He referenced these figures with very little context. Viewers were led to believe that they were simply insightful men who recognized early on many of the defects of liberal governance. Though these thinkers were indeed critical of liberalism, it was imprudent to recommend them to a general audience without first providing caveats about the serious defects in their work, especially the antisemitism of Bonald, the conspiracy theorizing of Billot, and the authoritarianism of Cortés. If he was unwilling to supply this background, Deneen, in my view, should not have recommended these thinkers. If he insisted on raising them anyway, Bishop Barron should not have included this part of the interview.

When I raised these concerns on X, Deneen accused me of trying to “cancel” him as an antisemite like, he believed, Yasha Mounk had attempted to do in the past. One could reasonably suspect that Deneen made this accusation to deflect attention from his dubious recommendations, and in a sense, it worked: what followed was a heated debate about antisemitism and cancel culture. However, Deneen neglected to address my core concerns. Was he aware of how deeply problematic these thinkers were? Does he have a reason to recommend them to Bishop Barron over, say, Edmund Burke? He did not say. To my knowledge, he still has not (though I cannot investigate the matter for myself, since Deneen blocked me on social media).

If Deneen is unwilling to give important background on the writers he recommends, someone ought to do so. This article, accordingly, will review the three figures in question. Bonald was one of the architects of modern French antisemitism. He condemned the French Revolution not only for its tremendous violence and waste but also for the emancipation of the Jews, who he thought should remain in ghettos until their conversion to Catholicism. Billot belonged to the antisemitic monarchist party Action Française, and was a major opponent of the Modernist Heresy in France. His strident opposition to Modernism eventually overwhelmed his sense of ecclesial responsibility, leading him to defy the pope he once called on others to obey. Finally, Cortés advocated dictatorship as a solution to parliamentary disagreements and the formation of political parties opposed to the Spanish monarchy. This recommendation was deeply troubling, and it also did not work, as the Spanish went through strong man after strong man until Francisco Franco died in 1975. To highlight one of these figures would be an honest mistake. Three looks more deliberate.

Bonald and “Sur les Juifs”

Louis de Bonald (1754-1840) was a French anti-revolutionary thinker. His most famous works in English are compiled in The True and Only Wealth of Nations. In the titular essay and others, he argues that true wealth comes from an established hierarchical order rooted in land ownership of the aristocracy, the indirect role of the Church in French lawmaking, and the preservation of the family. The Industrial Revolution had changed this order for the worse. Put simply, Bonald viewed the Industrial Revolution and its consequences as a disaster for the human race. He approaches the subject with a characteristically reactionary frame of mind. Back in the old days of agricultural estates, there was peace, but the industrial order had ushered in a new age of social unrest.

The cause for this unrest, according to Bonald, was the emphasis on production and efficiency over the higher things in life. Economists like Adam Smith, he believed, treated productivity as superior to virtue, and nations adopting the Smithian frame would rapidly achieve productivity at the expense of virtue. Vice would then climb, giving rise to conflict. The old aristocracy was powerless to stop this because it had been unseated by a new class of merchants who exemplified what he called the “triumph of the small mind,” preferring administrative rules to personal relations.

Bonald seemed to blame Smith for the collapse and partial dissolution of the aristocratic classes during the French Revolution. He never quite established the connection between the two, however. Moreover, there is little in Bonald to account for the incredible good Smith had observed in Scotland. The emergence of trade and markets had improved dramatically the quality of life among ordinary Scots, although aristocrats, like Bonald, had reason to lament the decline of monopolies that had once sustained them. It is no wonder, then, that he would see the rise of “new men” as an encroachment on his position. 

This is not the most unsavory of Bonald’s views. His “Sur les Juifs,” as yet untranslated into English, is an antisemitic conspiracy theory published in 1806 in the Mercurie de France, in which he ties the principles of the Revolution to the emancipation of the Jews, saying, “The Assembly provisionally declared the Jews to be active citizens of the French Empire, a title that—in consideration of the newly decreed rights of man—was then regarded as the highest honor and blessedness to which a human creature could aspire.” The original cause for its publication was a controversy over the economic position of Jews in Alsace. Responding to the Revolutionary emancipation of French Jews from harsh antisemitic laws, Bonald declared it to be not just a scandal but a threat to the survival of the French nation. Like the emancipated Black French slaves, Jews, for Bonald, were parasites on the French way of life and an alien class of people. As he said: 

If the Jews had been spread throughout France, united among themselves like all who suffer for a common cause, and on good terms with foreign Jews, they would have made use of their wealth to acquire vast influence in popular elections and then used their influence to acquire greater wealth. I believe that up to now, more focused on wealth than on power, they have partially carried out such a scheme by employing their capital in large acquisitions.

The Revolution, according to Bonald, was “always friendly to the Jews” and allowed them to engage in usury that had despoiled much of the French gentry. Their emancipation was “the enormous and willful fault … in contradiction to laws and morals.” He viewed the Jews as the ultimate expression of Smithian commercial society, noting wistfully how, under the ancien regime, they had rightly remained in ghettoes until their conversion. Under emancipation, using industrial, commercial society as their source of power, they instead flourished while the aristocracy crumbled. Bonald believed that French Jews would use commercial success to establish themselves as a new kind of feudal overlord, as he believed they had undone Alsace: 

We would have seen the same legislators, at the same time they were suppressing a feudal nobility that had become irrelevant and harmless, extending all their protection to this new feudalism of the Jews, the real high and mighty lords of Alsace, where they receive as much as a tenth of income as well as seigniorial dues. And indeed, if in philosophical terms feudal is a synonym for oppressive and odious, I know of nothing more feudal for a province than eleven million in mortgages owed to usurers! 

According to Michele Battini, 

Bonald began the propaganda campaign against the Jews of the French Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, which soon led to grave limitations on the legal equality and citizenship rights of the Jews. This was the new paradigm that arose in those years: the old enemies of Christianity had become equal to all other citizens and in fact constituted a hostile power within the national Christian community; thanks to the democratic guarantees they had obtained, the Jews could now with impunity conspire to use their economic power to conquer political power. As a consequence, the fight against “Jewish” capitalism should have been directed against its main protectors, namely, liberal institutions and the constitutional state.

In short, Bonald’s article in Mercure de France was not a fluke position that one can bracket out of his broader oeuvre. Rather, it formed the core of the conspiracy theory he attributed to figures like Adam Smith, Voltaire, and the Jews; moreover, this conspiracy theory, later known as the “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy theory, dominated reactionary political narratives ever after.

Billot, Maurras, and the Judeo-Masonic Conspiracy

Ex-Cardinal Louis Billot argued against liberalism in his 1921 pamphlet Liberalism: A Criticism of Its Basic Principles and Divers Forms, in which he extensively cites vehement antisemites Louis Veuillot and Charles Maurras (a personal friend). Billot was a Catholic integralist, theologian, a chief opponent of the Modernist Heresy, and a member of the French proto-fascist and antisemitic party Action Française. On a first reading, his pamphlet against liberalism seems relatively free of the antisemitism one would expect from a member of Action Française, but it is visible if one knows what to look for and where to find it. 

A hint is in the English language introduction by Fr. G. B. O’Toole of St. Vincent Seminary (now St. Vincent College). O’Toole introduced Billot’s book with a discussion of the liberty preached by the Church and “Masonic liberty, equality, and fraternity” which were “the veriest caricatures of those sublime ideals to which Catholic Christianity applies the terms.” The mention of Freemasonry might strike the reader as merely odd, since most Americans are not preoccupied with a men’s secret fraternal association best known for raising money for hospitals and being the subject of the National Treasure movie franchise. However, among a subset of especially traditional Catholics, the Freemasons were taken to be part of an international cabal, together with the Jews, to undermine Catholic confessional states. 

Since Bonald’s writing, figures of the French reactionary ideology like Louis Veuillot, Henri Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux, and Édouard Drumont had espoused this theory as an explanation for why the throne and altar were blameless for the start of the French Revolution. Billot uses the same pastoral mythology to explain himself: prior to the Revolution, there was a proper order to French affairs, and the conspiracy that Bonald feared had begun in Jewish cooperation with the Enlightenment liberals, who were later grouped together by Veuillot, Mousseaux, and Drumont into the Masonic Lodge. The public face of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy was, according to these conspiracy theorists, liberalism itself. Liberals promised a life unconstrained by tradition and therefore empowered by personal expression, but these were empty promises meant to conceal the real point of liberalism, which was to set the groundwork for establishing a vast, oppressive state intended to annihilate the Catholic Church. The mirage of liberty was a ruse to trick the people into establishing such a state. 

Billot’s book on liberalism falls squarely within this broader tradition. The term “liberalism” itself refers to the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy in its public efforts to undermine the position of the Church in France. 

The style of Billot’s writing illustrates as much. He speaks of “Liberalism” as a united force with its architects’ true intentions unstated but observable nevertheless in their political ambitions. Liberals may speak of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but what they really want is the power to destroy the traditional Christian way of life, in France and all over the world: 

It was not until the first part of the eighteenth century that infidelity became a real power. Thereupon it is seen to spread with incredible rapidity to every quarter. From the palace to the cabin, it insinuates itself everywhere, it infests everything; it has invisible channels, an action secret but infallible, such that the most attentive observer, witnessing the effect, is sometimes at a loss to discover the means. Through an incomprehensible sort of prestige it manages to make itself beloved by the very ones of whom it is the deadly enemy, and the very authority which it is about to immolate, stupidly embraces it just before the blow. Soon a simple system becomes a formal association, which by rapid transition changes itself into a plot, and finally a grand conspiracy which covers the whole of Europe. …

Liberty is the pretext, liberty is the idol to seduce nations; the idol which has hands and feels not, which has feet and walks not; an inanimate god behind which Satan prepares to reduce the nations to a servitude far worse than that which he had bound the world by means of the material idols of paganism. …

This, then, is the final conclusion of the present article that Liberalism seeks the overthrow of religion, when under the lying name of liberty, it enters the domestic, the economic or political order. 

The careful reader will note that the timing of Billot’s “spreading infidelity”—early eighteenth century—coincides with the founding of the Masonic Lodge in 1717, when it came to France by way of the Stuart exile from England, from the palace to the cabins of ordinary Frenchmen unaware of what was to befall them. As this snippet illustrates, Billot does not substantially engage with liberal ideas but rather seeks to expose them as a grand satanic conspiracy against the Church. To that end, he constantly ascribes to “Liberalism” a conspiratorial agency, treating it as an infernal entity coordinating a host of shadowy actors over a vast number of nations. This is not a serious work, either of cultural criticism or political theory. It is yet another example of reactionary narrative building.

Billot was an influential member of Action Française, as one of its most highly placed and committed allies in the French Catholic hierarchy. He was close friends with Maurras, the founder of the party, who carved out the party’s defining position during and in response to the Dreyfus Affair, a deeply antisemitic effort of the French government to convict an Alsatian Jew and French military officer of treason. (Note that Alfred Dreyfus, the falsely accused Jewish officer, was from precisely the same region of France that gave Bonald fits over French Jews).

Given the party’s origins and Maurras’ own views, it is no surprise to learn that Action Française opposed what Maurras called the “four confederated estates” of Protestants, Freemasons, foreigners, and Jews. When rumors circulated about Pope St. Pius X condemning Maurras and his writing in 1914, Billot intervened with a personal audience with the pope, where he presented a specially bound copy of L’Action française et la religion catholique, to persuade the pope to change his mind. The response of Pius X was that Maurras was “a good defender of the Holy See and of the Church.” 

What did Maurras say in the book that Billot gave the pope? He explained how:

Alas! Liberal, radical, and Masonic Jewish anticlericalism has made enough advances … from the tempters of Louis XVI to certain shady agents during the royalist crisis of 1910—so that it is no longer said that fidelity to Catholicism, that raises certain immediate obstacles to the royalist design, simplifies or facilitates it.

Like Billot, Maurras sees a “spreading infidelity” that moves from palace to cabin under the nefarious direction of shadowy agents. When describing what Action Française had done to thwart the liberals in the Third Republic, Maurras boasts, “Alongside the attacks given to the Freemason [Amédée] Thalamas or the Jew [Henry] Bernstein, who are protected by all the forces of the state, there is a series of campaigns led by Maurice Pujo” against a series of enemies of French Catholicism. Here, Maurras was boasting about the exploits of the Camelots du Roi, a French integralist gang led by Pujo who used violence to intimidate Maurras’ opponents during the Thalamas Affair of 1904. This was the book that Billot chose to give the Holy Father. It is sad that it moved him to spare Maurras rather than condemn him even more emphatically. As Fr. Martin Rhonheimer has written, the popes of this period were not immune to these ideas either.

However, the pope’s successor, Pope Pius XI, was unmoved and condemned Action Française in 1926, four years after Billot’s antiliberal pamphlet appeared in English. The condemnation required all Catholics to leave the party. Many in Action Française, at least initially, resisted. In response, Billot sent a message to Léon Daudet, an Action Française politician, antisemite, and then-future Nazi collaborator, commending them for their refusal. The message was subsequently leaked. Pius XI was furious and demanded Billot rescind his statement. Billot refused. 

In a compromise with the pope, Billot decided to step down as cardinal and retired to private life at an Italian novitiate. So committed was he to the political vision of Action Française that he surrendered his own position in the Church in a kind of misguided martyrdom to right-wing authoritarianism and antisemitism. It was a tragic outcome in light of Billot’s tremendous work in dogmatic theology, but he brought it on himself.

Cortés and Dictatorship

Deneen’s third thinker, Juan Donoso Cortés, was an important politician and diplomat in mid-nineteenth-century Spain. A descendent of the explorer Hernán Cortés, Cortés was a liberal monarchist early in his life, but the anti-clerical nature of the Spanish republicanism drove him further and further right, ultimately pushing him into reactionary political positions after the Revolution of 1848. Cortés was friends with Veuillot, who encouraged him to publish his essays against liberalism and socialism. He also corresponded with Pope Pius IX, and according to R. A. Herrera, the substance of Cortés arguments found their way into the 1864 papal encyclical Quanta cura and the Syllabus of Errors. 

In his essays, Cortés defended dictatorship as the solution to the threat Spanish liberals posed to the preservation of the Spanish monarchy. Drawing from figures like Joseph de Maistre, he staked out a negative view of human liberty. Once emancipated, Cortés predicted, the people would engage in tremendous vice like the kind found during prior nineteenth-century revolutions. The result would be a liberal dictatorship. If one had to choose between dictatorships, Cortés reasoned, the Catholic one was clearly preferable. Out of the three recommended authors, Cortés seems to have the least to say about either Jews or Freemasons. In the case of the Jews, that might be because they had been expelled from Spain in 1492, something that Cortés lamented in a letter to his friend Count Raczynski. 

Cortés adopts a more generic discussion of the French Revolution and its subsequent revolutions. Returning to a now-familiar theme, he details how Spain was once a great, unified nation before the Revolution destroyed everything. Cortés pronounced on December 30, 1850:

Spain was constituted a nation by the Church, formed by the Church for the poor; the poor have been kings in Spain. Those who were tenant farmers held lands perpetually with the lowest rent, in reality, were proprietors. All the religious foundations in Spain were for the poor. The laborers had enough to give bread to their children with the wages they earned working on the glorious and splendid monuments of which Spain is full. And what beggar did not have a piece of bread as long as there was a convent open?

Well, Gentlemen, the revolution has come to change everything.

