What American Conservatism Exists to Conserve by Christopher DeMuth
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/11/what-american-conservatism-exists-to-conserve/
EXCERPT
Have you noticed that almost every progressive initiative subverts the American nation, as if by design? Explicitly so in opening national borders, disabling immigration controls and transferring sovereignty to international bureaucracies. But it also works from within—elevating group identity above citizenship; fomenting racial, ethnic and religious divisions; disparaging common culture and the common man; throwing away energy independence; defaming our national history as a story of unmitigated injustice; hobbling our national future with gargantuan debts that will constrain our capacity for action.
But my program would also address causes of national political disorder in which recent conservative politicians have been fully complicit. This would include returning to a balanced federal budget outside of wars and other emergencies; redirecting federal spending from personal entitlements and income transfers to public goods such as national defence and infrastructure; withdrawing the collective-bargaining privileges of public-employee unions; and instituting a stable currency—not 10 per cent or 5 per cent inflation, nor even the current goal of 2 per cent inflation that quintuples prices in a single lifetime, but 0 per cent.
And my nationalist program would include not only measures that reinstitute the historical tried-and-true but also thoroughly modern innovations. These include universal school choice, which would give all parents the wherewithal to direct resources to the schools they think best for their children, and initiatives to mobilise science and enterprise to dominate China in advanced computation, communications and weaponry and to repatriate production of national essentials such as pharmaceuticals.
This is not a policy manifesto. I have not prepared a PowerPoint briefing for Ron DeSantis or Mitch McConnell. I mean only to suggest that the purpose of conserving the American nation points to concrete actions rather than abstract desiderata, encourages us to be as bold and disruptive as our illustrious conservative forebears, demands that we explain ourselves earnestly to our countrymen, and is necessary to everything else a modern conservative would want to conserve.
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