Conservatism as Counterculture

Historical corrections always come cruelly.

Hello all,

We have a new president. I know my liberal friends are disappointed. However, for me, America’s vote for Trump was a vote for the American individual and principles. It was a vote for freedom and the possibilities that come with it. It was a vote for law and order. Most of all, it was a resounding rejection of a Calvinistic world where one’s race or some other immutable characteristic predetermines one’s fate or, at the least, affects how one lives.

We are looking at a potentially 12 year run (Trump, then Vance) to reverse the educational, cultural, etc., decline since the 60s. We must move away from being a backward looking nation that exploits past sins — slavery, segregation, etc. — for power. We must live in the present with an eye on the future. We must also restore our Americanness. After all, the American identity is grander than any race or religion — it is the most inclusive of all identities and one of endless possibilities. Being born in America is the greatest gift one can have on this earth.

(I recently returned from Mexico where I saw some of the most heartbreaking poverty in remote villages — the kind where is no escape from and faith in God is the only solace.)

Yet we have been here before when it comes to the fate of America. Since the late 1990s, my father has advocated for a return to this kind of Americanness through Jeffersonian conservatism, or classical liberalism. He has published several pieces on on conservatism as the counterculture and I thought I would share an excerpt that he wrote in 2007 for his “White Guilt” book. I’ve copied and pasted it below.

What is interesting about this piece is that it features President Bush who now serves as a lesson for us. Bush made efforts to compete with the Left when it came to the uplift of minorities and his presidency was the first real attack on white guilt and the Left’s dominance of culture. However, many of his policies like No Child Left Behind were disappointments. His failure in Iraq — a war that should not have been started (what WMDs?) — affected him tremendously.

In a very general sense, I believe these failures along with the Left’s continual demonization of him played a role in how he eventually gave into white guilt during his post-presidency era. This act led him to betray the principles he once held — he seemed to think that pleasing the Left would somehow absolve him. But history cannot be erased.

The same problems that Bush faced remain today, in worse conditions. I believe my father’s words not only predicted our current situation but defined the problem facing us: the Left’s profound refusal to admit its wrongness since the 1960s on many crucial issues, especially the uplift of blacks.

Have we Americans reached the tipping point with this election and will we finally overcome the destructive force of white guilt and make the American individual paramount in our society?

The answer depends us Americans far more than our new incoming president.

The excerpt:

The right today enjoys a new political and cultural ascendancy for two reasons. First, the left has effectively ceded its old territory— compassionate Jeffersonian liberalism-to the right, thereby ceding to it precisely the democratic principles and values of individual freedom and responsibility that have made America a great nation despite its many betrayals of these principles. The second reason is that today's right has been chastened and now understands that racism, sexism, and reckless militarism are morally wrong.

The right of my segregated childhood took white supremacy to be the natural order of the world and sought to preserve it. The conservatism of that era was not simply about free markets and smaller government. It also wanted to "conserve" the prevailing racial hierarchy that made America a "white man's country." This history associated conservatism with the nation's evils. And today all forms and schools of conservatism remain stigmatized as carriers of these evils.

In fact, most of today's conservatives sound like Martin Luther King in 1963. Contemporary conservatism treats race with precisely the same compassionate Jefferson liberalism that Martin Luther King articulated in his "I Have a Dream" speech. Is there, on the right, a covert, unspoken loyalty to racial hierarchy, a quiet atavistic commitment to white supremacy? In the hearts of some there must be. There are fools and devils everywhere. But today's right has made itself accountable to the democratic and moral vision of the early Martin Luther King.

In many ways, the special character of contemporary conservatism comes from the fact that it is a reaction to the cultural decline caused by the culture of dissociation. This conservatism tends to think of itself as a historical corrective. Its great mission is to reassert principle as reform. For decades now it has been preoccupied with social problems that were once the sole province of the left - education reform, inner-city poverty, marriage and family issues, youth culture, and so on.

And yet, white guilt means that this reformist conservatism still labors under a stigma. It struggles against an opposition that now operates more by association and dissociation than by reason and principle. A great power for today's left is the power of association. Whether the issue is Social Security, school reform, or even war, the left forces the right to do battle with associations drawn from an imagery of America's past evils.

The Iraq war is the rebirth of American imperialism. Private retirement accounts privilege the rich. Accountability in school reform blames the victims of underfunded schools. Reasoning against an association is like punching a shadow.

Clearly a mission of the current Bush presidency has been to destigmatize contemporary conservatism. Here Bush has accepted that he operates in the age of white guilt, and— with good and bad results-he has brought dissociation to conservatism. He appoints minorities at every opportunity and to the highest levels of government. His faith-based initiative directly addresses poverty through the institution of the black church. His "bigotry of low expectations" statement was the first and most far-reaching enunciation of American social policy since Lyndon Johnson's Howard University speech. It offered a new direction for social reform and, especially, a new theory: dissociation from the racist past through principle and individual responsibility rather than at the expense of these things. Bush is the first conservative president to openly compete with the left in the arena of ideas around poverty, education, and race. He has attempted to establish conservatism as a philosophy of social reform.

But in our deepening culture war, Bush has endured a remarkable degree of contempt from many of his opponents, more contempt than even the worst Bush caricatures would justify.

One reason for this is that he sits atop a historical, cultural, and even political correction that is much larger than himself. And this correction-this historical pressure to correct for the many excesses of the age of white guilt-harshly judges people on the dissociational left. It tells them that they were wrong, one of the most unsettling things anyone can be told. It tells them that they failed the country out of a self-congratulating moral elitism-that they refused to enforce demanding principles or to ask for more responsibility from those they claimed to feel compassion for, and that they flattered themselves with a "progressivism" of mere moral relativism even as the culture declined all around them. What is more, there is an utter confidence at the center of this corrective. It has spawned an entire alternative media that scolds, belittles, and even scorns the dissociational left twenty-four hours a day. And whenever people feel shamed, there is a blowback.

Historical corrections always come cruelly. They shame as a means to power and transformation. This is how the baby-boomer dissociational left defeated its parents' generation. And this is how history is once again moving.

My best,

Eli