The pastoral imaginary he describes is simply fiction. Spain experienced instability and war before any modern revolution, as seen during the Reconquista, the Thirty Years War, or the War of the Spanish Succession. The last example is particularly telling. From 1701 until 1714, tens of thousands of Spaniards died or were wounded, while the poor not serving in the armies and navies suffered from limited access to necessities because of low productivity and the cessations of trade. This revolution was hardly the fruit of pernicious modern political ideologies, having been fought over the question of who should succeed to the throne after the last Habsburg king of Spain died from health issues caused by generations of inbreeding. No one was disputing at this point whether Spain should ever have had inbred kings. 

During a speech on January 30, 1850, Cortés claimed that he wanted Spain to have liberty, but that liberty was impossible because of political corruption and popular impiety. Oddly, Cortés insisted that the decline he lamented so colorfully had started as early as Constantine, and that the moral conditions of religion were already quite bad by the time the Church had laid Spain’s foundations. Consistency was not one of Cortés’ strongest suits.

He was reasonably clear on his preferred solution, however. The only real choices he saw were among types of dictatorship. Cortés insisted “that dictatorship in certain circumstances … is as legitimate a government, as good a government, as beneficial a government, as any other. It is a rational government, which can be defended in theory as well as in practice.” He even went so far as to argue that miracles could be understood as a kind of divine approval for dictatorship, to wit, “he manifests His will directly, clearly and explicitly breaking those laws which He imposed on Himself, changing the natural course of events. And when He acts this way, Gentlemen, could He not be said … to act dictatorially?” He concluded with one of his most famous declarations (if anything by Cortés could truly be called “famous”): 

But the question is this: is it a matter of choosing between the dictatorship of insurrection and the dictatorship of government? In this case, I choose the dictatorship of government, as less oppressive and shameful. 

It is a matter of choosing between a dictatorship which comes from below and a dictatorship which comes from above. I choose that which comes from above because it comes from pure and serene regions. It is a matter of choosing the dictatorship of the dagger and the dictatorship of the saber because it is the more noble. 

Why would Deneen recommend such a political thinker to Bishop Barron? Does he favor the installation of a Catholic dictatorship? The history of such efforts is replete with failure, and has also prompted the disaffiliation of untold numbers of Catholics from the Church; the effects are still visible in Europe and Latin America today. It is worth noting, too, that Cortés served as a major influence on Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who adopted Cortés’ view of dictatorship as his own and expanded it in a decidedly antisemitic direction. Schmitt’s decisions are clearly not Cortés’ fault, but the ease of application should at least give a person pause before recommending Cortés, especially since all recent work on Cortés now bundles him with Schmitt. 

Separating the Wheat from the Chaff? 

Deneen recommended deeply flawed critiques of liberalism to Bishop Barron, and he did so without caveats, asides, or any other warning about the unfortunate commitments at the heart of these critiques. Yet, some, including Deneen, have responded to my queries and critiques by calling me “anti-intellectual,” suggesting that I prefer to “cancel” thinkers for having bad arguments instead of salvaging the good ones. Aristotle, after all, is a foundational figure in philosophy, but he also held views on slavery and women that offend contemporary readers. Even the greatest philosophers are wrong from time to time.

Where are these good arguments, though? The “sifting” in the case of these three thinkers badly undermines the very critiques of liberalism that Deneen wishes to recommend. Bonald did not just happen to be an antisemite in his personal opinions; rather, he integrated that antisemitism into an apocalyptic vision anticipating the final triumph of liberalism. To “sift” here means to leave Bonald’s criticism in the dust heap of history where it belongs. Billot was not just a casual friend of Maurras’s but a committed member of Action Française whose commitment to antisemitic conspiracy theories framed his political views, and ultimately destroyed his clerical career. Cortés saw dictatorships as the necessary and inevitable response to liberalism, so his advocacy of dictatorship was central to his critique. 

The question one must raise at this point is, “Why these three?” What is it about them that Deneen found so appealing? I cannot answer this question, but I can at least raise it. There is much to critique in contemporary liberalism, but Jewish emancipation from repressive laws is surely one of the pieces we should keep. Some historical traditions are worth recovering, but not organized antisemitic parties. Liberals can make mistakes, but they are right to call for a free government of equal citizens.

Deneen has attempted in the past to avoid the antisemitic, conspiratorial angle by “structuralizing” liberalism as a social force rather than an instrument for nefarious conspirators. With this foray into reactionary European thought, Deneen seems to be undoing his own work. For the sake of his own arguments, he should recommend better critics than these three.

Hence, my opposition stands. Deneen should not have recommended Bonald, Billot, or Cortés, but at the very least he should explain more clearly why, despite everything I have outlined, he thought them worthwhile. It is abundantly clear that these thinkers are ill-suited to critique contemporary American political problems or those facing liberal theory. It is up to Deneen to show that antisemitic conspiracy theorists and defenders of dictatorship are worth reading.

The post Into the Reactionary Abyss appeared first on Law & Liberty.

What does a university president do? First, the president raises money. Second, the president is the face of the university. Whenever there is a problem, she is the one who appears on television, meets with faculty, and takes calls from donors and important alumni. Presidents are not the final authority on most things, and they almost never handle student or faculty controversies the way some conservative commentators seem to think they do. A university president is doing her job when she is raking in the cash and representing the university well. In the end, Gay was doing neither. While Harvard was never going to close, she had upset enough donors that she was, on balance, a problem rather than an asset for fundraising. She had put on a bad face for the university, starting with her December 5 appearance before the Committee on Education & the Workforce alongside Liz Magill, former president of the University of Pennsylvania.

Magill stepped down a mere six days after the appearance. Only a few months before, Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned from Stanford University after the discovery that he had misrepresented his research. All these resignations have two factors in common: money and prestige.

The Prestige Economy

Money and prestige are the two currencies of higher education. They are related but distinct. For a university, money is not just tuition revenue, but also grants, donations, and endowments. A university that relies entirely on tuition is poor and, in this climate, likely to close. Grants are discrete allocations of money for particular research or teaching roles, such as those given by the National Science Foundation or the Ford Foundation. Donations are usually from wealthy individuals with specific intentions attached to them, such as to pay for a new dormitory or fund a new music school. Endowments are collections of funds that the university invests that can be used for a rainy day or a major expansion.

Prestige is difficult to define, but it requires a good reputation combined with highly selective admissions. Universities can acquire good reputations by graduating excellent students, but they can also acquire them by attracting the sons and daughters of elites. The latter often wins one the title of a “finishing school,” but finishing schools still deal with elites in ways that less prestigious institutions simply do not. Contemporary elite universities do both—mixing incredibly talented students with scions of the upper crust. 

Prestige relates to money in that prestigious schools attract more grants and donations, because of their excellent students and also the eagerness of wealthy donors to have their children admitted. As a result, these institutions can spend money on fine arts programs, more faculty, better student services, and better facilities. Low-prestige universities often have to focus on budgets, which may mean opting for low-prestige signals like merging departments or relying on contingent faculty.

Over the past few years, I have become increasingly baffled at how little of this conservative commentators understand. Conservatives often joke about the irrelevance of higher education by quoting Sayre’s law, “The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Universities house scholars, whose work is both in research and the formation of students. If conservatives have no place in higher education, there will be no conservative scholarship and very few conservative students. Indeed, the falsehood of Sayre’s Law is evident in the intensity and coverage of the Magill and Gay fiascos. Conservatives understand that there is something at stake here, but they do not understand what it is. Let me explain.

Car Dealers vs. New Dealers

The source of this ignorance is what I call the “Car Dealer vs. New Dealer problem.” Most American conservatives are middle class or aspire to the middle class, and, as a result, share a “car dealer” view of the world. The car dealer is a successful business owner. He is usually one of the wealthier people in town, and he makes other people rich too—by advertising on local media, hiring employees, and investing in local enterprises. To ensure success, the car dealer must constantly manage finances by finding new investment opportunities and cutting losses. That means gathering market data, firing underperforming staff, and seeking out innovation for increasing sales. The car dealer provides for the common good of those around him because of self-interest, and he assumes that others do the same. This worldview could not be worse for succeeding in higher education. Why is that?

Car dealers cannot commit to anything in the long term. Short-term losses are signals to the car dealer that it is time to pull up stakes and minimize losses, and the costs imposed on those affected are simply part of how the world works. This mentality is what often prevails among American Christian higher education institutions. If we view higher education through the car dealer paradigm, education becomes a service for sale, while students are the consumers, administrators the management, and faculty the labor. Under this model, the primary source of income is tuition, so tuition dictates low-prestige education that diverts the college away from its mission. Meanwhile, faculty in prestige-generating majors are sidelined, encouraged to retire, or downsized.

Most conservative colleges are Christian liberal arts colleges, many of which are struggling to stay afloat. At these struggling American Christian colleges, the majors in greatest demand are primarily in education, business, and nursing—the fields that appear to have the readiest application to real-world employment. Hence, car dealer administrators will divert ever-dissipating resources toward these high-cost programs, often at the expense of the core liberal arts disciplines that are central to the stated mission of the college. Because leaders at Christian colleges do not coordinate decisions, they all make these same decisions at the same time, meaning that they are now fighting over the same students, which in turn means no one gains the enrollment bump they expected. Moreover, students in these majors often graduate into fields with solid employment possibilities and lower salaries. (A notable exception is nursing—although nursing is in greater demand outside of the areas where most Christian liberal arts colleges are.) I am regularly surprised by how little incoming students and their parents know about the demand for conservative graduates to work in prestigious, high-earning positions that would enable them to live religious lives. In my field of political science, the best guess students and parents have is law school, but they know nothing about think tanks, policy shops, staff work, or consultancy work. This universe simply does not exist for them.

Upon perceiving the college as a short-term loss, car dealers jump ship and move on to other, better opportunities but only after paying themselves handsomely for their failure. The faculty can do nothing about the remaining administrators (also paying themselves handsomely), and hence, are the ones on the receiving end of cost-saving measures such as department closures, canceled tenure lines, benefit cuts, and salary freezes. The faculty are not the ones responsible for the poor administration of the university, but they bear all the costs, along with the students who will lose opportunities to learn. Faculty have few opportunities for exit because of a bad job market provoked in part by the number of American Christian colleges and universities that are experiencing this problem. Even if a professor manages to exit one struggling institution, there is a good chance he will just end up at another one. Anyone who has run a search committee in the past couple of years will have seen many applications from associate and full professors writing pleading requests to get out of a near-bankrupt institution that blew the endowment on a boondoggle four years and two presidents ago.

New Dealers do things differently. They are not normally Christian or even religious (unless one counts Wokeness). This gives them an advantage because they can turn to government money for long-term development of their institutions without concern for church/state separation. This advantage is one I will not focus on, but it is worth noting, since securing government funding was the starting point decades ago for proponents of the original New Deal.

New Dealers focus on institution-building in the long term. According to the New Dealer approach to higher education, education is formation, and students are investments, administrators patronage appointments, and faculty the face of the institution. Under this model, donors are the primary source of income. 

The New Dealer institutions secure donors by investing prior gifts into prestigious ventures that draw in more competitive students, foundation gifts, and faculty. The nominal tuition is not a source of real income; rather, it is a signal of the value attending the institution provides. In fact, some wealthy, prestigious universities could do away with tuition altogether, but there is no reason to give up this revenue stream. The students become future donors who fund the prestige of the university, and they are formed in a way that integrates students into high-prestige placements that make it easier for them to earn salaries to make such donations possible. All the while, New Dealer institutions hire grant writers to work with faculty to procure research grants that then become an additional basis for prestige. That, in turn, draws in more competitive students (or, as the institutions see them, future high-prestige graduates and donors). These students then work with faculty in the projects these grants fund and thereby prepare them not only for their field but also in the methods for procuring resources to work in the field.

The key to the New Deal approach of higher education is recognition that there are two economies at work. There is the financial economy and the prestige economy. The financial economy of the institution serves the prestige economy, and the prestige economy multiplies the financial returns at a much higher rate than the car dealer approach. There is an upper bound for what any institution can charge for tuition, but no such limit on donations from loyal alumni. 

For example, assume that a university has 1,000 students and applies a sticker price of tuition and board at $20,000. At full enrollment, then, the university pulls in $20,000,000. However, few students will pay that amount, as admissions needs to lower prices to compete with capable students. The rate at which a university lowers the tuition is called the “tuition discount rate.” Many conservatives like to point at sky-high tuition and mock it as a poor value for the money, but this mockery reveals a fundamental ignorance: no one pays the sticker price except, perhaps, foreign students, who are often wealthy or receive subsidies from their home country. The tuition discount rate can vary from institution to institution but can be as high as 40% or 50%, meaning that this $20,000,000 is never realized. Institutions must bid down their tuition to draw in students, meaning that the tuition necessary to sustain the institution is rarely enough given the fixed costs that come from running a college or university. The focus on tuition is therefore a deeply mistaken one.

Car dealer institutions have sought to increase student count by moving online. The problem here is that online courses are prestige killers. To go online, moreover, is to give up on the idea of student formation, treating them primarily as a source of income. Some online programs are useful, especially in the mathematical and computational fields that are conducive to online instruction. There is a problem, though; most Christian colleges are not engineering schools. Hence, the move online usually signals that the school is in financial trouble while also guaranteeing that it will remain so because of the tremendous loss of prestige. Other online programs are useful for professionals who need to continue coursework to keep their licenses. In these cases, however, students are less interested in the community and formation of college life, since they are older and established. Moreover, online markets are already matured, with key institutions like Liberty University dominating the market. The opportunities here are too limited.

Prestige, on the contrary, signals not merely a return on investment but membership in a respectable class of educated people with a purpose in life. For secular New Dealers, this amounts to piously woke experts joining the policy work, non-profit, management consultant, and investment bank positions. For Christian colleges, prestige would obviously look different, pertaining not only to things of this world but also of the next. And alumni support would not consist merely of money, but also in service to the institution’s mission. Christian colleges rightly care about the faith and formation of clergy, as well as preparing the laity for their roles as parents, aunts, uncles, and caretakers to the least among us. Even though these institutions would necessarily take a different approach, they cannot do without prestige in some form. For this to work, it would mean developing a separate conservative prestige culture, at least in the short term, as progressives possess a stranglehold on what already exists. Donations, then, should be to shoring up Christian institutions to pursue less tuition-driven programs in favor prestigious ones in law, economics, and theology to draw would-be conservative elites to work in conservative elite institutions. The broader vision of this is too broad for this article, however. 

Is a Prestigious Conservative University Possible?

The car dealer is good at finding deals, so why won’t he pick up the prestige approach of the New Dealer? There are several answers. The most defensible reason is a real concern that adopting the New Deal approach amounts to abandoning the college’s religious mission. After all, some mid-century religious colleges did precisely this, such as Emory and Duke. But those examples may not be as pertinent as they first seem. Those institutions were often theologically liberal and simply unconcerned about losing their religious identity and mission. That does not have to be the case for contemporary Christian colleges. 

Another reason the car-dealership university does not see the value of the New Dealer approach is that it is simply unable to engage in the long-term institution-building necessary to follow this plan. These are the colleges likely to close. For them, it’s simply too late. A worse reason is simply that no one in the college leadership, whether in administration or on the board, has any idea that the New Deal approach exists. The worst reason is that the car-dealer president has purely mercenary motives for taking over a Christian college—to pay himself until he is fired. These presidents are the result of college board members at Christian colleges having no idea what they are doing. They do not know what they are doing because none of them are academics, and they do not want to listen to academics because they are merely labor, and ideologically and religiously suspect labor at that. Hence, they do not learn and do not want to learn from their mistakes.

