Speaker of Surprises?

by AM | Oct 28, 2023 | Aggregate

“It was worth it.”

So says Matt Gaetz of his move against Kevin McCarthy, 22 days and four GOP nominees later. It is hard to dispute. McCarthy was not a conservative, nor did he have the pragmatic bona fides of an operator like Mitch McConnell, whose brainless and soulless personal views are at least balanced out by an ability to get things done. That McCarthy was ever elected speaker of the House to begin with is a ringing indictment of the Republican Party’s Washington establishment.

That offense has been corrected now. McCarthy lost the gavel, and none of the worst-case scenarios materialized. No liberal Republican, no Respectable Moderate, no rabid war hawk or corporate crony managed to weasel his way into the job. The ostentatiously unimpressive Patrick McHenry, a McCarthy ally made speaker pro tempore upon his ouster, did not get a chance to make his Hail Mary play. The long-shot possibility that a faction of dissatisfied Republicans would break off to elect a compromise candidate with the Democrat minority came and went, barely a flash in the pan.

Mike Johnson’s ascension seems a shining example of the Buckley Rule in action. The man who came closest to the gavel before him was Jim Jordan, who fell short first by 17, then by 18, then by 23 votes before his colleagues sent him packing by way of a secret ballot. To a number of intraparty holdouts—not to mention opponents across the aisle—Jordan was an unacceptable option. Yet wherever the two men differ on politics, Johnson is to Jordan’s right, and the objectors gave way for the former but not the latter. Maybe it is simple presentation. Johnson is mild-mannered, a Southern gentleman without a drawl, buttoned-down and bespectacled without projecting McHenry’s weakness. Jordan revels in his brash populist image—his signature look: jacket off, cuffs rolled, tie loosened—and carries himself through the House of Representatives like a wrestling champ with a chip on his shoulder.

Still, the staid new speaker has his detractors. The emerging narrative among left-wing activists in the so-called “mainstream” media is that Johnson is a proponent, an ally, or a sympathizer of “Christian nationalism.” As of this writing, fretful articles to that effect have already run in Time, Newsweek, Politico, MSNBC, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the Associated Press—the list goes on. (If nothing else, it is remarkable how quickly a propaganda network can get its ducks in a row.)

Definitions may be important here. Insofar as “Christian nationalism” means the belief that nations should be Christian, this is a bare minimum for sound politics. Insofar as it means a Christianized revision of the anti-universalism of early modern political theology, it is a philosophical question that even the speaker of the House is not likely to drag from the online journals into the realm of actual statecraft. Far more likely is that opinion-makers use the term simply to gesture at religious reaction, to raise a specter that looks vaguely like The Handmaid’s Tale but that contains neither a roadmap nor a substantive philosophy. I would be surprised to learn that Johnson is part of any revolutionary vanguard. 

In fact, much of the evidence presented to this end suggests the opposite conclusion to more serious observers. In his first speech as the leader of the chamber, Johnson quoted G.K. Chesterton’s profound misunderstanding that “America is the only nation in the world that is founded upon a creed”—one “set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.”

The speaker did not continue to the rest of Chesterton’s thought: 

Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.

To cite without the obvious qualifications the gravest of liberal errors—the primacy of The American Idea—is not exactly the stuff of hard-right ambition. It is an important reminder of Johnson’s actual politics, which are essentially the consensus politics of the Republican Party circa 2004. Johnson is as hardline as they come on the red-meat social issues. He has also stated publicly that his “number one priority” is making cuts to Social Security and Medicare. He has stayed dangerously silent on much of foreign policy—recall the George Bush of 1999—but is already making gestures toward more funding for Ukraine. He is better than a mile by Kevin McCarthy. But he hardly seems the reactionary avatar of TAC dreams and AP nightmares.

