovery of citizenship as a conservative vocation. Across the country, there is a real hunger for a kind of education that reminds us why we ought to love the Republic. The desire is largely found outside of social media. Instead, it is embodied in schools of civic thought at flagship state universities and the rise of the classical school movement. As the University of Florida’s Aaron Zubia said at a recent conference, these “new houses of the humanities” are “built on piety, love of one’s country, and civilizational continuity.” Only by recognizing the universal truths at the heart of the West as they are expressed through our particular constitutional tradition can we hope to revive a true sense of what it means to be American.
Yet a retreat into the academy is not good enough. As citizens, we have been entrusted with a high responsibility. Society is not, as Edmund Burke would remind us, a mere commercial partnership or a temporary agreement—self-government is not a game of cards. Conservatives hold, with Burke, that the “great primaeval contract of eternal society” exists “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” We must not only learn what the Founders thought but how they deliberated. Postliberalism as an ideology can never meet that standard. Conservatism has a much better teaching to offer our Republic.
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