The American higher education landscape is largely divided between two types of institutions: struggling mission-driven or formerly mission-driven colleges trapped in demographically shrinking parts of the country, and high prestige, secular colleges and universities sustaining themselves on tuition, alumni donations, foundation grants, and interest on endowments. This state of play is not inevitable; it is not the result of external social forces like liberalism, late-stage capitalism, or some other nefarious Hegelian geist. No, the conditions of Christian higher education are the result of leaders in Christian higher education. They might not have intended the aggregate outcome, but their collective decisions have produced it all the same. 

Tessier-Lavigne, Magill, and Gay resigned because they threatened both the short-term money and the long-term prestige of their institutions. The latter is the much greater harm, as prestige exists in the opinions of persons rather than in the cash at hand. As Helen Dale argued recently, holding onto prestige is difficult, and losing some increases the probability that one will lose it all. For a month, Harvard University was best known as a place where (not for the first time) Jewish students were unwelcome. Gay’s resignation will likely put that to an end, but even this is not certain, as we await her replacement.

The likely result will be that the donors who sat on the sidelines will resume their annual giving, and grants will continue to flow into the faculties and graduate students at these universities over those of less prestigious conservative Christian schools. Whoever replaces Gay will not be, on his or her own, enough to change an entire institution, meaning that this money will continue to be wasted except insofar as it might help secure the individual conservative donor greater access to elite admissions, leaving conservative higher education the declining market share in educating future phlebotomists. As important as they are to health care, they do not run the country. 

The post The Economy of University Prestige appeared first on Law & Liberty.

There are three reasons. The first is a misreading of voter analysis immediately after the 2016 presidential election, one that National Conservatives have refused to correct even after new data revealed a stable alignment within parties. The second is advancing an issue set that simply does not work for would-be Democratic voters or for conservatives outside the National Conservative milieu. The third reason is Trump himself, who has proved too divisive to be a bridge-builder between Democratic and Republican factions. This essay examines each of these problems in turn.

The Empty Quadrant Fallacy

In June of 2017, Lee Drutman published an article based on data from the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group detailing a key graphic for National Conservatives, one that illustrated the now famous “empty quadrant.” Drutman divides the American voting electorate into four quadrants. The X-axis shows the spectrum from economic liberalism to economic conservatism. The Y-axis shows the spectrum from social liberalism to social conservatism. Fully 44.6% of voters are found in the bottom left of the graph, meaning that they hold both economic and socially liberal views. Drutman calls these the “liberals,” and they vote for Democrats. The upper-right quadrant contains 22.7% of the voters, and these are Drutman’s “conservatives,” who vote for Republicans. The upper left of the graph contains 28.9% of voters, who are economically liberal but socially conservative. Drutman calls these the “populists,” and their votes are swing votes. The bottom right—those who are economically conservative and socially liberal—are what Drutman calls the “libertarians,” and they make up just 3.8% of voters. The joke among National Conservatives was to say all these people work for AEI.

Forming what Matthew Continetti calls “the left of the right,” National Conservatives want to appeal to those in the populist quadrant. In their view, the libertarian quadrant is empty, yet Republicans spent much of the Obama years wishing it were not, with Romney infamously confessing that he “likes to fire people” and:

There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what … who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims. … These are people who pay no income tax. … and so, my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

For National Conservatives, Romney simply wrote off the populists and lost because he had no one else to persuade. Conservatives were already voting for him, but they were too few. Liberals will never vote for him. Yet Romney campaigned on entitlement austerity, pressing the War on Terror, and a pro-immigration stance that appealed only to the Republican donor class and Washington think tanks. The party obtusely built itself around the lonely few populating the otherwise empty quadrant.

This is the empty quadrant fallacy. National Conservatives want to believe that the populist quadrant is filled without would-be Republican voters who would gladly move right if only fusionism were kicked to the curb. What makes this a fallacy is that many voters in that quadrant vote for Democrats because they like the Democratic Party, and express views directly contrary to the principles of National Conservatism. Most importantly, they hate Trump.

Drutman’s analysis leaves out the issue of race. This is not as such to his discredit; Drutman did not intend for his analysis to become essential to the playbook of an insurgent ideology that did not yet exist when he published his findings. Yet, if one looks at another report, this time from the Pew Research Center, one finds that the so-called “populists” are not the vast, untapped source of working-class votes that National Conservatives believe them to be. Three months after Drutman’s analysis came out, Pew published this much more detailed analysis of the 2016 voting population. Their conclusions are less favorable to the future of National Conservatism.

Tracking the Populists

The study broke down Republicans and Democrats along a spectrum of reliability as voters. In a rank ordering of voters, starting with those most likely to vote for Republicans, Pew listed Core Conservatives, Country First Conservatives, Market Skeptics, and New Era Enterprisers. In a similar listing of Democrats, they identified Solid Liberals, Opportunity Democrats, Disaffected Democrats, and the Devout and Diverse. Out of the total range, 45% of those listed are on the Republican spectrum. National Conservatives are a combination of Country First (6%) and Market Skeptics (12%), who combined represent only around 18% of this 45% of Americans who vote Republican. Internal to Republican politics, the two oppose the Core Conservatives because Core Conservatives have a faith in political and economic liberty that they do not share. The same is true of New Era Enterprisers, who are more non-white and favor immigration. Those two groups combined account for around 29% (Core Conservatives being 20% and New Era Enterprisers being 9%) of the Republican base, meaning that, at least back in 2017, the National Conservative base was much smaller than the more traditional fusionist one. Indeed, the combined National Conservative constituency is smaller than the Core Conservatives alone.

Looking back to Drutman’s populist quadrant, one might ask: who is in it, if Country First and Market Skeptic Republicans are so few? The answer can be found in the Devout and Diverse category of Democrats, a population of politically disengaged, socially conservative racial and ethnic minorities. While they disapprove of business regulations (meaning they might be more economically conservative than even some Market Skeptics), they are also more likely to have financial hardships that lead them to rely on government entitlements. They are also more isolationist, and are the most skeptical of the benefits of immigration, perhaps because they view immigrants as competition for work and benefits.

Is this a natural constituency for realigning the Republican Party in a more populist direction? Well, no. Devout and Diverse Democrats also have favorable opinions of Black Lives Matter and of government doing more to help racial minorities, especially because many of them are African Americans themselves. National Conservatives do not share these views but rather repudiate them, and their constituency among Country First and Market Skeptic conservatives, who are much whiter than the Devout and Diverse. Indeed, given that National Conservatives are very much at odds with the immigration-friendly New Era Enterprise Republicans, and given that this contingent is the most non-white, the obvious commonality among National Conservative leaders and constituents is whiteness. Any inroads the National Conservatives hope to make in the populist quadrant, therefore, would require them to surrender core commitments of National Conservativism on issues like wokeness. If National Conservatives do this, then they are just Democrats. Moreover, opposition to wokeness is the glue that holds otherwise disparate National Conservative elites together, and also gives the movement purchase with conservatives outside their faction.

On racial issues, Country First and Market Skeptics are hostile to the position that more must be done to advance African American civil rights. They do not see racism as a problem and think the problem is more that people find racism where none exists. Devout and Diverse Democrats simply disagree profoundly with these positions, with massive gaps of around 50%. The only matter on which Devout and Diverse Democrats somewhat agree is that discrimination is the reason minorities cannot get ahead, but even there the gap is 20%. Devout and Diverse only somewhat disagree. Country First and Market Skeptics disagree profoundly.

Disaffected Democrats are another contingent in the populist quadrant, and also “majority minority” in composition. According to the study, they have strongly favorable views of the Democratic Party, and their disaffection mainly relates to the operation of the political system more generally. While 60% of the Devout and Diverse disapproved of Trump, 91% of the Disaffected Democrats did. The other data are equally discouraging for National Conservatives. The Disaffected Democrats want Democrats to win, not Republicans, and want Democratic policies, not Republican.

National Conservatives were right to note that the populist quadrant is full. But it is full of non-white Democrats who are often strongly supportive of the Democratic Party. Even in the National Conservatives’ best-case scenario, they are racial and ethnic minorities who reject significant planks of the National Conservative platform. The conclusion one must reach is that the National Conservatives are a minority faction within the Republican Party, with little to offer to Democratic populists. There are several reasons, but the main one is race. National Conservatives are too “white” in their assumptions and priorities.

Party Stability

In 2021, Pew Research Trust published a major update to their 2017 report, reassessing the changes in the party coalitions. Their 2021 report created a category of “Populist Right” that conflates the Country First and Market Skeptics of the 2017 report. Pew’s 2021 analysis is even worse for National Conservatives than the report of 2017, as the share of Populist Republicans in the GOP is a mere 23% out of 100%. However, National Conservatives made inroads with the 2017 Core Conservatives, now called “Faith and Flag Conservatives” who have a favorable view of Trump and believe that the 2020 election was stolen. These make up 23% of the GOP, meaning that the two are a combined 46% of Republicans (Committed Conservatives, 15%, are more fusionist, while Ambivalent Republicans, 18%, are moderates who dislike Trump; the other 15% are classified as Stressed Sideliners, who stay out of debates and do not like Trump). 

The study explains that the Faith and Flag and Populist conservatives agree on Trump, but disagree sharply about everything else: “And there is a cleavage in the coalition around views of the economic system itself: Two typology groups who both hold highly restrictive views about immigration—Faith and Flag Conservatives and Populist Right—differ over corporate power, economic inequality and taxation of large businesses and wealthy individuals.” Even on religion, the two groups disagree, with Populist Republicans showing much less interest in a public role for Christianity than Faith and Flag Republicans. One remaining issue is that, as in the 2017 study, the Populists are the whitest group.

Moreover, the 2021 analysis features unwelcome news for those still hoping to reach out to moderate Democrats, playing on their dissatisfaction with liberal elites. Devout and Diverse and Disaffected Democrats are now broken into two groups: “Mainstay Democrats” and the “Outsider Left.” Composing 18% of the Democratic Party, Mainstays remain skeptical of increased immigration, stress the importance of religion, and dislike blaming structural racism for the economic conditions of minorities. However, Mainstay Democrats also really like the Democratic Party, favor American influence in the world, and want to maintain or increase spending on the American military. Forty percent of Mainstays are African American. There is little National Conservatives can offer them.

Unlike Mainstays, Outsider Democrats do not like the Democratic Party as much. They are also younger, and whiter than Mainstays, and they overwhelmingly think that the economy is rigged against them. This might seem like more fertile ground, but the priorities of Outsiders do not align with National Conservatives at all. They are not religious, and they favor increases in immigration, approve of cutting police budgets, and want to see college education made cheaper or even free. They also do not vote much. While composing 16% of the Democratic Party, only half are registered to vote. 

The biggest liability for National Conservatism is Trump. Both Mainstays and Outsiders strongly dislike him. As the 2021 report says of Mainstays, “They rate Republicans coolly and offer very negative evaluations of Trump (giving him an average rating of 10 [out of 100]). The same is true for Outsiders: 

Weaker attachment to the Democratic Party than other Democratic-leaning groups does not translate into positive attitudes toward Republicans among Outsider Left: Three-quarters say they feel very coldly toward Donald Trump, and just 13% say the Republican Party represents them very or somewhat well.

Therefore, in the four years after Trump’s term in office and after his defeat, the National Conservative constituency has not increased, and they can increase their appeal within the party only by rallying around Trump the candidate. Remarkably, Trump has shown zero interest in them, apart perhaps from John Eastman, whose legal theories about the 2020 election landed Trump in the hot water in which he finds himself today. One searches in vain for evidence that Trump has any intention of campaigning on policies advancing National Conservatism. As ever, his appeals are primarily personal, whether he is bragging about his superior ability to serve as chief executive, or bitterly airing his grievances about mistreatment by the press or Biden administration. As one can see in the graphics taken from the 2017 and 2021 Pew studies, the coalitions for both the Republican and Democratic Parties remain very stable. There is no sign of a realignment. 

Realignment Without Trump?

Earlier in the essay, I observed that National Conservatives would need to drop the issue of wokeness to have any hope of making inroads with the broader constituencies they hoped to integrate into the Republican Party. National Conservatives like Oren Cass and Sohrab Ahmari have nearly done that. While Cass sticks to labor economics, Ahmari publicly condemned the Republican Party as a vehicle for populist politics, yet somehow insisted that Trump would be the best president for Ahmari’s own ideas, even as he celebrated Democratic senators like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren whose social views are diametrically opposed to Ahmari’s pro-life, anti-contraceptive positions. 

Similarly, Gladden Pappin, writing in American Affairs, lamented that the Republican realignment along more European conservative lines had reached a crisis point. Soon after, Pappin moved to Budapest as the inaugural President of the Hungarian Institute of Public Affairs. Pappin and Ahmari are founding members of the Bonum Commune Society and have worked closely together in the past. It is clear to at least some among the National Conservative coalition of elites that their time might be running short. The Republican Party does not seem disposed to move dramatically to the left on economic issues. Failing that, the options seem to be, as with Ahmari, transitioning to the Democratic Party or, as with Pappin, leaving America altogether.

The post The Realignment That Wasn’t appeared first on Law & Liberty.

This argument, of course, is very bad, but it is useful for revealing the frame of mind in which Christian Nationalists and other illiberal religious thinkers perceive the world. Those who might be enticed by such an argument ought to recognize the absurdity of the very concept of a “Protestant Franco,” the tyranny and failure of the historical Franco regime, and the self-radicalized derangement that so many illiberal religious thinkers find themselves experiencing.

As I joked in a podcast earlier this year, the person who would be most horrified at the idea of a “Protestant Franco” would have been El Caudillo por la Gracia de Dios himself. El Franquismo as an ideology was a combination of Catholic integralism, right-wing Carlism (a monarchist party seeking to restore a Bourbon descendent from the line of Don Carlos, Count of Molina), and a Spanish version of fascism called Falangism. The first two elements are expressly Catholic: integralism provided a model of Church cooperation with the state and Carlism provided the ultimate goal of restoring a Catholic monarchy. Falangism was the means of restoration, as it provided the organized military dictatorship necessary to combat the enemies of the throne and altar.

Franco’s legitimacy rested on him being El Caudillo por la Gracia de Dios—the Leader by the Grace of God. Conferring this status was a captive Catholic hierarchy stuck between extermination by the Republicans and submission to Franco. Some were true believers in El Caudillo, but not all. Regardless of the personal opinions of clergy, Franco relied on the blessing of an external, visible Church and regular appearances at Catholic Masses and other ceremonies that emphasized his role as a temporal ruler defending the Catholic Church. The Church had a monopoly on spiritual matters, meaning that Protestants in Spain—unless they were foreigners of some standing—were exposed to considerable risk in practicing their faith.

It is not clear that most varieties of Protestantism could countenance this approach because of the very nature of most Protestant faiths. The closest example one might find is in, perhaps, the long reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who used her supposed authority as the spiritual and temporal sovereign over her realm to hunt down Catholic clergy and laity alike. Another example might be the Kulturkampf of Otto von Bismarck, who wished to wrest Catholics away from their religious institutions and force them into state-run alternatives.