What do the progressives hyperventilating about Johnson’s radical philosophy really fear? That he will manage to act on his common-sense belief that America is daily betraying its Christian heritage, and that in so doing it invites chaos now and judgment in the days to come? That five years hence, American children will be praying to the Lord each morning in schools across the country; that marriage will be restored in law to the concept required not just by Scripture but by bedrock mental function; that the industrial slaughter of innocents will become first illegal, then impracticable, and then unthinkable; that the regular conduct of unjust wars will be left behind by the greatest Christian power this world has seen since the fall of Rome—that disaster will be averted though the hour is very late?

I would be surprised, but I have been surprised before.

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John Gray’s Postliberal Prophecies

by AM | Oct 28, 2023 | Aggregate

The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism, by John Gray, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pages

In his Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot observes that “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” The British philosopher John Gray would concur; but for him, that’s no reason not to give it to them good and hard. The author of such works as Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, and False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Gray is a remorseless puncturer of the comforting fairy tales man tells himself, offering much wisdom but little solace. But he does it in such bracing style that reading him becomes not a morose slog, but an invigorating quest for the truth. In this respect, Gray’s writing calls to mind Joseph Conrad, whose outlook he commends in his Seven Types of Atheism. With his newest book, Gray invites comparison to another dour Brit: Thomas Hobbes.

The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism seeks to understand today’s tumult—Antonio Gramsci’s “time of monsters”—by considering Hobbes’s midwifing of his own beast, the modern state. For Hobbes, whose Leviathan appeared in 1651 amid the English Civil War, the state allows us to put aside both the constant war of all against all over life’s basic necessities and conflicts over higher things, such as the best way to live, in favor of a new equilibrium of compromise. Every man can go about his business in safety, as long as he does not tamper with anyone else’s. This peaceful tension, however, is only made possible by the existence of the all-powerful state—the Leviathan—which keeps its subjects in check and holds back the state of nature. 

Today’s Leviathans—Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, and the progressive mob’s America—have eagerly kept all the power that Hobbes claimed for the state, but have done away with his strict boundaries around the state’s proper authority. Instead of securing the most basic liberties so that we can pursue our individual ends, the new Leviathans wage the very moral crusades Hobbes aimed to end and mean to force us into the collective ends our rulers have selected for us. This puts us in the worst of all possible worlds: We already gave up a more primitive freedom in return for the state’s provision of public order and safety; now, we risk losing our other freedoms as well, as tyrants seek to use that state for the perfection of man. Hobbes insisted there was no highest good, no summum bonum; today’s leaders confidently say that there is, that they know it, and that they’ll make sure you know it, too.

With the new Leviathans cutting up Hobbes’s cordon around the state and venturing out beyond his boundaries, into the territory of “the curing of souls,” we have reached “the return of the state of nature in artificial forms” and the replacement of liberalism with something else. “Postliberalism” has become fashionable, but Gray has been thinking about politics’ expansive possibilities for decades—his Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought appeared in 1993—and he saw before most that the institutions of modernity which we took for granted were not the culmination of some grand historical scheme, but a fragile anomaly in history’s drift.

Gray’s assessment of liberalism’s demise mirrors one gaining credence on the Right today, although Gray is no conservative. As he sees it, the madness and wreckage of contemporary politics are the result, not so much of rejecting liberalism, as of realizing it more fully, exposing liberalism’s self-defeating nature: “Liberalism has once again become a creature eating its own tail.” Gray notes our predicament’s resemblance to the plot of Dostoyevsky’s Demons, in which an older generation of liberals, who love to condemn their society while enjoying its blessings, are aghast when their children take those criticisms seriously and decide to burn it all down. What we are seeing is not a deviation from liberalism, but its culmination in a frenzied “hyper-liberalism.” 

