RUTHFULLY YOURS

Let us begin by listening to the progressive vision of America.

The late Todd Gitlin, a leading student activist of the 1960s New Left who went on to a career in academia, declares that America is the fulfillment of the Enlightenment. But, Gitlin writes, “the point is not to celebrate some accomplished Enlightenment with its Declaration of Independence…its Federalist Papers and Constitutional debates,” but to see the American project as “an aspiration, an invitation, a commitment to a process that seriously aims to bring about understandings that do not yet exist.”

Michael Walzer, another major left-wing intellectual of Gitlin’s generation, writes that America is “a radically unfinished society.” The late Richard Rorty, one of the most influential public philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, described the American project as the utopian dream of Walt Whitman and John Dewey. Rorty declares that Whitman and Dewey, influenced by Hegel’s concept of progressive evolution, “wanted…utopian America to replace God as the unconditional object of desire. They wanted the struggle for social justice to be the country’s animating principle.”

This is the shared vision of the progressive  political coalition that includes both the hard Left, with its neo-Marxist oppressor vs. oppressed framework, and the mainstream of the Democratic party.  These forces represent progressive fusionism, its constituent parts working in tandem just as the twentieth-century conservative fusionist coalition worked together politically, despite philosophical differences.

Different elements of the progressive coalition emphasize distinct yet complementary visions of America. All find our nation deeply flawed and in need of transformation.

The hard left tells us that America is (and always has been) an oppressive society.For example, the Organization of American Historians praises the 1619 Project and declares America is “a nation built on slavery, exploitation, and exclusion. Critical race theory provides a lens through which we can examine and understand systemic racism and its many consequences.”

The narrative of the mainstream Democratic party must be more political.  Their argument runs as follows:

America’s past is deeply problematic. But we have great ideals. The core of those ideals is the continuing expansion of social justice to those previously “oppressed” groups: blacks, women, gays, undocumented immigrants and as President Biden noted “transgender rights are the civil rights issue of our time.”

At one level, the fulfillment of those ideals means “equity” — statistical equality among racial, ethnic, and gender groups in all sectors of society.  Such exact statistical equality among groups can never be realized in a free society. Thus, the progressive project is utopian and hostile to liberty. The ideals that it extols are more characteristic of the French Revolution than the American one — more the ideas of Condorcet than of Madison.

Internally, the American Right continuously argues over whether America is an “idea” or a “culture.” If it is exclusively the former, then a good deal of ground is already conceded to this progressive fusionism. If it is exclusively the latter, with no higher grounding principle, then the Right will be no more reliable than the Left.

Charles Kesler gets it exactly right when he states America has both a creed and a culture that work in tandem. Kesler writes:

The American creed is the keystone of American national identity, but it requires a culture to sustain it. The republican task is to recognize the creed’s primacy, the culture’s indispensability and the challenge which political wisdom alone can answer to shape a people that can live up to its principles.

During the years when Republicans promoted global democracy, amnesty for illegal aliens, and mass immigration, the culture–creed equilibrium became unbalanced. Conservatives made a strategic mistake, overemphasizing abstract ideology while downplaying the concrete cultural and emotional aspects of patriotism. James Madison himself in Federalist 49 warned us that even the most “rational” regime is better off with the “prejudices of the community on its side.”

While conservatives embraced the paradigm of a nation based solely on ideas, the progressives who control America’s universities and schools appropriated the concept and filled in the content: bellowing “diversity is our strength.” Meanwhile, Obama skillfully modulated the progressive narrative of American history as the never-ending unfolding of group-based social justice.

Willmoore Kendall was William F. Buckley’s mentor at Yale and an original contributor to National Review in the 1950s. Long before wokeness and DEI, Kendall anticipated some of today’s New Right arguments, declaring:

The question ‘Is Liberalism a revolution?’ can have only one answer. Since it seeks a change of regime, the replacement of one regime by another of a different type altogether, it is, quite simply, revolutionary. … Is the destiny of America, the Liberal Revolution, or is it the destiny envisaged for it by the Founders of the Republic? Just that.

Today, many of us believe that we are not simply in an argument with the Left over policy, but a much deeper conflict over a way of life, a regime conflict, or what Angelo Codevilla called a “cold civil war.” That is, many fear that the Left today, as Kendall warned more than sixty years ago, is a revolutionary threat.

Others on the Right disagree. They say liberals and conservatives share common ideals of liberty and equality, but disagree on how best to fulfill those ideals. They consider talk of regime conflict and cold civil war as exaggerated and unseemly.

They maintain our political disagreements are a family argument between two forms of liberalism: progressive liberalism and conservative liberalism. Yuval Levin asserts we are in a “coherent debate between right and left forms of liberalism.” But, in fact, left-liberalism is illiberal in terms of free speech and racial/gender quotas. The Aristotelian concept of civic friendship is broken. The “resistance” to Trump is not the traditional “loyal opposition.”

America is built on the truth of a transcendent moral order; on natural rights; on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal by nature; on government by consent of the governed; and on a realistic view of an unchanging human nature. The progressive project totally disagrees with all of this. The Left says rights are socially constructed, always evolving, and so-called human nature is infinitely malleable.

Therefore, the progressive project is a total repudiation of the American way of life, both philosophically and practically. It is a revolutionary assault on America: our principles, culture, history, heroes, economic system and Constitution. The Left’s practical policies threaten the American way of life in terms of public safety, societal cohesion, family formation, family stability, employment opportunities, overregulation, reverse discrimination, the destruction of small businesses, and restrictions on speech, personal liberties, and the free exercise of religion.

In light of these circumstances, the two most recent meetings of the Philadelphia Society have addressed the two most important issues facing American conservatism. First, should conservatism be conservative? And second, recognizing that our country was founded in revolution: should we, once again think, in revolutionary terms?

The answer to the first question is no. We should not be “conservative” in terms of disposition, tactics, and strategy. The status quo today has very little in common with the American regime earlier generations fought to conserve.

The answer to the second question is yes. We should think in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary terms because the destructive Left controls the administrative state and has captured most leading institutions of civil society (even the formerly conservative American Medical Association; and remember that the American Bar Association was a pillar of conservatism when it led the fight for the Bricker Amendment to defend American sovereignty in implementing treaties).

When Democrat politicians declare they want to “fundamentally transform the United States,” they admit they are at war with the historic American regime. We must think and act accordingly. As Lincoln wrote, “As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Fortunately, it’s clear that the Trump administration has internalized the concept of a cold civil war. As in all revolutionary periods, it will be a rocky road ahead. But we are headed in the right direction.