These examples are far removed from the American experience. During the colonial years, establishments fought tooth and nail to retain their monopoly status, but theirs was a losing battle. The strongest case was that of the Massachusetts Puritans, and they went from the Half-Way Covenant of the 1660s to the dissolution of their establishment in 1833. They governed without Ye Olde Sovereigne Chusen by God. Instead, they operated under associations of church members and, eventually citizens of the Commonwealth. Indeed, Puritan political theology seemed to forbid the idea of a “Protestant Franco” altogether, given that the true sovereign over Church and state was God Himself. Reformed ecclesiology rejected episcopal hierarchy in favor of a more “republican” selection, such as by church elders. Puritan co-religionists remaining in England would fight the English Civil War in defense of parliamentary supremacy during the mid-seventeenth century. The Reformed influence on English republicanism was still strong enough for King George III to agree with his advisor, Sir William Jones, that the American Revolution was a “Presbyterian War.”

As for colonial Anglicans, they relied on overseas administration since they lacked a bishop. One major cause (among many) for New England’s agitation against the British government was the fear that the Crown might appoint such a bishop. Hence, the experience of a strong Anglican establishment was muted, although Baptist evangelists were often jailed for preaching in Anglican territory. Of course, Baptists were the major force for religious disestablishment, as found in the forceful argumentation of Isaac Backus. There is no fertile ground there.

Scripture itself seems to recommend against a “Protestant Franco.” It was such a figure who enslaved the Israelites in Egypt, and he was laid low by the one and true God. Moses lacked full authority, as he was a temporal leader, and Aaron the chief priest. The golden age of Israel is one in which the tribes governed themselves, and the end of this golden age comes with the establishment of a monarch. In I Samuel 8, God says, “And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” If the people of Israel wanted a king, then they would get one good and hard, as Samuel prophesies:

And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of him a king. And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.

The passage continues at length in detailing the fate that would befall Israel, and the Bible recounts precisely this outcome until ultimately the Southern remnant is exiled to Babylon. No wonder, then, Psalm 146:1–5 implores:

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.
Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the LORD his God.

Abbotoy seems to think that a “Protestant Franco” would be restorative for conservatives who are left with no other option, but Franco was a cause of tremendous frustration even for those who saw in him the possibility of restoring a stable Catholic monarchy. The reasons for Franco’s failure are very dark.

During the years he spent aligned with the Axis Powers, Franco understood his enemies not only to be the Spanish Republicans who had started the crisis leading the Spanish Civil War, but also a “Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik” conspiracy that he believed was one of the root causes of the crisis. Spain had a long history of suspicion of foreign influence, stemming from the Inquisition questioning the genuineness of formerly Jewish and Muslim converts. Converted Jews, or “conversos,” experienced considerable prejudice and suspicion, but the converted Muslims, or “moriscos,” were subject to a lengthy purge from Spain altogether in the early 1600s with fear of their continued presence lasting into the eighteenth century.

Declining fear of morsicos shifted to suspicion of the Masonic Lodge in Spain, which intensified after the French Revolution. Monarchists sought to vindicate the ancien régime by blaming Jews and Freemasons and, once they became a force, communists. The development of these narratives began with Abbé Barruel, Félix Sardà y Salvany, Louis Veuillot, Charles Maurras, and Fr. Julio Meinvielle. Franco had drunk deeply of reactionary Catholic narratives that vindicated the throne and altar as innocent victims betrayed by foreign powers, and those closest to him shared belief in those conspiracies. Franco regarded his foes in the Spanish Republican Army as part of this conspiracy and would suppress Masonic Lodges. And as Paul Preston recently demonstrated, he engaged in fiercely antisemitic practices, the knowledge of which his post-war propaganda efforts sought to suppress. Franco, according to Preston, regarded The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as real history.

After the war, Franco oversaw a failed autarky that impoverished and isolated the country from the rest of Europe. By the combined efforts of propaganda and the generous use of state violence, he was able to preserve his control. Franco’s advancing age loosened his grip on power, as did the desire of many Spanish to integrate into the postwar democratic West. Only in 1959, with the imposition of the Plan de Estabilización, was the Falangist corporatism ended in favor of freer trade and openness to investment. Soon after, he began to liberalize his regime, delegating his authority to advisers and watching hours and hours of soccer. God blessed Franco with a long life, but this blessing was a curse on Spain, whose people were resigned to awaiting his death in the hope that whatever came next would be better. Thankfully, it was. Upon his death on November 20, 1975, Franco was succeeded by King Juan Carlos, who immediately began to transition Spain not into a centralized Catholic monarchy but a liberal democracy. The Catholic Church in Spain to this day remains moribund, Her churches empty and graveyards full. Using the idiom of his present-day American admirers, one is tempted to ask what Franco’s conservatism conserved?

An examination of Abbotoy’s rhetoric reveals a kind of self-radicalization. He opens his argument by entering into evidence an overheated description of the present:

American conservatives know things are bad. Our Constitution is stretched to the breaking point. Contested elections, failures to pass a federal budget, impeachments, talk of packing the Supreme Court, emerging fights between states about extradition, politicized persecution of dissidents, and many other such strains all reveal the U.S. to be a schizophrenic state, divided by incompatible visions of justice and the good life.

Abbotoy seems unaware that this kind of dysfunction is the status quo for American government. The Constitution, though not rightly heeded, is far from a breaking point, and the failure to heed the Constitution is hardly new. It has been, rather, a constant since its ratification. Look only to the debates over the Alien and Sedition Acts, attacks on the First Bank of the United States, the Tariff of Abominations, Indian Removal, the Mexican-American War, the Annexation of Texas, the Compromise of 1850, Dred Scott, the Utah War of 1858, the American Civil War, the first Ku Klux Klan, the Devil’s Bargain of 1877, Jim Crow, Indian Wars, the economic Depression of the 1880s, the Populist Revolt, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Robber Barons, Buck v. Bell, the entire second Wilson Administration, the second Ku Klux Klan, the Great Depression, widespread lynching of African Americans, Japanese internment, Roosevelt’s court packing, Wickard v. Filburn, the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948, the rise of the administrative state, and the list goes on and on. There was never a period in American history without seemingly insurmountable moral and ethical problems that threatened to consume the Constitution. Yet we have surmounted them by maintaining fidelity to the Constitution. Never did it require a “Protestant Franco.”

Abbotoy says, “Reciprocal participation in the republican process has broken down, imperiling the government’s ability to secure basic goods such as order and security. Any regime that fails to provide such basic goods has a limited shelf life.” The appropriate response should be: “You must be new here.” The United States regularly experiences national crises and tragedies, and our republican institutions have served us well enough to handle them. By no means are they perfect, but they are much better than Franco’s.

The United States does not need a paranoid, antisemitic dictator to force Americans into poverty with propaganda and secret police. There is nothing in 1930s Spain that can instruct Americans about their Constitutional order. Spain had never recovered from the French Revolution, and its decline into fights over true sovereignty reflected a complete collapse in civic virtue. To call for a “Protestant Franco” is to call for a surrender of civic virtue in the name of vengeance against one’s enemies. The result under Franco was like that prophesied by Samuel: a nation despoiled. Samuel warned, “And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.” It seems like the Psalmist was right.

The post The Absurdity of a “Protestant Franco” appeared first on Law & Liberty.

For the Bourbons, the French Revolution seemed like an unjust interruption of their rightful place atop the French throne, one which they would eventually end and resume their rule. In the same way, for Freedom Conservatives, it is tempting to think that the years since the rise of Donald J. Trump, Catholic integralism, Christian nationalism, and National Conservatism are merely an interruption of the old fusionist place defining the American Right. The Bourbons came to ruin soon after their restoration. Freedom Conservatives cannot allow the same fate to befall them. 

Fusionism rested on the cooperation of social conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and libertarian economists to balance appeals to freedom and virtue while confronting an imperial Soviet Union. Social conservatives wanted to defend against the excesses of the sexual revolution. Hawks wanted an aggressive posture in confronting the Soviet Union. Libertarian economists wanted deregulation, low income taxes, and right to work. Ronald Reagan delivered on all of these except, perhaps, for the social conservatives. At the time, the consensus made sense and achieved its objectives.

With the defeat of the Soviet Union, fusionism began to unravel. The process accelerated during the George W. Bush presidency. The 9/11 terrorist attacks on American soil seemed to provide a substitute for communism in radical Islam, but the response to 9/11 was misguided. Rather than a narrow policy of rooting out Al-Qaeda terror cells, the George W. Bush administration invaded and occupied Afghanistan and, soon after, Iraq. In the meantime, Bush and Congress worked out a surveillance regime, and defended “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but struggled to make the case for them during the second administration. From 2005 until 2008, the Bush administration endured the humiliation of Hurricane Katrina, multiple human rights abuses in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, a near disaster in his nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, and the failure of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill. In his final year in office, Bush oversaw the Troubled Asset Relief Program to address the rapid unraveling of the housing market and, with it, the American and (eventually) global economies. This last issue was especially difficult for libertarian economists to square with their own ideas and the broader fusionist coalition.

With two terms under Barack Obama, conservatives saw a dramatically diminished Republican Party fail to prevent the passage of the Recovery Act and Affordable Care Act. Fusionists seemed powerless to stop him. When the 2010 midterms returned Republicans to a congressional majority, they campaigned hard against Obama’s domestic gains while defending a questionable policy of continuing to station soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan without a clear mission. It is hard for some to remember, but the mood in 2012 was jubilant. Fusionists were back! Conservatives genuinely thought that the Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan was sure to win on a campaign preserving the forward position abroad and austerity at home. To his credit, Romney understood the threat in Russia, but any vigilance against China was hard to find, especially since so much of American industry depended on the labor arbitrage of off-shoring less skilled work. The sound defeat of the 2012 GOP ticket was followed up with the Obergefell decision, the “pen and phone” executive order liberalizing immigration, the pullout from Iraq, and the Iran deal. 

By the 2016 elections, fusionism was dead. Gone was the threat of radical Islam as a unifying force. Social conservatives had seen their efforts to defend traditional marriage vaporized, while business interests had been bailed out. These interests also seemed to secure the immigration and off-shoring advantages they wanted. The declining fortunes of working-class men changed their political interests away from preserving personal independence to seeking revenge or entitlements. The 2016 campaigns rooted in 1980s fusionism no longer spoke to ordinary Americans, and the Trump candidacy, for all of its excesses, seemed like the kind of change that these ordinary citizens had hoped Obama would have brought but did not. 

Trump’s presidency is thin on achievements, beyond breaking the Iran deal, reversing the “dear colleague” letters to universities, some tax reform, and some critical Supreme Court appointments. The long-promised “repeal and replace” of Obamacare never came, while Trump pulled us out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership vital to isolating China. The Biden administration has achieved even less besides a disastrous pull-out from Afghanistan, dithering support for Ukraine, and the introduction of left-wing social engineering in the educational system. Both are to blame for COVID policies from which some parts of the country have still not recovered. 

No matter whether they controlled the presidency, whether they had congressional majorities, or both, conservatives have proven unable to govern effectively. Fusionism rested on a consensus concerning a set of policy solutions for problems that had long passed—high income tax rates, communism, and wage and price controls. Attempts to refashion those conditions with, for example, replacing communism with radical Islam only delayed the reckoning the GOP experienced in the 2016 election.

For Freedom Conservatism to succeed, freedom conservatives must relearn how to govern. Governing will require them to identify who their constituents are, what institutions they wish to conserve or build, and what policies achieve the ends enunciated in the Statement of Principles. The constituents are likely not the fusionist ones of old. If conservatives want to win, they need to listen to African Americans, Hispanics, and other ethnic and religious minorities without dictating to them the terms of debate. They must then build institutions that foster these communities and integrate them into a broader milieu of freedom conservatism and provide them opportunities to advocate for policies they favor. These policies cannot rely on freedom principles alone but on meeting the interests of these communities. The place to start this process will be by restoring the priority of self-government, wherein citizens of local communities have greater control over local institutions than state and federal governments. 

The key institution Freedom Conservatives must reform is the political party. Parties have been hollowed out of their original function of negotiating interests, nominating capable candidates, and hammering out compromises in legislation. None of this happens anymore except in emergencies. The donor-driven Super PAC world of elections simply cannot integrate citizens into politics, leaving them subject to the appeals of demagogues on the campaign trail and in the media. Without functioning political parties, the Freedom Conservative principles will remain confined to a manifesto, instead of becoming the foundation for a renewed American republic.

As for policies, the starting point is restoring the material conditions for a free life. As wrong as many National Conservative policies are, they are at least right that citizens today have a real desire for bold leadership, just not of the Viktor Orbán kind. To restore the material conditions for a free life, America needs major changes to housing policy. Freedom Conservatives should push against zoning laws and the manipulation of environmental regulations, while developing long-term housing solutions for the homeless. It is also critically important to address the root cause of foreign drug imports and the failure of psychiatric care reforms of the 1970s. 

It may seem odd to start with these policies, but to be free, one must first achieve a level of financial independence, such as can be secured in home equity. By freezing the housing supply, not only are incumbent owners hoarding wealth, they are hoarding economic independence, thereby preventing challenges to their incumbent status. Once again, ordinary citizens are the ones most exposed to this harm, while wealthier Americans can insulate themselves in better-policed or even gated communities. 

To conclude, I want to say, as one of the original singers of the Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles, that I bring this criticism out of a desire for freedom conservatism to succeed. Since the 1990s, conservatives have lived in fear of governing by their own principles. Now it is time we live up to them instead. 

The post The Promise and Peril of Freedom Conservatism appeared first on Law & Liberty.

As a religious minority, American Catholics had to find a way to fit into a Protestant cultural hegemony, and there have been two strategies proposed over the years. The predominant strategy was one of Americanization, and proponents were dubbed “Americanists.” The American hierarchy, working within this framework, articulated a Catholic republicanism complementary to American institutions. Some even insisted that Catholicism was the best source for perfecting American republicanism! Even so, Catholic Americanists stopped short of a full-fledged nationalism. As John D. Wilsey has shown, American nationalists have generally seen the nation itself as having a divine mission, owing to its exceptional character and place in the world. American Catholics could not easily fit into this mission for reasons I explain below. Rather, Americanists appealed to patriotism, urging Catholics to love their country for its many gifts, and to feel a corresponding obligation to contribute as loyal citizens and to support its administration of justice. 

The alternative strategy was one of cultural separation. This separation did not involve a radical removal or loss of contact with the broader world, but there was a separation of ethnic cultural practices and beliefs bound up in their ancestral Catholicism. The separationists regarded America as inferior—and probably heretical; hence, they sought to retain as much of their old beliefs and institutions as they could. Over time, separationists began to lose contact with the old world, but their displeasure with America remained and found expression in the endorsement of foreign nationalisms over American nationalism.

The two schools of thought have battled it out over the course of American history, and this essay features some key moments: the Americanism controversy, the radio competition between Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen and Fr. Charles Coughlin, and the challenge of Triumph magazine. Moreover, this division remains today. The heirs to Triumph are today’s postliberals and integralists who recycle the same critiques from Triumph, which in turn recycled Coughlinite and other Catholic fascists, who recycled the anti-American arguments made here at home and abroad during the late nineteenth century. 

