Why the Right Should Embrace Its Roots

 The United States has faced a growing social malaise over the past half-century. Younger Americans over each subsequent generation have faced higher rates of mental illness, including anxiety and depression. Families are eroding as marriage rates decline, divorce rates rise, and fertility rates now fall below replacement levels. Communities are suffocated by the weight of crime, drugs, and deteriorating community engagement. Patriotism is nearing all-time lows among the American public. The economy has stagnated, particularly for blue-collar workers and rural communities.

This is a predictable conclusion to a Post-War left-wing era. In the aftermath of World War II, and in the outbreak of the Cold War, the American political system definitively shifted from its historic foundation. For the first 169 years, the United States was defined by a political battle between liberalism and conservativism. The conservatives weren’t attempting to preserve a liberal tradition, but one grounded in American nationalism, British heritage, and Christian virtue.

John Jay wrote in the Federalist 2, “I have as often take notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.”

This nationalist view by John Jay was mirrored by President George Washington in his inaugural address, where he said, “The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles.”

President John Adams, in his Defence of Constitutions of Government in the United States of America, provided a clear and pragmatic defense for the continuation of English governance in the American system. “The English constitution is, in theory, the most stupendous fabric of human invention, both for the adjustment of the balance, and the prevention of its vibrations; and the Americans ought to be applauded instead of censured for imitating it as far as they have.”

Likewise, these conservatives fought for the preservation of Christian virtue in the public square. President George Washington wrote in his November 26^th Proclamation that, “It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor.” His successor, John Adams famously wrote, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenue, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Collectively, these conservatives, these titans of America, formed the Federalist movement prior to the Constitution’s ratification, and later the Federalist Party. They were opposed by the side of liberalism, led by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Edmund Randolph, and cleaving to the liberal views of John Locke, formed the Republican Party (later dubbed the Democratic-Republican Party).

This battle between conservativism and liberalism, empirical traditionalism and rationalism, nationalism and radical individualism, dominated the American landscape for more than a century. After the Federalist Party collapsed in 1816, and the Democratic-Republicans shattered in 1824, the conservatives would form a successor in the National Republican Party, while the liberals would form the Democratic Party. Within a decade the National Republicans would form yet another conservative faction, when it merged with the Anti-Masonic Party, to form the Whig Party. Finally, the Whig Party, in its dying years, coalesced with the Free-Soilers and American Party to form the modern Republican Party.

From 1854 to 1901, the Republican Party was the bulwark of conservativism, defending economic nationalism, national immigration policy, Christian virtue, and Anglo-American heritage. A fateful bullet and the rising progressive zeal led the Party astray for nigh on two decades, before finally it returned to its roots in 1920 with the election of Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding. The Great Depression and the outbreak of World War II rocked the party to its core and led to an ill-advised severing of its roots as it clung to Lockean liberalism in the post-War order.

Likewise, the Democratic Party, the party of liberalism from Jefferson through Jackson to Grover Cleveland, gravitated away from its roots in 1896, when it nominated progressive William Jennings Bryan. Progressivism finds it roots not in the liberalism of Locke, Montesquieu, and Price, but rather in the Franco-German socialism of Hegel, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Owen. While the liberals pursued freedom as the ultimate end, the Socialist pursued egalitarian ends, wherein nature was subverted to the will of mankind to ensure equality of opportunity, as in the case of Saint-Simon, or in overcoming an antithetical relationship between oppressors and the oppressed, as in the case of Hegelian Dialectics.

The Progressives faced two separate internal divisions that can still be seen today. On one side, you have the technocrats, in the mold of Saint-Simon and Woodrow Wilson, who believed that the economic, political, and cultural system need not be discarded, only radically restructured to ensure fairness and equality of opportunity. The game board needed to be reset to undo all past injustice. From there, a bureaucracy of technical experts should be empowered to administer the lives of the people within the polity.

This is a view that is antithetical to the Anglo-American tradition of constitutional governance. Woodrow Wilson, in his The Study of Administration (1887) critiqued the limitation of authority. He wrote, “There is no danger in power, if only it be not irresponsible. If it be divided, dealt out in shares to many, it is obscured; and if it be obscured, it is made irresponsible.” In this mold, the Wilsonian Progressives seek to maintain the status quo, by pursuing a Bismarckian policy agenda, wherein large social programs are provisioned by taxpayers, large bureaucracies are crafted to closely watch producers and consumers, and the legislature is mitigated to ceremonious matters of constitutional inconvenience. These progressives tend to favor incrementalism, slowly boiling the waters so that the public does not aggravate at the change.

