We must reject repudiation in all its forms.
Many conservatives, myself included, have recognized the wisdom of a populist turn in our politics. A roused populace was necessary to address the growing illiberalism and sheer unaccountability of woke elites who, for at least a generation, have committed themselves to redefining the theory and practice of liberal democracy. But populism also has marked limits, especially when applied to the realm where principle and prudence, in the high and noble Aristotelian or Burkean sense, must inform action.
Populist anger must be calibrated and channelled so that it does not become self-destructive. The welcome resistance to the progressivist “culture of repudiation,” as the late Roger Scruton so suggestively called it, must not give way to a rival spirit of repudiation on the Right that dismisses our intellectual and political forebears as fools and frauds. “What has conservatism ever conserved?” is both historically illiterate and politically ungrateful.
When the young and activist militants on the disaffected Right reduce Winston Churchill to the status of a dangerous forerunner of neoconservative foreign policy, or see in Ronald Reagan nothing but a sterile libertarianism—ignoring his courage and determination to defeat the scourge of communist totalitarianism, and his eloquent appeals to faith, community, and patriotic devotion to country—or facilely dismiss the pugnacious and brilliant William F. Buckley, Jr. as a RINO and puppet of the liberal establishment, something has gone seriously wrong. These ill-conceived judgments need to be corrected for the sake of truth and for preserving our shared moral and civic inheritance, which is what the Constitution calls our “blessings of liberty.”
Serious conservatives should not only fight woke despotism but also the new pseudo-rightist culture of repudiation at the same time. Indeed, it would be a mistake to imitate the ’60s Left, with its almost pathological fear of upsetting “the kids,” as they were then called. Happily, some young conservatives are rediscovering faith and the deeper wellsprings of Western civilization. They should be encouraged and tutored. This is an eternal imperative, now urgent in our time due to disturbing trends that are more and more apparent in younger generations.
As Eddie LaRow pointed out in a recent insightful reflection at The American Mind, Gen Z has faced a series of troubling events, one after another, ranging from growing up under the thumb of censorious progressive teachers and school administrators to the government’s heavy-handed response to COVID. This has caused young men to increasingly take their bearings from unsavory podcasts and streamers. Legitimate suspicion of politically correct orthodoxies has, in some quarters, given way to a nihilistic suspicion of all inherited truths and judgments. In certain corners of the disaffected Right, “international Jewry” is seen at work everywhere, while the palpable threat of militant Islam, which is visible in the massive persecution of Christians around the world—especially in Nigeria—is all but ignored.
These young souls have been deeply wounded by tyrannical wokeness without ever being exposed, or adequately exposed, to the deeper wisdom on offer from Western civilization or the American civic tradition in republican self-government. Ironically, the disaffected Right is following in the very footsteps of the progressives themselves as they utterly reject their intellectual and political patrimony.
In the face of this creeping nihilism, we must offer them something better. We need to renew the serious thought that grounds and defends the precious goods of faith, family, and nation. Without it, many of the spiritually adrift young will continue to succumb to the false allure of neopaganism and the new pseudo-rightist culture of repudiation. This means that we conservatives must not tiptoe around this spiritual and intellectual crisis that risks morphing into a civic crisis. To ignore it would only exacerbate the situation. It would be a disaster not only for the conservative movement, but, far more importantly, also for the country as a whole.
Conservatives must effectively communicate a spirited regard for liberty, civilization, and human dignity, together with an underlying commitment to moderation rightly understood. The task is daunting, but our times require it, and our resources can fund it.
Perhaps above all, we must avoid the obverse error of what we oppose. Ours is and must be an anti-ideological politics. This means we must appeal to common sense, and to the common sense of the people. However, common sense must have living roots in what Cicero called “right reason” (recta ratio). This displays itself in the two-fold domain of the intellection of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and in the cultivation of practical reason and tough-minded moderation in the political realm. Populism will flounder if the common sense of the people is not renewed at these wells.
Our task, however, is not just intellectual. Liberal democracy, as any number of thinkers and statesmen like James Madison have taught, requires a certain degree of virtue in the populace. Here too we must take seriously the notion of a “virtuous people” (the phrase is Willmoore Kendall’s) dedicated to self-government in the personal and collective senses. It is not just the youth that need conservatism’s permanent truths.
Conservatism rightly understood will always stand in some tension with populism. And that will be magnified especially if the latter loses its connections with what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called in his 1978 Harvard Address “the great reserves of mercy and sacrifice,” the legacy of the Christian centuries that was alive and well in “early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth.”
This is why I think Christopher Long and Thomas Lynch, who recently resigned from the board of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, are wrong for linking a “post-liberal hijacking” of the Right with the recent developments on the disaffected Right that I have highlighted. As Daniel McCarthy has argued at The American Mind, the post-liberals are our allies in the crucial task of tying self-government to a richer and deeper understanding of the human person at the heart of Western civilization.
True, there will be tensions and disputes. But in the battle on the two fronts I have limned here, they can be allies, though we must resist the temptation of some post-liberals to find in the American Founding a “poison pill” inevitably unleashing atomistic individualism and moral relativism. What is needed to make this alliance truly effective is a common commitment to what Tocqueville called “liberty under God and the law,” and a shared recognition that debased liberalism, with its inordinate emphasis on human “autonomy,” has rejected what is best in the liberal tradition itself.
We should follow the example of America’s own thoughtful, sober, and reflective statesmen, who did not completely reject their inheritance after declaring, and then winning, independence from the British. They self-consciously drew on the modern idiom of natural rights without repudiating the reality of a natural moral sense or moral law. They loved liberty but did not endorse radical individualism or a conception of happiness that was inherently hedonistic or relativistic. They cared deeply about honor and self-respect and never succumbed to “Year Zero” thinking, as if they could create the world again from scratch.
For the American Founders, the centrality of consent in the political order did not demand that all human relations be rethought in a radically voluntaristic way. Nor did they conceive of a human and political world where only the state and the individual have ontological reality, so to speak.
As I will argue in a follow-up piece, one can appreciate the serious limits of philosophical liberalism, or important currents of it, without rejecting liberalism tout court. The future we build together must be both liberal and post-liberal. Our task must be to preserve the work of our Western and American forebears by building on their achievements while reconnecting freedom to the larger ends and purposes that inform it and give it life.