Origins of American Nationalism 

American nationalism is historically a Protestant phenomenon. At various points in American history, Protestants have found it easier to fit their faith into the broader mission of the nation, whether it was to free themselves from a distant overlord, settle the West, or defend democracy across the globe. The reason for this is simply that America, though not quite confessionally Protestant, had a broadly Protestant culture. In fact, open opposition to Catholicism was long a defining component. Revolutionary New Englanders hated the British for the passage of the 1774 Quebec Act that continued the establishment of Catholicism in recently conquered Quebec. American westward expansion, as John C. Pinheiro demonstrates, had deeply Protestant roots and explicitly anti-Catholic motivations. James G. Blaine pioneered his eponymous amendments to block Catholic efforts to seek state money for parochial schooling as part of the Republican “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” party line of the late nineteenth century. Even today, secular liberals continue the tradition by pointing out the Catholic justices whenever the Supreme Court issues a decision they dislike.

Catholics responded to this expressly Protestant nationalism with their rival strategies of Americanization or cultural separation. At first, the division over strategies followed ethnic lines. After the Irish immigration during the early nineteenth Century, the majority of American Catholics and Catholic hierarchy were Irish, and most of these were eager patriots ready to adopt their new country for themselves. By the 1830s, laws in America excluding Catholics from such rights and privileges were gone. Irish Catholics found much to love about republican government, freedom of association, political organization, and relative freedom of labor and property. Except for a few prominent recusant families in Maryland and Kentucky (especially the Spaldings), and the French expatriates who had fled the Terror, the Irish constituted the American Catholic hierarchy, hence their desire to appear as patriotic as possible, and to render the Church as comprehensible to non-Catholics as they could. 

There existed, however, a minority of Catholics opposed to Americanization. These were the separationists. They were primarily German in origin and had fled the wars of the French Revolution. The Germans settled in the Midwest in tight-knit communities, continued to speak German, and had considerable ties to their homelands. They possessed skills in trades and arrived with more money than their Irish co-religionists. They wished to retain their German way of life, which included hostility to Americanization and the Irish hierarchy that pushed for it. 

The First Battle: Archbishop John Ireland and Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae

The American Civil War put a temporary halt to the rising tensions, but the years following it saw them return and accelerate. Things began to come to a head after the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore of 1884. Americanizers like Archbishop John Ireland, Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore, and Archbishop John J. Keane pushed to integrate American Catholicism into the mainstream, but in 1891 the German Catholics worked with German businessman and politician Peter Paul Cahensly to found the St. Raphaelsverein zum Schutz deutscher katholischer Auswanderer (the St. Raphael Association for the Protection of German Catholic Emigrants). In addition, Cahensly worked with German Catholic bishops to see their clergy appointed in American dioceses where German predominated. Ostensibly, the reason was that German Catholics were attending Lutheran services because the Irish bishops were indifferent to German folkways. Cardinal Gibbons was able to halt the plan before it ever got started. Americanizers did not want American Catholics to appear loyal to foreigners like Cahensly, or to the German hierarchy. This would only confirm the Protestant accusation that American Catholics gave their allegiance to foreign powers, and not the United States.

The ensuing conflict over Americanism is a subject left for a future essay. It is sufficient for present purposes to mention that the Americanists were a powerful influence in America but made miscalculations in Europe. Ireland toured France after a favorable meeting with Pope Leo XIII. During his tour, he called for the French to heed the pope’s call to ralliement for the Third Republic as loyal citizens, and held up Servant of God Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulists in America, as a model for them to follow. Ireland also saw The Life of Hecker published in France with his introduction that echoed these same themes.

The French reactionary press and the Jesuits were furious with what they saw as Americanist triumphalism, and with the Americans’ perceived liberalism, indifferentism, Pelagianism, and minimalism. French reactionaries clung to the political theology of “ultramontanism,” or the reliance on papal authority to intervene in political matters. With the support of separationist ally Archbishop Michael Corrigan of New York, the reactionary French clergy insisted the pope condemn the so-called heresy of Americanism. This gave rise to a strange epistle from Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, in which he condemned heretical views that anti-Americanists attributed to men like Ireland.

Leo XIII’s position on the Americanists themselves was deliberately unclear. He condemned the positions as heretical, but stipulated that he was unaware of anyone who actually held them. He refused even to identify anyone who might, and added no titles to the Index of Prohibited Books. The primary purpose of the letter seemed to be lowering tensions within the French Catholic Church over ralliement, and also within the American Church over similar political questions. After all, things in the French Church were already boiling over: reactionary French priests were becoming anti-Dreyfusards and members of the proto-fascist Action Francaise party, which Pope Pius XI condemned in 1921.

Despite the pope’s subtlety, the Americanists were chastened and kept to their side of the Atlantic. Corrigan accepted this limited victory, though he paid a price: neither he nor Ireland was ever considered trustworthy enough to be offered a cardinalate. Ultimately, the Americanist legacy was considerable. Catholics learned from men like Ireland to interpret American republicanism in terms of Catholic social teaching, and to view republican government as equal, or even superior, to that of monarchy given the spirit of the age. 

The Second Battle: Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen against Father Charles Coughlin

The next battle featured the rival radio preachers of Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen and Fr. Charles Coughlin. Sheen was nothing short of a prodigy, studying in several American institutions, such as the Catholic University of America. There, one of his chief instructors was Monsignor John A. Ryan, later known as the “Right Reverend New Deal” because of his economic liberalism and support for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan to end the Great Depression. Sheen finished his graduate work at the University of Louvain, a bastion of neo-Thomism. Despite the distinctly reactionary bent of neo-Thomism, Sheen remained thoroughly Americanist in his views. Briefly, during the 1930s, Sheen was cautiously optimistic that Benito Mussolini, on account of his concordat with Pius XI, might be at least not a bad leader, and the violent anti-clericalism of the Spanish Republicans gave him hope that Francisco Franco might at least put a stop to the bloodshed. Sheen’s endorsement was quite measured, however, and within only a few years he became a leading anti-fascist voice in America. 

Once America entered the Second World War, he called on Americans to be patriotic citizens and make the necessary sacrifices for war. Here too, he was measured, never fully embracing the nationalism of the moment. Sheen saw the war as a punishment from God for the sins of the involved nations, especially their irreligion and greed. He was also deeply disturbed by the American alliance with the Soviet Union, which he regarded as a devil’s bargain.

To this end, Sheen endorsed a form of Americanism, which was by this time in favor with the authorities in Rome. Despite Sheen’s use of Americanist rhetoric (or, arguably, because of it), Pope Pius XI elevated Sheen to Auxiliary Bishop of New York under Cardinal Francis Spellman, while also making Sheen the Director of the American branch of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. In 1940, he said:

Americanism, as understood by our Founding Fathers, is the political expression of the Catholic doctrine concerning man. Firstly, his rights come from God, and therefore cannot be taken away; secondly, the State exists to preserve them. … The recognition of the inalienable rights of the human person is Americanism, or, to put it another way, an affirmation of the inherent dignity and worth of man. … As a political document, [the Declaration of Independence] affirms what the Gospel affirms as religion: the worth of man. Christ died on a cross for him, and governments are founded on account of him. He is the object of love theologically and politically—the source of rights, inalienable and sacred because when duly protected and safeguarded, he helps in the creation of a kingdom of Caesar which is the steppingstone to the Kingdom of God.

At this time, Sheen condemned nationalism as the elevation of the nation over God, and named Mussolini its chief advocate. He accused Adolph Hitler of valuing race over God, while Stalin made an idol of the proletariat. Sheen made these statements in homilies and public engagements, but most of all over the radio on The Catholic Hour, which broadcast out of New York starting in 1930, sponsored by the National Council of Catholic Men.

In this period, the separationist position was supplied by Coughlin, whose 1931 radio show The Hour of Power, broadcast from Detroit, Michigan. Originally, Coughlin’s mission was to teach listeners the basics of the Catholic faith in a dual effort to catechize Catholics and evangelize non-Catholics. After the Great Depression began, his radio shows began to take on a more political and conspiratorial tone. He became an enthusiastic supporter of Roosevelt, but regularly indulged in antisemitic paranoia that earned him a large audience but little gratitude from the new president. Coughlin took that rejection personally and turned his program against the president and the New Deal. He began to rely on fascist and Nazi propaganda that was introduced into his radio program by agents in Coughlin’s Social Justice Party, and later his Christian Front. 

Coughlin argued on the air that Jews wanted Americans to enter the Second World War, hoping the United States would bolster the flagging Jewish conspiracy to create the Soviet Union and spread communism over the world. He therefore urged his listeners to be both anti-war and anti-America. Their own president, he argued, had proven entirely too sympathetic to the Jewish fronts that endangered America with a war against her own interests. 

Coughlin lionized fascist regimes for fighting both communism and the Jews. For example, in the winter of 1938, Coughlin plagiarized a speech by Nazi Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels, originally delivered in 1935 at the Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg. His broadcasts continued until 1941 when he violated the Espionage Act by publishing fascist propaganda in his magazine Social Justice. One of Coughlin’s chief lieutenants, Francis P. Moran, was an unregistered foreign agent for the Nazi government. Coughlin was shielded from any clerical punishment because his bishop, Michael Gallager, substantially agreed with him.

Sheen remained on the air and became the nation’s most popular Catholic cleric, serving as an unofficial liaison between the American hierarchy and prominent state and national figures, as well as hosting his Emmy-award-winning Life Is Worth Living and testifying before Congress on the moral and religious ills of communism. This time, the Americanists had won.

The Third Battle: The Defeat of Triumph Magazine to the Present

In the second half of the twentieth century, this debate was revitalized yet again when Americanist Catholic William F. Buckley Jr. disappointed his convert brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr., with his unapologetic patriotism and his moderate attitude towards modernity. Bozell published Triumph as a magazine that was critical of America, fawning over Franco and fascist Spain. For example, one major contributor, William H. Marshner, looked not to the American Catholic republican tradition but to the French anti-Semite Charles Maurras as the source for reforming politics, saying:

When Maurras, then, raised the slogan “politique d’abord,” he was not advocating that we make like the great Irish mayors of Boston! He was saying that the political order is the key of all other social questions. Create a proper government, he said, and all the labor problems, economic problems, and pornography problems, will fall into place.

Like the German Catholics preferring German Catholicism and Coughlin preferring European fascism, Bozell preferred the clerico-fascism of the declining Franco regime and Marshner the derangement of Action Française. Triumph contributors and editors featured arguments similar to those of the separationists beforehand (and of the postliberals today), condemning America as fundamentally hostile to the True Faith. Triumph, however, suffered from serious mismanagement and lost readership and ad revenue until its ultimate closure in 1976. This time, the separationists did not so much lose the battle as give up and start Christendom College instead.

It should surprise no one that contemporary postliberals like Guillaume de Thieulloy and Chad Pecknold invoke Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae as evidence that Rome condemned Americanism and hence patriotism, despite popes after Leo XIII treating Sheen as a hero when he invoked it. Others among them look to China or Hungary as models for Catholic Americans to consider as an alternative to the American republic.

The division within Catholicism will never abate. America remains a fundamentally Protestant country, even today. Catholics must face the choice of Americanism, which requires adapting themselves to a country that does not quite welcome them, or separationism, that is, rejecting this country as fundamentally wicked. The first choice is preferred by Catholic leaders who hope that, over time, Catholics might influence American political culture sufficiently to carve out a home here. The second choice appeals to people who want Catholicism to offer a meaningful alternative to a culture that to them seems degraded and deeply anti-traditional. Unfortunately, they often end up idolizing foreign tyrants, and dreaming of a future postliberal order.

This separationist choice is bad for many reasons, but I will conclude with what I consider the most important: it leads away from the virtue of pietas, or the love of country. To the extent a nation lacks virtue, Catholics are called to participate in government, to improve it, and, more importantly, to honor individuals who have sacrificed themselves for their country. As Br. Anthony VanBerkum, O.P., has said in his reading of St. Thomas Aquinas on pious patriotism, “While it is very good to have concern for the general legal justice of one’s country, one’s obligation to patriotism extends rather to individual relationships. We can thus properly honor our country by honoring especially our fellow citizens who represent the service of governance and stability that the nation provides.”

American Catholics have a rich treasury of citizens who have represented these virtues: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Archbishop John Hughes of New York, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, Fr. John Courtney Murray, and Servant of God Thea Bowman. It is best for us to learn patriotism from them.

The post Two Forms of Catholic Nationalism appeared first on Law & Liberty.

While Musk is the hero, the villains are the ousted Vijaya Gadde and Yoel Roth, who seemed to have managed content in a highly ideological and partisan manner. They overwhelmingly favored left-wing causes and routinely fielded requests from Democratic campaigns and officials who wished to dictate what material Twitter would and would not allow. Recently, Weiss and Taibbi have revealed that Twitter freely engaged in “shadowbanning” or “deamplification,” allowing moderators to apply various methods for preventing conservative messengers from reaching their audiences. These could include preventing their tweets from “trending,” keeping their content from showing up in searches, or imposing suspensions with the thinnest of rationales.

These revelations follow years of new labeling of posts made to the site. Specifically, Twitter warned users that posts contained inaccurate information about the 2020 presidential election or COVID-19 policies. Moderators would “shadowban” or suspend accounts that violated what Twitter took to be the right kind of information to share on its platform. Those decisions were influenced by government agencies concerned about the propagation of bad ideas, such as the wrong-headed notion that the 2020 election was “stolen,” or the much more reasonable position that school lockdowns entailed greater costs than government officials admitted. 

The very topic of Twitter might cause some readers to roll their eyes, but the significance of these discoveries should not be overlooked merely because one finds Twitter unpalatable. What we are seeing in the so-called “Twitter Files” is what media scholar Zongyi Zhang calls “the infrastructural turn in platforms.” As a platform for discussion becomes more relevant to government interests, governments seek to control that platform, hoping to direct it toward their own ends rather than those either of the users or owners. 

Infrastructuralization: A Chinese Technique on American Shores

Zhang’s inquiry is not focused on Twitter; it examines the trajectory of TikTok as it is used in China. Zhang finds that the government initially treated TikTok in China as more or less a frivolous nuisance, given that most content was, as it is in America, based around dancing and lip-synching short videos. The founder, Bytedance CEO Zhang Yiming, said in 2018 that his platform was not just an “information aggregation and distribution platform” but a “technology company.” These terms indicated that Yiming had embraced a neutrality ethic, in which he was happy to develop the platform in a way that drew in new users, which in turn opened greater opportunities to draw from their metadata new sources of revenue. In essence, TikTok was no different from other social media platforms like early Twitter, Facebook, and the like, on which content moderation was kept to a minimum in order to encourage new growth in the user base. 

The Chinese government was not pleased and began that same year an effort to stymie the platform’s embrace of content neutrality. State media pointedly criticized Yiming’s approach, and TikTok users discovered they were unable to share their videos over other social media and messaging apps like WeChat. Tech giant Tencent throttled access. Yiming escaped digital purgatory by coordinating content moderation with the Chinese government. The Chinese government wanted TikTok to stress certain content in its launch of a “video encyclopedia” that stressed traditional Chinese culture and education over its previously popular content. Yiming complied and his company has since found itself freed from constraints and returning to its previous earnings. 

The above is a compressed narrative that showcases the “infrastructural turn.” Once TikTok was simply a neutral platform for sharing videos, but now it is an extension of the government’s broad social and cultural priorities. 

Something similar seems to have happened at Twitter. At first, Twitter was a relatively small social media site that had the character of a bulletin board for the subcultures that found a home there. Perhaps the earliest (forming around 2009) was “Black Twitter,” which generated much of the vernacular used on the site, from terms like “drag” (to mock someone justly) or “to have receipts” (to have evidence against a person). There was also the formation of “Weird Catholic Twitter” or “Weird Christian Twitter” that featured a hodgepodge of communists, integralists, and “normies” (people without very online, bespoke ideological modifications to their faiths). These subcultures are the bread and butter of social media networks.

