Three Americas, and How We Might Make Them One

I apologize for rapid blasting essays, but the world is full of food for thought at the moment, and I had rare free time during travel.

The Ukrainian situation is once again bringing out a phenomenon first aired by the rise of Donald Trump. There are two conservatisms. There are also two liberalisms. One of each of these represents something within the genetic progeny of the American founding, and two do not.

All discussions benefit from a clarification of definitions, but this topic is by nature definitional. What is liberalism? That depends on what one is trying to be liberated from. What is conservatism? That depends on what one is trying to conserve. In the case of the United States, conservatives are the inheritors of a revolution. Conservatives are conserving an actual known past reality or, perhaps with a degree of appropriate humility, what we believe a past reality to have been. In other times and other places, like American colonies circa 1776, conservatives were monarchists.

So American conservatism has inherited the mantle of enlightenment ideals like individual liberty and democracy, freedom of speech and religion. But those were liberal ideas in the 1700’s. Those are ideals shared by people who vote D and those who vote R. Those who vote R are likely to subscribe to supply side economics and religiously influenced social mores and policies. Those who vote D are likely to subscribe to demand side economics and loose libertine social mores and policies. But there are those who vote D and those who vote R who don’t cling those principles.

There are some on the left who believe that individual liberty and equality before the law did not go far enough in liberating. Rather these are small concessions which cast an illusion of equality and dignity while keeping the aristocracy entrenched. Freedom of speech and religion were recognized as obstacles by leftist thinkers like Herbert Marcuse who branded such with the label “oppressive tolerance.” If you want to see the connection between libertine standards of sexual conduct and economics just read the first chapter of his book “Eros and Civilization.” (You can keep reading beyond that but it’s a bit painful.) It’s here where you see the fruits of the current academic left and political far-ish left in the bud.

Ok, so on to conservatism. (Much of this will sound elitist, and in a sense, it is. We will have elites. It would be nice if they stunk less! So let’s make good ones.)

Conservatives in the National Review/ William F. Buckley vein have been largely immune from the propensity to stray out of the American “classical liberal” tradition, because they are/were educated in classical liberal theory. Donald Trump himself, I would argue, didn’t really stray from it for the bulk of his presidency. You might say he bridged the two conservatisms. But the tenor and the emphases which he personified is what awakened a blue collar populist uprising which propelled him to power. A portion of that movement was not benign. A portion of that movement, and not an insignificant one, brought to the table an ignorance of, or even an informed disdain for, the liberal order which has been built upon the American founding.

This is seen in policy reactions that are quick to utilize censorship over persuasion and make showy molehill last stands over persuasive dialogue. They view the other side not as collegial disputers within an agreed upon order, but as enemies of the order altogether. They do not fear the breakup of the nation, but anticipate it with some greater or lesser degree of longing. They muse on how the new order of states will protect itself from the left by illiberal means, since they will no longer be constrained by the current institutional documents, systems, and norms which prevent the use of force to enshrine and protect cultural attitudes from leftward drift. They look to a day when public schools can become centers of rightwing indoctrination, as opposed to the centers of leftwing indoctrination, which they indeed are at present.

They are reacting to real concerns and the left bears much of the blame for this phenomenon. The mainstream truly liberal left, which has remained essentially within the broader founding principles, has placated the far left and sacrificed much of their moral standing. Academia has drifted so far left that Che Guevara seems like a centrist. I mean, I’m not sure Malcom X was woke enough for the squad and may have been suffering from a bout of false consciousness and internalized whiteness.

The is another related folly on the mainstream left. The public schools and universities, firmly in the grip of the left for decades, stopped teaching civics and stopped encouraging belief in the founding ideals. This helped to foster the current crisis of belief all over the west which currently hampers our resolve to make commitments and sacrifices to preserve the western liberal order (Ukraine/Russia). The far left has multiplied within our institutions as it undermined them. It was virus-like, with our own “cells” being used as factories to bring about their demise.

The flip side of this is that the post-WWII generations resisting leftist change are resisting without a foundation or firm belief in the classical liberalism on which America was founded. They view the far left as a powerful force which itself does not abide by the norms of the liberal order and thus must be met with resistance that also uses force outside the norms of the liberal order. They find the liberal order to be weak and futile in the face of “burn it down” leftism.

That is why they love Trump. He is the first American political figure since Reagan to appear strong in the face of the leftist onslaught. His methods and principles are not called into question by the conservative populist ground swell because they themselves were educated by the illiberal left and thus have no faith in the liberal order. They don’t bring theory to the table but experience and pragmatic reasoning. They fight fire with fire. They want to cut the crap and start bringing guns to gunfights.