On the flip side of the Progressive coin are those that adhere to the Proudhon-Marxist axis that disputes the very legitimacy of the system and agitate for its destruction, in hopes of a utopian replacement. These individuals care not for specificity, only action, and only that action which contributes to the destabilization of society. These are the louder voices on the Left and the ones who are given more media attention, though their numbers remain in the minority compared to the Wilsonian majority.

The problem with the Right’s abandonment of its conservative roots for a new liberal worldview is that liberalism is destined to fail within reality. In the ashes of its consequences individuals naturally agitate for purpose. When individuals feel harmed and lack purpose, they will become spiteful towards the system, and this is the seed that sprouts into progressivism. Conservativism offers purpose, liberalism rejects it.

The main problem with liberalism is that it not grounded in reality. It is predicated upon human reason, and more specifically, the unfounded belief that humans, through reason, can ascertain universal axioms. The ultimately conclusion to this reason is that humans are inherently free by their nature and the preservation of that freedom is an imperative good. The greatest end for the individual is freedom. The primary end of society is to protect that freedom. This freedom dictates that all interactions and obligations be founded upon consent, hence the idea of the “consent of the governed”.

None of this is grounded in reality. Humans are not equal by their nature. Humans upon birth are actually highly unequal with other humans. Babies are weaker, less wise, less knowledgeable, than adults, while teenagers and young adults lack the wisdom and understanding of those with more years under their belt. We are all different in our physical strengths, our mental acuity, and our personal preferences. Likewise, we are not born naturally free. Children are beholden to their parents because they are reliant upon their parents for survival. Even as adults, humans are not naturally free. We are enslaved internally by inclinations and impulses, and externally by duty. We crave purpose and we find that purpose in serving others, in other words, by subverting our own desires to the interest of others.

Humans are not born as islands in a sea of chaos. Rather, we are born into a hierarchy of mutual loyalty. We are born to parents that we didn’t choose or consent to, but are loyal to until given a viable reason to cease doing so. Likewise, we maintain loyalty to siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, and grandparents. We choose and cleave ourselves to additional family through marriage and childrearing. We partake in communities and in the broader nation. We do this because our family, our community, and our nation are an extension of ourselves. We share common traits that define who and what we are as people.

Freedom as an end negates any form of impairment on that freedom. Foremost of these impairments is duty. We all have a duty to honor our parents, we have a duty to support our family, raise our children, support our community, and defend our nation. We accept this duty because we accept that each of these institutions, family, community, and nation, are all higher than us. That they existed prior to us, and will continue to exist after us. We honor our parents because we hope to one day be honored by our children, as part of a generational duty to pass down family traditions. We serve our community and our nation, because they shaped who we are, and because one day we will be leading voices within those communities and within the nation, and we wish to ensure that they remain strong for our children.

When you eliminate this sense of duty, you leave the individual with no sense of purpose, and so they cling to the only thing they can, materialism. But material possessions or experiences cannot satisfy the soul, and the result is a slow erosion of the basic institutions that have provided fulfillment to human beings for thousands of years, the family, the community, the nation, and the church. You leave entire generations lost without purpose and with an economy that becomes warped to meet the obsession with individual freedom and material satisfaction that it begins to undermine those very institutions. This is why liberalism fails.

Conservativism isn’t just about conserving everything, or resisting change at all costs. Conservativism isn’t predicated on universal precepts like liberal rationalism. Instead, it acknowledges that human reasoning is flawed, and that humans themselves are fundamentally flawed. Therefore, we need institutions to regulate us to minimize our vices and nurture our virtues. Those institutions should be examined throughout history to ascertain their merit and if found to be effective should only be rejected upon heavy scrutiny. When a vital and historically sound institution is discarded though, a conservative wouldn’t be slow to its restoration. In other words, a conservative doesn’t despise change, he distrusts changing institutions that have been proven successful over generations and centuries through empirical analysis. He cares for the living wisdom of society over youthful reason.

The United States was grounded in this conservative doctrine for nearly two centuries, and it safeguarded our vital institutions and helped flourish our society. It built the world’s largest economy and served as the basis for the abolitionist movement. It raised the generations that defeated Fascism and Nazism, and rescued the Pacific theater from Japanese imperialism. In a time where Americans are feeling lost, angry, and without purpose, conservativism is the solution. In a chapter of American history wherein we are closer than ever to the dangerous whims of socialism, conservativism offers a defense that liberalism cannot muster. The political right should reconnect with its roots and be the force that Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Jay created.