The success of Twitter as a platform did not necessarily translate into profits. Twitter has always struggled with monetizing the platform, and it has branched out in such ventures like Vine (launched in 2013 and closed in 2017) and other short-lived (2020-1) Twitter features like “Fleets,” similar to the “stories” on Facebook and Instagram. Twitter did find success, however, in certain “superusers” whose content drove people to the platform in droves—chief among them being former President Donald J. Trump. Immediately prior to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, some people noted that the number of superusers had declined, spelling possible trouble for the platform. That was part of a broader media downturn following Trump’s departure from the presidency, as well as the return to relative normalcy after most COVID restrictions came to an end.

As Matt Taibbi explains, the fall of 2020 through 2021 was the period of “erosion of [moderation] standards within the company.” This “erosion” is the same as Twitter’s “infrastructural turn.” In November of 2020, Chaya Raichik started a Twitter account dubbed “Libs of TikTok” that posted weird, sometimes unsettling progressive TikTok videos, along with occasional commentary on them. Throughout 2021, as the account gained traction, Twitter moderators put the account through multiple shadowbanning techniques and repeatedly imposed temporary suspensions. 2021 began with banning Trump from the platform for his encouragement of the January 6 riot. During the early fall of 2021, Twitter used shadowbanning techniques to suppress messages by Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya for his warnings against COVID-19 lockdowns. As the Twitter files have revealed, the Twitter moderation team greatly expanded its mandate to suppress “disinformation” and the tools to implement this mandate. As Bari Weiss and others at The Free Press conclude:

The bottom line was: If someone in [Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support team] didn’t like you, they could find a way to shut you down.

That was the subtext of this direct message from Yoel Roth to colleagues in early 2021, written in a nearly indecipherable Twitter-ese:

“A lot of times, SI [Twitter’s Site Integrity team] has used technicality spam enforcements as a way to solve a problem created by Safety [team at Twitter] under-enforcing their policies.”

In a follow-up message with a colleague, Roth said he was looking for ways to marginalize accounts that had fallen into disfavor without banning them outright. Banning a user, especially a prominent one with many followers, generated bad publicity. Possible workarounds included “disabling engagements” and “deamplification/visibility filtering.”

Roth claimed the sub rosa censorship amounted to a public service. “The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented,” he said, “is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure.”

Without informing either users or the suppressed accounts, Twitter moderators would suppress the reach of certain users on their platform and then lie about doing so—even before Congress. 

The comparison between Chinese TikTok and Twitter is not perfect. The former is a case of imposition; the latter is one of collaboration. Leading figures within Twitter like Gadde and Roth seemed happy to work with the US government to assist in moderating against “stop the steal” conspiracy theorists, dissenters to the government’s COVID regime, and accounts lampooning “woke” Tik Tokers. This attitude reflects an elite monoculture shared between the upper echelons of Silicon Valley and the administrative state, though it is important to note that Roth and Gadde, in exercising moderation oversight, behaved as private actors in a private company.

This difference matters less, though, when it becomes clear that none of these relationships were disclosed, that moderation was heavily one-sided, and that these connections were denied under oath before Congress. In addition, the unintended consequence of these efforts was to provide fuel to the fire for conspiracy theorists of all kinds as the platform suppressed genuine scientific disagreement over how to manage the response to the virus. Perhaps worst of all is the co-mingling of these two issues, since skepticism of the 2020 election outcome was unwarranted while doubt concerning COVID lockdowns was perfectly valid. It is hard to persuade the public to discount conspiracy theories when, sometimes, the theories are true.

The Press and a Free People

Musk has referred to these matters as First Amendment violations, but this is not correct from the perspective of constitutional law. It is better to say that these issues touch upon the original reason for establishing freedom of the press in the first place. A “free press” contrasts with a “licensed press.” During the seventeenth century, religious and political dissenters in England objected to the requirement to procure a license to print publications, and the suppression of their efforts was partly responsible for the civil strife that engulfed the nation for the better part of that century. The issue remained relevant into the eighteenth century, prompting the once-famous Cato’s Letters to demand a press free of a licensing regime in the name of encouraging public discussion.

As Michael Kent Curtis has persuasively documented, Cato’s Letters, or at least the ideas expressed in them, had a strong influence on the Founders, who had fomented rebellion as well as a Constitution through the use of a free press. Far from licensing the press, the Founders agreed to subsidize newspapers with low postage rates that incurred losses covered by postage on letters. The legacy was a society in which newspapers flourished. Alexis de Tocqueville was not overly impressed with the result, but could not think of a superior arrangement. Newspapers were so prominent a part of the American culture he saw in 1831 that he remarked how the American frontiersman wandered into the wilderness with a Bible and a newspaper.

Expediting the spread of the newspaper were technological developments that rendered its production much cheaper at small and large scales. The Gordon jobber (which some still use today) is cheap and could produce small-scale publications for local civic and political associations with ease. The steam press could churn out newspapers by the thousands for regional or even national distribution. As a result, censoring these newspapers was nearly impossible. When Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist, ran afoul of Democrats in Missouri in 1835, he found his printing press destroyed. He quickly procured a new one and began printing across the border in Illinois until in 1837 a mob found his press in a barn, shot him to death, and burned the barn to the ground. While Woodrow Wilson found it relatively straightforward to use war powers to censor radio, newspapers were a constant nuisance. The reason was that the stakeholders in radio were small enough to organize; printers were in the thousands. He responded by using the Committee of Public Information to uncover and suppress seditious speech against the First World War and the government, but his efforts were limited and produced some of the first Supreme Court cases ruling in favor of press freedoms.

The rise of broadcast media was simultaneous with the rise of the administrative state, and the creation in 1927 of the Federal Radio Commission, now the Federal Communications Commission, brought a licensed press back to the United States for the first time. For radio and television stations to broadcast legally over airwaves, they were required to secure a permit from the FCC and comply with the terms of use. Like all early platforms, these terms were somewhat limited at first, but by the 1950s, the infamous “Blue Book” of recommended content creation for broadcast platforms began to structure what American radio and television should look like. By no means was the FCC licensing regime inevitable—it was an ideological project. As Ronald Coase wonderfully illustrated in his paper on the subject, the competition for use of airwaves could have been easily managed through private contract, and by extending common law solutions to land use rights.

Social media combines both newspaper and broadcast features. Like newspaper printing of old, social media has a low barrier to entry for users and producers. Like broadcast media, it has incredible reach because its material is easy to access. No longer does one have to wait for the paper to arrive on a doorstep; one merely opens an app. Low barriers to entry and user-generated content are what define social media. This creates a problem for print, however, because its increasing dependence on digital distribution over social media exposes print publications to the censorship that they successfully avoided for so long.

The decline of broadcast in favor of digital technologies has created new mandates for the FCC, but we are now no longer seeing these questions addressed either by legislative efforts from elected officials or by the adjudication of judges. Now they are the province of law enforcement and other administrative agencies, which directly coordinate with digital platforms to build government infrastructure into their platforms. This development is worse than licenses—at least they are publicly disseminated. Now, the de facto licenses are rooted in private communications between agencies and corporate leaders, and the full extent of these regulations is known to us only because of Musk’s revelation of them. These communications are different from the Chinese interventions in TikTok only by degree, not in kind.

This kind of government infrastructuralization is possible because there are relatively few social media platforms, and because there is considerable ideological overlap between the employees of government agencies and those running the major tech companies. I do not wish to dwell on the ideological overlap too long—many, many others are already doing so. Rather, I want to draw attention to what a major loss it is for Americans to have abandoned newspapers as a mode of communication. The digitization of print meant that it became necessary to funnel print stories through a very small number of digital networks in order to reach audiences. Thus, printers lost the advantage of being so large in number as to avoid government censorship. When the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, their story was suppressed on Twitter, and Twitter moderates even temporarily banned their official account for sharing it. 

Return to Print?

The introduction of infrastructuralization into platforms is not so much a violation of free press in statute or case law—or at least, it is not only that. It is a direct violation of a foundational American principle, by which free people are permitted to consult whatever publications they wish for political information. The argument against a free people doing so has always come down to the same rationale: the information can be dangerous. The only thing that makes dangerous information more dangerous, however, is its suppression, as people begin to believe that the story is not just dangerous but damaging to government interests. People lose faith in a government that seeks to suppress political information against it, no matter how spurious; ironically, the suppression itself grants that spuriousness a veneer of truth.

Political solutions to this problem are difficult and not within the scope of this essay. Perhaps the best first step an individual can take is to bypass social media as a primary source for news and information and, instead, go directly to one’s preferred publications online or in print. Given that online stories can be taken down or edited without notice, print is arguably the best method to preserve free discussions. As streaming sites have begun to pull digital downloads and books, media consumers have relearned the value of having hard copies of their favorite music and movies. The same can be said about what we read.

The post Social Media vs. Freedom appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Some of these narratives precede the Founding, like the arrival of the Puritans, the discovery of the New World, or the Reformation. Poor old William of Ockham thought he was just having a theological debate, not tipping the first small domino that would lead to the collapse of Western civilization. 

Ockham would not need to worry, because these potted histories of ideas are a waste of time. Nevertheless, American conservatives still crave them. Why is that? The answer, sadly, is that they are what Alexis de Tocqueville called general ideas, and general ideas are substitutions for a real understanding of political life. Tocqueville observed that democratic peoples love general ideas because they answer difficult questions, easily if not correctly. Has Netflix increased its subscription rates? That’s late-stage capitalism for you. Are you a single religious man who cannot find a wife? That’s liberalism for you. Did the Supreme Court render a decision you do not like? That’s fascism for you. General ideas do not explain why something happens but rather act as a substitute for an explanation, since democratic peoples lack the time and inclination to decipher the complicated reasons for events. As Tocqueville said, “General ideas do not attest to the strength of human intelligence, but rather to its insufficiency, because there are no beings in nature exactly alike: no identical facts, no rules indiscriminately applicable in the same manner to several objects at once.”

However, Tocqueville noted that Americans did not always succumb to general ideas, and the reason for this was their institutions. Because Americans participated in local government, civic associations, and religious activities, they were well aware of the details behind the events in their lives. Moreover, their experience of self-government taught them that behind the Geist directing History was a bunch of schlubs holding a meeting. These conditions are largely missing from the lives of many Americans, especially conservatives working in elite institutions, and the result is that they have little understanding of republican self-government and, hence, a sense of bewilderment about how their country is so different from what they were raised to believe it was.

American Ideas and Institutions

Contemporary American conservatives understand that ideas matter, but they often do not have any experience in these kinds of self-governing institutions. Yes, ideas matter, but institutions matter, too. Indeed, the ideas that conservatives seek to conserve emerged in a feedback loop between improving institutions and the ideas about why they improved. For example, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations came after he and other Scots recognized the improvement in the quality of life in Scotland and sought to explain it. Indeed, a contemporary reader might expect Smith’s magnum opus to be brimming with explanations for their present ills. They are there, but they are often situated in concrete details of 18th-century trade, taxation, and currency. Smith requires careful study, of the kind that dispels general ideas, but democratic peoples have little patience for this. As James W. Ceaser notes, “Without recourse to general ideas, no science…would be possible” yet “[p]olitical science is the careful construction of knowledge in which general ideas are founded not on abstract principles from self-contained intellectual systems, but on the painstaking study of particular cases.”

Smith engaged in such an analysis, which is why his discoveries were so profound but difficult to translate directly. On the one hand, he firmly grasped the general ideas of markets but on the other depended, as a good political scientist, on the particularities of Scotland and England to learn of them. Hence, there can be no universal political science but only the work to discover and adjust general ideas according to new and varying particularities. 

Today, many young conservatives will conduct this study of Adam Smith, but they will not enter the market as independent entrepreneurs, or engage in statesmanship. They will perhaps intern at a think tank or, if they’re lucky, get a gig at a management consultancy firm. Say what you will about the selfishness of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker;  they don’t hold a candle to a partner at Deloitte. At least butchers knew their own business and their customers. Management consultants operate purely on general ideas they believe can be transferred from firm to firm. What else are they but purveyors of general ideas with slick PowerPoint decks?

Young, contemporary conservatives can spend their entire lives having never experienced a proper meeting at a civic association, with its old business, new business, and Robert’s Rules of Order. Yes, they have sat through hundreds of Zoom calls always ready to mutter something about “scalability” or “blockchain,” but these meetings are normally courtly affairs in which inferior employees compete for the favor of their superiors. After so many humiliations, young conservatives begin to wonder, “Where is that America I was taught to believe in? Why was I raised on Frederick Douglass and Calvin Coolidge, when that country is nowhere to be found?” 

Ceaser answers this question. In works like Political Philosophy and Liberal Democracy, Nature and History in American Political Development, and Presidential Selection: Theory and Development, he revealed that the relationship between ideas and institutions is the feedback loop I mentioned above. In Liberal Democracy and Political Science, Ceaser argues that students of politics have an obligation to serve their country rather than posturing as though they were impartial spectators or, worse, moral superiors. To preserve our country requires the close and constant study of the uneasy relationship between constitutionalism and republicanism. 

In Nature and History, he illustrates how foundational ideas adapt to institutions, while institutions rest on foundational ideas. As an example, he notes how John Adams repurposed the “rights of Englishmen” into “natural rights,” thereby regrounding one reason for the American War for Independence in human nature and not political custom. After all, what good are the rights of Englishmen when one no longer lives under the English crown? 

In Presidential Selection, Ceaser demonstrates how individual statesmen used ideas to influence institutional reform. All three of these ingredients were necessary: the people, the ideas, and the institutions. Ceaser tells two stories in this book. One is about how the people used ideas to reform institutions, and the other considers how to determine whether these ideas are bad, as some have been. A less capable political scientist would shy away from so-called “normative” evaluations, but Ceaser has already accepted in Nature and History in American Political Development that our nation is rooted in foundational ideas that should always be the basis for institutional reform.

To omit significant political actors from political science is to reduce politics to battles of ideas within institutions, the paranoid style. We see this error in low-effort political social media content about “the rise of socialism” or “the rise of nationalism” or, at the academic level, talk of “social forces” of which all people are merely the physical manifestations. To omit ideas from politics is to reduce political science to rational choice theory, in which ideas are merely heuristics for voter decision-making or rationales for pursuing self-interest. Ceaser, in Liberal Democracy and Political Science, draws from Tocqueville an approach that relies on the convergence of ideas and institutions, or what he calls “political culture.” Here is a key passage:

Each nation, by definition, has a political culture. By studying the various regimes and political cultures, the political scientist seeks to discover the elements of a political culture that operate to support each regime type. The political scientist then proceeds to see how existing political cultures in specific cases might be adjusted in direction of the political culture that best supports the maintenance of the chosen regime. This form of general regime analysis applied to specific cases is then supplemented by a purely local analysis, in which the political scientist considers specific aspects of political culture that have grown in that place, analyzing whether they work to strengthen or weaken the existing regime.

Ceaser is not, however, recommending pure detachment. Far from it. Instead, he insists that political scientists must act out a commitment to the best regime possible for a political culture. Political science cannot be “an academic discipline” but “an important human enterprise in a free society.” What, then, is the current state of American republican political culture? 