When this is pointed out, when they are confronted by conservatives who preach theory and speak about Burkean conservatism and Lockean liberalism, they gag on what they find to be elitist pussyfooting and toxically ineffective nuance making. They blast the left and their undermining of the founding principles not realizing that their own worldview is the unintended consequence of the leftist assault on those principles. We are now pushing into the fourth generation of Americans who have been educated under a system which was fully constructed by the likes of Marxists like John Dewey.

So what is to be done? I have very little good news here. Nothing is going to bring about a quick correction to ensure that the center holds and that the nation does not fracture into two equally illiberal halves. I also have no confidence that the center left quadrant will provide an effective solution to the mayhem that it let in the door. The answers will have to come from the center right quadrant, and it is going to need Reaganesque spokesmen to do it. (Yeah, women too, but Reaganesque women, whatever that looks like).

It is a two generational educational task. Once again, are now pushing into the fourth generation of Americans who have been educated under a system which was fully constructed by the likes of Marxists like John Dewey. This won’t be fast, and it won’t happen within the public schools. That makes it very challenging because the blue collar and middle class people which make up the rightwing populists are being educated in public schools in which they are either converted to illiberal leftism or pushed reactionarily into illiberal conservatism. Thus the primary concern of liberal conservatism is to remove as many children from the public school system as possible. David French, alleged squishy-middle suspect and purveyor of toxic nuance, was absolutely correct when he legally affirmed that infamous line by the former governor of Virginia: parents don’t have the right to tell schools what to teach. You can’t get a tailor-made education from a public school and the legal precedent for this is overwhelming. Thus parents who think they are going to “fix” the public schools in time to help the next generation are delusional. He was also right when he asserted that the right to opt out of government schools is also well founded, and the only hope for any real progress.

There are several ways this can be done. Parents’ primary motivator for keeping children in the public school system is money. The left knows this. We have a world where the majority of households need two incomes to live comfortably if not simply to make ends meet. The public schools provide free daycare, both subsidizing and exacerbating the need for dual income households, entrenching a society where schools raise children instead of parents. This makes one of the great options, homeschool, all but impossible for most families.

Private school obviously suffers from the same flaw, unless we address the price issue with school choice vouchers. These are not only effective in opening a pathway for the reeducation of Americans in the arts of self rule (known as liberal arts, or liberating arts) but are a popular option across demographics. This is a winning issue for Republicans in minority communities which have been Democrat strongholds. An ancillary program of tax credits for homeschoolers can make marginal difference as well.

But this brings us to another problem. Classical liberal arts are all but forgotten. Whenever I talk about this to conservatives I have to explain that “liberal arts” is not a leftist educational conspiracy. So how do we educate the next generation when we have very few teachers who possess knowledge of it themselves?

In actuality we are already a generation into the effort to reintroduce classical liberal arts into the nation’s primary education. There are hybrid homeschool programs like Classical Conversations and Veritas, created by educators and parents who have already done the grunt work of digging up old books and learning from classicists like David V. Hicks. They built systems, networks, and curriculums that are now being used on a wider scale. There are classical private schools popping up, some which embody a hybrid program with two or three days per week in class and the rest at home, making them more flexible for parents, and cheaper. The movement is growing.

Now we need to utilize them and realize that the danger of continuing down the current path of conventional modern education is not simply a path leftward, but diverging paths into authoritarian nightmares, the likes of which we simply do not want to see.

This means opting out of financially advantageous arrangements of education at every level. It means forgoing opportunities at Ivy League schools and state universities in favor of independent liberal arts colleges. It means letting, or even insisting that, your kids forgo a scholarship to your prestigious alma mater and opt out of the social network and business network it would have opened up. These are hard things to do but they are essential. The alternative is to not only sacrifice your children’s moral underpinnings, but to further the fractured disaster that is leading us toward more civil unrest and civil dissolution, handing over copious amounts of your hard earned dollars and funneling scholarship money right into the mouth of the beast which is destroying us. To make an analogy to current events, it’s like giving expensive weapons to Ukraine while buying billions of dollars in fuel from Russia. Sacrifices MUST be made.

But, there is hope that this will make a difference. The movement has grown, and with God’s help, now that the systems and institutions have been built by a few pioneers over the last two or three decades, that growth will become far quicker and its effect will be far reaching. This is the way. Let’s walk in it.