The Virtual Institution

In the sweeping historical narratives I mentioned at the beginning, the problem is omitting institutions from politics. These narratives focus on the development of ideas with too little interest in the political actors and institutions who deployed them. Yes, Cicero was a genius, but the Roman Senate helped shape his understanding of republicanism. No Senate; No Cicero. No Cicero; no Roman republicanism. I am not saying that the Roman Senate, as an institution, was the true author of Cicero’s works but only that Cicero could not have gained an appreciation of republicanism without also serving republican institutions.

After conservative collegiates graduate and make their way into public life, they cannot find the institutions where people express ideas—except online. The online forum is a poor institution for, well, anything. Online audiences are attracted to conflict and pornography (or both). The digital device often has a small digital screen, making it hard to read anything longer than 240 characters, especially when there are limitless alternatives waiting in one’s feed. The experience of social media is inherently isolating, since one must silently look at a phone. These features should remind us of the problem of individualism that Tocqueville feared. I remember meeting some young, upwardly mobile Washington Zoomers whom I largely knew through social media, and our conversation inevitably was about social media. When our talk reached a natural pause, all of them reached for their phones.

With only social media as an institution for mediating people and their ideas, the problems multiply. Isolated people without institutions for public engagement fall victim to the paranoid style. Having no experience of shared deliberation in a public forum, these Americans suppose that all decisions are the result of some nefarious social force. Social media users then have to choose a force with which to align, and the algorithms relentlessly recommend to them more of the same. 

As provincial as the problem seems to be, the consequences have already reached the height of American politics. The 2020 Kamala Harris campaign largely took its cues from influencers on Twitter. The result was disastrous. A significant number of Capitol Hill and White House staffers use Twitter, and they take their cues—whether consciously or unconsciously—from whatever is trending there. Without Twitter, I posit, there would be absolutely no discussion of student loan forgiveness. Of course, Barack Obama made Twitter the it-place for social media political influence, and Donald J. Trump, the first man to master the medium, leveraged his millions of followers to help him reach the Oval Office. Afterward, a major goal for many conservative “influencers” was to get the coveted Trump retweet.

When young conservatives operate under these conditions, it is no surprise that they have latched on to paranoid pathologies that once operated at the fringes and now have found their way into serious discussion. Without political parties hashing out policy priorities and vetting candidates, congressional committees transforming political preferences into statutes, and civic associations forcing social media addicts to “touch grass,” every fight comes down to identity politics. Conservatives always had these fissures, but they are hyper-charged into anarcho-syndicalist, Catholic integralist, neo-Hapsburg monarchist, Chestertonian distributist, Lee-statue-defending neo-confederate, and ever-more insane permutations of this sort. 

These ideas all share something: they are utterly detached from the business of self-government and consume an incredible amount of creative energy. Some of you may know that I participate in these debates from time to time, but I do have a limited defense. As a writer in the digital age, I have to promote my work and engage with people who comment on it. Although imperfect, my efforts in these debates are meant to attune readers to the real political problems and the proper institutions for their resolution. The only reason I can confidently make these recommendations is because of the time I have spent sitting at Ceaser’s feet, learning about the need to hold republicanism and constitutionalism together. All my writing is simply a footnote to his.     

Reclaiming American Institutions

So what is to be done? As I mentioned earlier, many successful conservative students find themselves sucked into immense, profitable, and hierarchical organizations like think tanks and management consultancy firms. Whatever their virtues, they are poor institutions for forming free citizens. Yuval Levin has rightly observed that our institutions have ceased to be formative and are, instead, performative. Performance is the only way a person can stand out. The reason people are so mean on Twitter is that it gets attention. The reason that politicians take extreme positions on silly issues is that it gets attention. Academics stake out indefensible theses online for the same reason.      

It wasn’t always like this. Formative institutions used to create space for people to perform, and those performances opened opportunities for advancement, not just for the performer but for the institution. These institutions were once so common and ingrained that they became the names for the speeches people gave at them—Lincoln’s Lyceum Address, FDR’s Commonwealth Club Address. How surreal would it be for us in the future speak of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Speech at the McKinsey Headquarters or even Ron DeSantis’s speech atop the smoking ruins of the Epcot Center? In our time, the person speaking is everything, and the institution at which they do so counts for almost nothing. 

The very nature of large, profitable, hierarchical institutions prevents the old-style self-government on which American constitutional republicanism depends. Unless one is toeing the social mission of the institutions, then one is constantly at risk of termination for an errant tweet or post, even a text message. Elizabeth Anderson calls this “private government” and audaciously claims that the terms of employment at many American corporations bear a closer resemblance to communist totalitarian states than anything authentically American. The introduction of the Nondisclosure Agreement to the White House is certainly a reason to agree with her. And this puts the conservative in an uncomfortable place. 

For decades, American conservatives have relied on the three-legged stool of foreign policy hawks, business interests, and social conservatives. Now, the business interests have defected, as their lower management and newer hires are increasingly radical on leftist issues. Despite the recent course correction stemming from the DeSantis fracas with Disney, the institutions themselves have not changed. As Noah Rothman has shown in his recent book, the fact remains that they encourage traits exactly opposite of what one needs in a republic—routine obedience, courtly kowtowing, and a constant emphasis on efficiency above all else. Hence, business interests had no problem trading with a geostrategic opponent in China, and attempted to persuade everyone that China would become more like us even as American corporations became more like China. 

So now conservatives need to consider taking a different approach to large, hierarchical institutions. How does one reintroduce republican self-government in a country where larger corporations prevail, and the rate of start-ups has declined precipitously? Fortunately, I’ve reached the end of my essay, so I don’t need to answer that question. But we do know that there are already those who are doing so. Oren Cass, Sam Gregg, Anne Bradley, and many others have begun this debate in earnest, but this matter of constitutional republicanism is too important to be left to the economists. 

It is my view that we should start assessing the structure of American economic life, and how it depresses the formation of republican virtue. Even more urgently, we should turn our attention to what habituates the public to isolated, self-radicalized individuals. The place to start is in the study of the American corporation as a political institution. This could be a site for policy reform that defends the natural rights of American workers against the too-often high-handed, increasingly minute regulation coming down from Human Resources and Legal Departments. 

In most large corporations today, legal and HR staff operate on general ideas of “Wokeness” received from education in elite academic institutions, from elementary school to graduate school. Yes, wokeness is silly to those fortunate enough to live outside of its reach, and complaints about it have become somewhat overwrought. Even so, to treat wokeness as a kind of mass hysteria is not to take institutions seriously.

Academic institutions are hierarchical, competitive, and consumed with fear of litigation, and wokeness, as a general idea, emerged from these conditions and became a significant part of their curriculum. Graduates of these institutions have a keen sense of how to use woke outrage to reach the top of hierarchies by way of legal or quasi-legal threats. When Dave Weigel at the Washington Post retweeted a tasteless joke, many of his co-workers took him to task online. For many onlookers, the whole affair was an amusing tempest in a teapot ending with Weigel suspended without pay for a month and at least one of his co-workers fired. Another way to understand the whole affair is that it was a bunch of job applicants trying to replace Weigel. Weigel, who has now left the Post for Semafor, held a prestigious position, and younger journalists learned at school that collective outrage is a great way to get ahead. For many corporations, the easiest solution is to fire the offender and hire the complainant to take the job. 

Such an environment is one of suspicion and fear, and it is one that is poisonous to republican government. I can recall a friend who told me of a financial services executive who is an evangelical Christian. My friend was raised among evangelicals and recognized some of the language she used. When my friend asked about it, the executive was at first terrified before my friend assured the person that no one would know. The whole affair confirms Anderson’s comparison of modern corporate life to that of living under a communist dictatorship, in which such secrets were the coin of the realm. As Anderson explains, Americans have rather robust political and legal defenses against the government, but they are constantly under surveillance in their own places of employment, both by higher-ups avoiding litigation and competitor co-workers looking for any offense they can leverage to advance their careers. It is time to consider reforming corporate institutions to defend these same rights against abuse. To retain our republican ideals, we need to reclaim republican institutions.

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This past October, at NatCon 3, Rev. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and one of the most prominent evangelical Protestant voices in the conservative world, gave evening remarks condemning wokeness as an idol of our age. In keeping with Baptist teachings, he drank no alcohol. His views on LGBT issues are well known. At one of the breakout sessions, Katy Faust, the head of the children’s rights group Them Before Us, directly condemned Rubin for having surrogate children with his husband, referring to the practice as sacrificing a child’s right to a mother and a father “on the altar of the modern family.” Her condemnation earned her applause. Many speakers dismissed Catholic integralism, including, Fr. Benedict Kiely and Daniel Burns. The most direct attack, however, came from Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, who devoted considerable time in his plenary speech to condemning integralism, at one point pronouncing, “Integralists: heal thyselves.”

Murray, Rubin, and Ahmari were not at NatCon 3. Ahmari and Hazony had a rather dramatic falling out earlier this year, and Gladden Pappin’s defense of Ahmari earned a scathing response from Hazony. Pappin, who had spoken at the NatCon Brussels conference back in March, refrained from attending NatCon 3, but he did join Ahmari at the integralists’ own “Restoring a Nation” conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville.

What changed over the past year? To answer this question, we must go back to the one posed in 2021: “Is Alliance Possible?” And the answer depends entirely on the parties agreeing to such an alliance. The purpose behind NatCon was always to find a new conservatism to replace the “dead consensus” from the Reagan years. Originally, those willing to join NatCon were Trump enthusiasts, “Claremonsters,” Catholic integralists, Bronze Age Pervert devotees, isolationists, immigration hawks, and economic protectionists. These groups had overlapping membership in some cases, and there existed the kind of internal disagreements that are inherent to any coalition. All the same, they hoped to mount a take-over of the Republican Party and sort out an ideological platform that NatCon would facilitate. At NatCon 3, many of these groups were still present, particularly the Claremonsters, isolationists, immigration hawks, and economic protectionists. Trump enthusiasts were few, as were the Bronze Age Pervert types. And of course, the integralists were gone. The latest conference was mostly made up of DeSantis enthusiasts, Protestants, and Catholic Americanists. NatCon appears to be reconciling with fusionism.

Out-Party Politics

The first and most important change was in conservative electoral circumstances. NatCon 1 took place during the summer of 2019 and provided the intellectual architecture for a second term for then-president Donald J. Trump. Given that the Republicans controlled the presidency and taking back Congress was not entirely out of the question, national conservatives wanted to replace dead-consensus conservatives with true believers, which explains why the fire at the conference was trained as much on the “liberalism” of movement conservatism as it was on progressives and Democrats.

There was no conference in 2020 thanks to COVID-19, but the 2021 conference took place during the first year of a Biden administration with a profoundly weak Democratic majority in Congress. Now the out-party, Republicans had to find a way of consolidating different factions into a coherent, workable alliance. Hence the question of 2021 really was, “is alliance possible?” The proposed coalition of 2021 gave significant emphasis to creating space for conservative gay men. In addition to Rubin and Murray, the conference also featured Peter Thiel, the billionaire PayPal founder and early Facebook investor. Thiel was outed by the gossip website Gawker in 2007, and has since been quite open about his sexuality, even speaking on the subject at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

NatCon 2 wasn’t all rainbows, though. Also present was Curtis Yarvin, once known as “Mencius Moldbug,” a reactionary monarchist with a longtime following, including Thiel himself. Another notable guest was Jack Murphy, a big player in the “Manosphere,” the internet-based community of men seeking to affirm masculinity through various forms of self-help and sexual conquest. Murphy was in the process of taming his image in an effort to direct his following into the NatCon circle—even at one point interviewing Ahmari for one of his programs—until online activists unearthed graphic sexual footage of Murphy engaged in, well, less-than-traditional masculinity. While Yarvin and Murphy did not speak on any panels, their presence indicated that NatCon was in part going to be an alliance of manly men seeking masculine manliness.

This union was extremely volatile and depended heavily on its leaders finding a modus vivendi. That was the subject of the evening panel with Hazony, Ahmari, Murray, and Rubin.

The volatility led to Ahmari, Murray, and Rubin forgoing NatCon this year, and in their place was the old social conservative alliance of religious Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. The best monarchists like Yarvin could hope for was John O’Sullivan’s remarks about the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, who distinguished herself as the dismantler of the British Empire and by her studied effort to rule her kingdom as little as possible.

In other words, the Judeo-Christian consensus was back, and this time its leader was a Jew, Hazony himself. As it happens, I wrote a book on the Judeo-Christian consensus, and one of the issues I had to contend with was that, despite the name, no Jews ever led it. Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman died young, and Rabbi Abraham Heschel sought only to lead Jews within the Civil Rights Movement. The rest he left to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Incredibly, Hazony emerged at NatCon 3 with the answer to “is alliance possible?”: Essentially, “Yes, but not with the guys from 2021.” A Jewish-led Judeo-Christian consensus affords Republicans something with a broad base, an existing activist network, and decades of working together across denominational lines. It is a base highly mobilized on issues like trans rights, wokeness in public education, and religious freedom. National conservatives want to win, and to win requires a capable alliance. The appeal to the Judeo-Christian consensus also draws in bigger Washington institutions long committed to these issues—including NatCon 3’s biggest supporter, the Heritage Foundation—instead of the subscribers of Murphy’s Liminal Order or the integralists’ Postliberal Order.

Even so, NatCon 3 began on an unsteady note, perhaps because this new alliance was so dramatically different from the previous year. Thiel, one of the few gay men speaking at NatCon 3, opened his speech on “The Tech Curse” by ruminating on what NatCon had become, saying, “It’s always a little bit hard to know exactly how to define our movement. I think it is strikingly heterogeneous…we’re not even some ‘happy clappy church.’”

He then gave an extended metaphor in which progressives were the Empire in Star Wars and the NatCons the Rebel Alliance, with Thiel hoping to be Han Solo and perhaps Trump as Obi-Wan Kenobi. His rejection of the happy clappy church was not echoed in the two breakout panels on Protestantism, two breakout panels on Catholicism, the aforementioned speech by Mohler, Senator Joshua Hawley’s talk on “The Biblical Revolution,” Rod Dreher’s “Shadrach in American Babylon,” Michael Knowles’ “One Nation under God,” and the closing remarks Hazony gave on the Bible.

One wonders how much Thiel truly was fretting when he said “the diversity is extreme. Maybe it’s too much. Maybe it’s just right.” Indeed, the general tone of NatCon 3 was that of a high-minded Protestant revival.

The Resurrection of the Dead Consensus

The second reason for shifting alliances was the change in issue sets from 2019, especially with respect to judicial decisions and the use of administrative power during the COVID lockdowns. The 2021-2022 Supreme Court decisions, especially in Dobbs and Kennedy, shifted the ideological ground. Prior to these cases, NatCons had every reason to doubt liberalism and even the feasibility of the American project because of the unending march toward democratic decadence that would lead to a crisis in which NatCons could seize power and reconstitute the American regime. As John Yoo illustrated in his defense of originalism, SCOTUS proved there was still some life in the dead consensus, though Josh Hammer and Hadley Arkes registered their complaints that the Court had not gone far enough in Dobbs.

In the same year, after decades of litigation and institution building, Roe and Lemon were dead, meaning the dead consensus may yet still live. The force behind both decisions was the Judeo-Christian consensus, and at the time of the conference, the orthodox Jews at Yeshiva University were fighting a religious liberty case in the Supreme Court. There was little taste for the administrative state among the attendees at NatCon 3 after years of COVID lockdown and onerous regulations on religious worship. Of course, one could make a decent bet that any given speaker would say something like “liberal institutions are not neutral,” almost as a nod to the NatCons of old, but the speakers had resumed their talk against state power, most astonishingly when Michael Anton (one of the few national conservatives to speak at all three conferences) offered an apology to libertarians. Anton said they had been right all along about the Patriot Act creating a de facto surveillance state.

Even the economic protectionists curtailed their positions. Saurabh Sharma, Johnny Burtka, Alan Tonelson, and Michael Lind argued for encouraging the GOP to adopt tariffs and industrial subsidies to high-tech manufacturing firms. These, they argued, would help confront China, but they would also build up the skills and livelihoods of American workers who would reward the GOP with their votes. Sharma compared these industries to the oil and gas industry and its close relationship with the GOP and conservatism. No longer was the administrative state the key to success; now the goal, seemingly was to use government to sponsor new market actors as clients to the Republican Party similar to what universities and tech companies are to the left. In other words, the move is away from direct seizure of state power, and toward good old-fashioned patronage. Your average classical liberal would balk at the idea itself but might appreciate the movement away from the use of raw state power, as Julius Krein recommended at NatCon 1. Now, national conservatism was no longer an insurgent counter-consensus seeking to displace fusionism, but part of a coalition within the broader conservative movement seeking to influence GOP policy agendas.

National Conservatism After Trump

The third reason for the change in the alliance is the decline of Trump’s political fortunes and the rise of DeSantis’s. Astonishingly few speakers praised Trump by name. Only one, Tom Klingenstein, spent much time talking about him. For most speakers, Trump was a historical figure, a distant founder of a movement retired to let others fight the fight he started. When Thiel called Trump the “Obi-Wan Kenobi” of NatCon, he perhaps inadvertently diminished his importance. After all, “Old Ben” dies in the middle of the first movie and only watches as a force ghost as others complete his task.

DeSantis, Rubio, and Scott—Floridians all—spoke of their state as a model for the country. A rising star, West Virginia Treasurer Riley Moore, detailed how he managed to purge Environmental, Social, and Governance, or ESG, standards from financial services holding contracts with the state of West Virginia. Notably, he did this by using his role as an elected executive officer to work out policy changes with members of the West Virginia legislature. His message was not to invest all one’s hopes in a single person or even in the federal government but to apply his experience to other states hoping to fight back against the imposition of progressive social values by financial services on unwilling and unwitting state populations. The last thing I expected to see at NatCon, a conference built on nationalism, was an appeal to federalism. Even for NatCon, the states are back.

NatCon-fusionism or Nat-Confusionism

The future of National Conservatism is a choice between fusionism or confusion. The old fusionist project of Frank Meyer has an irresistible logic: no single ideological faction on the right has sufficient force to command the others. All must, therefore, find a workable consensus to influence elected officials and persuade the broader electorate. To do so, national conservatives needed to get serious, and this was the message of my favorite speech, “On Being a Serious Country” by Bill McClay. The alternative is for national conservatives to remain confused about who they are and what they stand for, continuing to identify themselves by what they are not (Reaganites) and what they oppose (the dead consensus). Thiel summed up this choice and powerfully illustrated, in just a few moments at the beginning of his speech, how difficult it will be to make. In some cases, former allies have already made the decision for them. But ultimately, NatCons will have to decide for themselves what the core of this counter-consensus will be.

The need for a kind of fusionism is hardly news to Hazony, but the alternative he hoped to commence in 2019 has proved to be unserious. To get serious, it would seem, he has to bring the dead consensus back to life.

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Some might think that 2015 is the better benchmark year, but the 2010 Tea Party Movement featured a populist anger that revealed an odd incoherence perhaps best summarized by the Tea Party signs that said things like, “Get your hands off my Medicare.” On the one hand, regular conservative populists were angry at government mismanagement of the 2008 Great Recession, and this among other events drove them to lose faith in their leaders. However, one reason for the anger is the sense that Republicans were betraying the middle-class entitlements that conservative populists regarded as their birthright. The Romney/Paul 2012 ticket promised cutbacks to these very entitlements—precisely the opposite of what this faction wanted. When the next presidential nomination came around, the ground was fertile for a populist champion to claim them and turn them out, as the GOP was becoming increasingly working-class, as suburban white voters started to lean more Democratic. Donald J. Trump was just the figure to take advantage of this, not only because of his brash, larger-than-life persona but also because he had long associated with populist third parties and the attending conspiracies, such as those concerning Barack Obama’s citizenship. As of now, the GOP is at a crossroads, as party members look for signs from Mar-a-Lago. Until the GOP knows its political future for certain, the intellectual division within the conservative movement will persist and perhaps worsen.

How Conservatives Got Here

Since the start of the modern conservative movement of the 1960s, conservatives have clashed over issues of political economy. Libertarians usually see themselves as the heirs to the Austrian School of Hayek and Mises. As such, they continue to insist that large government entities suffer from the “knowledge problem.” Statistical measures and bureaucratic expertise cannot substitute for local knowledge. Such a view was easy to square with social conservatives, who had witnessed the mid-century Progressive consensus advocate for secularization of public institutions and legalization of abortion, all while mocking religious faith as superstition. In addition, the labor arbitrage with China, a regional or even global opponent, worsened economic decline, which in turn brought a decline in civil society. Foreign policy hawks could recommend the proper end for a strong federal government where it counted most, namely in defeating America’s communist and—after the end of the Cold War—terrorist enemies. More radical libertarians would decry the ever-growing “military-industrial complex,” and social conservatives would become increasingly impatient for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Lemon v. Kurtzman, and the self-inflicted wound of Employment Division v. Smith.

The end of the Bush administration brought these tensions into open conflict. The decision to bail out American financial firms ran afoul of a principle of competitive capitalism—namely, that unprofitable businesses ought to fail, since entering a free market entails precisely that risk. Social conservatives were frustrated with the narrowly avoided appointment of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. While Samuel Alito satisfied social conservative court-watchers, Chief Justice John Roberts proved far too risk-averse to give them much confidence that Bush had really changed the composition of the Supreme Court.

The two terms of the Obama administration saw the ascendance of large web-based firms like Facebook, Alphabet, and Amazon. Their new status closed the internet frontier. These large platforms generated immense profits by reducing the cost of navigating the web. Obama captured the imaginations of firm leaders and management, thus providing him both the money and talent he needed to win messaging battles when both campaigning and governing. Indeed, something of a revolving door emerged between the White House and Big Tech board rooms.

In the meantime, Obama continued the bailouts and saw his Affordable Care Act pass Congress by the narrowest of margins. The implementation went poorly. His Left flank grew increasingly angry, as revealed in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011. Republicans thought such a weakened Obama had proved unready and unserious, especially after the 2010 Tea Party Movement that had delivered a “shellacking” in Obama’s words.

Today’s young conservatives might find this hard to believe (they were, if you can believe it, born around 2000), but GOP leaders in 2012 were supremely confident that a ticket based on economic austerity would win the day. Instead, Romney and Ryan struggled to generate enthusiasm for drawing down American welfare commitments while preserving an increasingly unpopular global presence. The hope in 2012 was that GOP regulars would come home and that the enthusiasms of Tea Party activists for protecting entitlements flowed from ignorance and not deeply held policy preferences. They were wrong. Obama was reelected, and during his second term, the Supreme Court handed down Obergefell v. Hodges, stunning and demoralizing social conservatives. The fact that the author of the decision was a Reagan appointee crystalized their opinion that fusionism could not hold.

Trump’s Influence on Conservative Priorities

With this background in mind, Trump’s rise makes sense. He understood the conservative populist attachment to federal benefits, the unpopularity of Washington-consensus foreign policy, and the general sense of economic decline felt by the middle class. The fact that he was shunned by most Republican leaders only reinforced the idea that he was the torch-bearer for the emerging conservative populist rebellion. Trump was the sole representative of the populist position in 2016, while the rest of the field divided up the flagging old consensus. In the 2016 general election, he was lucky to face a Democratic candidate under federal investigation, without much gift for campaigning, and deeply hobbled by a brutal nomination battle with a hard-left hero, Senator Bernie Sanders.

Trump’s presidency had one major piece of domestic legislation, a tax cut that included a reduction to the SALT deduction. He also permanently changed the consensus on China from possible future partner to serious geo-strategic threat. He appointed three justices to the Supreme Court, including the vital addition of a sixth conservative in Amy Coney Barrett. He rescinded the Dear Colleague letter that threatened to turn university campuses into kangaroo courts.

Of course, he also fomented racial divisions, wasted time and money on an ill-advised border wall, and never managed to repeal Obamacare. His handling of COVID-19 was poor, though it has seemed just as vexing to his successor, Joe Biden. He found himself suddenly banned from the various social media platforms in an apparent collusion among social media giants, thus provoking outrage over the rediscovered Section 230 protections these firms enjoyed. His greatest failure came to pass when he declined to control his own followers during the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

National Conservatives Behaving Badly

Only after this review of events does the deep division at ISI’s conference begin to make sense. The panel devoted to facing the Chinese threat featured a range of conservative opinion, but offered a strong consensus in favor of treating China as an enemy. The classical liberal Sam Gregg found some relief in the increasing Chinese failure to preserve their investments, but retired US Air Force brigadier general Robert Spalding warned that Chinese decline will not come soon enough to fend off a likely invasion of Taiwan, especially given American inaction in Hong Kong. A panel on social media saw a bit more disagreement, with some panelists agreeing that the existing Silicon Valley giants are beginning to encounter competition. Yet others suggested that developing alternatives to firms like Amazon for server hosting will prove difficult. These two panels suggested paths for conservative cooperation over specific policy questions. But it should not escape notice that the more intractable disagreements are rooted in the Trump experience. These panel topics closely reflected Trump’s preoccupation with China and the power of social media. Even when panelists never said his name, Trump was always in the room.

The consensus over these narrow policy discussions, however, contrasted with the divergence in worldviews that appeared during a panel on “crony capitalism.” Decrying “crony capitalism” became de rigueur among conservatives in the post-2008 economy. There was a consensus that financial services firms successfully insulated themselves from competition by capturing regulatory agencies. A revolving door existed between the staff of regulatory agencies and lucrative positions at these firms. This cozy relationship shaped the language of regulations and laws.

Representing National Conservatism, Hammer and Krein disdained this longstanding account of crony capitalism. They insisted that conservatives must let go of their anxiety over crony capitalism because, they believe, genuinely free competitive enterprise is a fantasy. Since a level playing field is not possible, America should protect its firms from foreign competition. They viewed the idea that this might interfere with international gains from trade as irrelevant—it is simply a cost of national greatness. After all, the cost of leaving Americans to the mercy of competition is greater: wage stagnation, increasing welfare dependency, and deaths from despair. When Devine and Norgaard objected that this placed industry in the hands of government, Hammer invoked Adrian Vermeule’s call for conservatives to “integrate from within” the administrative state to use its regulatory power for rightwing policy goals. Someone will wield federal power over the market, and if conservatives refuse to do so, as they have for so long, progressives will wield it by default.

Devine seemed downright surprised to hear this view expressed at a conservative event. He fell back on the traditional free-market position emphasizing the power of independent market actors seeking opportunities that governments are simply unable to locate. Krein rudely described Devine’s reply as a “get off my lawn speech” and commented that Devine’s position explained why the Reagan administration—in which Devine served—had failed to get a handle on this problem.

Norgaard explained the well-documented shortcomings of industrial policy during the twentieth century, earning shrugs and smirks from her interlocutors, who replied that to presume markets could be “neutral” on matters of politics was naïve. One issue on which Krein and Hammer had no ready reply was the matter of how much individual freedom we ought to retain against state power. Krein had already suggested his indifference to individual freedom when he praised the Putin regime in Russia. He favorably contrasted Putin with the shambolic Yeltsin government, for proving ruthlessly efficient in ensuring Russian firms operated when he needed them to. In other words, Putin made the deals run on time.      

For all the fireworks of this panel, when a more capable National Conservative, Oren Cass, took the stage to debate Jay Richards, the disagreements began to vanish. Cass and Richards differed over the relative need for an industrial policy, but Cass was happy to concede that a competitive marketplace was better than a command-and-control variety defended by Krein and Hammer. One questioner seemed distraught that Cass and Richards had found a way to put aside their differences and tried to provoke greater disagreement. After all, the debate was pitched as Cass representing Alexander Hamilton, who defended tariffs to protect American industry and supply chains, and Richards representing Adam Smith, who saw international trade as a source for greater wealth and even peace. Richards recognized that American markets could be too exposed in their supply lines, but he kept Cass to the free market position over the corporatist one. The disagreement, in the end, came down to the emphasis on domestic producers versus international gains from trade, one reflected in the Rubio speech and Sessions conversation.

A Movement in Suspended Animation

Libertarian political economists proved capable of presenting a coherent vision of free markets and free citizens, as well as a possible constituency for this vision. The problem is that the coherent vision maps poorly onto the current circumstances and has in the conservative movement a rapidly shrinking number of real constituents. Advancing a vision of small, competitive enterprises is very attractive to young people who have easy access to credit, certainty about the economic future, and trust in government to arbitrate disputes and otherwise stay out the way. In a country awash with debt, half under lockdown, and polarized over government power, such a vision seems believable to the already convinced.

National Conservatives understand this, but they have a real interest in command-and-control authoritarianism. Any advantage they might have in offering a less disconnected vision evaporates when they offer a conspiracy to infiltrate the administrative state to usher in an American Putin. In the months since the conference, command-and-control economies have seen a serious downturn in reputation, as Chinese real estate firms like Evergrande and Fantasia Holdings Group are currently unable to make debt payments despite Beijing scrambling to shore the firms up. Perhaps crony capitalism is a problem after all? If not that, then they merely wish to consider protecting a handful of industries, which does not require some grandiose ideological realignment. The neo-conservative George W. Bush raised steel tariffs in 2002 only to have them rescinded in 2005 because they failed to protect the steel industry and hurt industries that relied on steel.

Most regular Republican voters would probably not like either option, but the consequences of this are relatively small. The real lesson from this conference was how conservatives cannot hope to reconsider their views on political economy while held hostage to a possible Trump 2024 candidacy. While both sides hope to persuade Republican members of Congress, those members themselves are also waiting to see what happens in 2024. Unfortunately, in the meantime, the rest of the country still has lives to live.    

Where is all of this headed? Recent political developments might suggest that the divisions may not have to be reconciled at a practical level. Statewide races in New Jersey and Virginia revealed that Democrats may need Trump more than Republicans do. Vanquished Democratic candidate for Virginia governor Terry MacAuliffe desperately sought to paint his rival, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, as an agent of Trump. Meanwhile, Youngkin kept Trump at arm’s reach and campaigned as an affable generic Republican concerned about woke radicalism in the schools. Meanwhile, Winsome Sears, the incoming Republican Lieutenant Governor, campaigned as a Marine, a Jamaican immigrant who lived the American Dream but also proudly represented Americans of African descent. Her campaign had a populist style but a rather plain Republican message. Republican candidates, in other words, did not need Trump to win and, in Sears’s case, to achieve populist credibility when the former president is not dominating the headlines.

So perhaps the path forward for conservatives is the one lit by the modus vivendi struck by Cass and Richards. There may be differences in emphasis, but these differences can be hashed out in the political process should conservatives be in the position to govern again in the near future. Then again, everyone should by now have learned never to underestimate the Donald. If there is another trip down the escalator, it could once again change everything.

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