At other times, though, Gray resembles those conservatives’ favorite punching bag, the liberals who exhort us to return to the true, “rightly understood” liberalism: “The task of the age is…to bring [the new Leviathans] closer to what Hobbes believed Leviathan could be – a vessel of peaceful co-existence.… Hobbes was a truer liberal than those that came after him.” But as Lenin wrote, “He who says A must say B.” What good is it to look upon B in horror, and then wish for a return to A—the very conditions from which the problem emerged? If there is a contradiction in Gray’s prognosis here, it is at least a fruitful one: as with his other works, what makes The New Leviathans worth reading is not some ersatz syllogistic deduction, but a horizon-expanding invitation to cut through our illusions and see, for once, clearly. 

And to this end, Gray as usual puts his erudition to full effect, discussing, besides Hobbes, such figures as Freud, Arthur Koestler, and Samuel Beckett—fellow thinkers of good cheer and joie de vivre—as well as more obscure philosophers, such as the Russian pre-revolutionary writer Konstantin Leontiev and Hobbes’s contemporary, Arnold Geulincx. One always comes away from Gray’s historical and literary considerations with much to ponder—and with a longer reading list—although one cannot help at times asking whether it wouldn’t be better to go straight to the primary sources themselves. You probably already know that you should get around to reading Proust—or, indeed, Leviathan itself.

Throughout, Gray is scathing in his demolition of our many modern fictions, fictions that the new Leviathans seek to prop up—free markets’ miracle of never-ending growth, democratic capitalism’s status as the final form of government, Russia’s messianic mission to redeem the West’s sins, and so on. (Gray does not criticize any distinctly Chinese myths, though; his objection to Xi is less about the promotion of false beliefs than about the spread of a homogenous surveillance state.) Still, if it’s myths all the way down, one wonders whether Gray is really justified in his own moral judgments, or whether he has fallen for what he should consider one more myth. He has no problem calling the Holocaust an “unparalleled crime,” or condemning genocide and injustice. But on what grounds? In his Black Mass, Gray writes of another philosopher who “argued that morality was impossible without theism, and if morality means categorial principles of right and wrong he was correct.” But Gray, an atheist, would be the last one to fall for that most enduring of myths: the myth of God. So it seems that when Gray here considers the tortures and show trials of the Soviet Union, the most he can really say is that, should the Bolshevik project of “God-building” be renewed, its subjects will likely find it highly unpleasant. 

A related sawing off of the branch one is sitting on is also apparent in Gray’s incisive consideration of liberalism’s relationship to Christianity. As Gray notes, “In both its canonical and hyperbolic forms, liberalism is a footnote to Christianity.” The modern recognition of the equality of all persons, and our concern for the victim, would not have come into existence without the Beatitudes. As the West de-Christianizes, we should hardly be surprised that liberalism, Christianity’s secular offspring, struggles to survive. In Gray’s reading, Hobbes, typically seen as the anti-Christian philosopher par excellence, perhaps unknowingly endorsed Christian truths: “Human beings need limitations as much as they need freedom. This was the message of Christianity… Often interpreted as a prototypically modern thinker, Hobbes reaffirmed this ancient orthodoxy.” But then surely any attempt to show liberalism’s value, while also casting the Christian myth to the flames, must fail. Is Gray rejecting A, while thinking he can still cling to B? To do so is, at best, merely to forestall the arrival of whatever comes next. 

And what is it that will come next? Gray is a prophet, but of the Old Testament breed; his purpose is not to proclaim the future with certainty, but only to warn of what will happen if we do not change our ways: “If the process continues, liberal freedoms will soon be forgotten, along with the world in which they were practised.” Perhaps, then, we should take Hobbes’s own words to heart: “things to come have no being at all, the future being but a fiction of the mind.” The consolation, and the terror, is that anything is possible.

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The Road Not Taken, EV Edition

by AM | Oct 28, 2023 | Aggregate

Anyone contemplating the American response to the alleged global warning crisis must be bemused by its allocation of priorities. It is conceded that the increased American use of natural gas in place of coal and petroleum and modest increases in production of wind and solar energy have met the U.S.’s Paris Treaty goals. The principal contributor to these “advances” has been the lower cost of natural gas as a result of fracking technology. It is conceded that minimal contributions to global warming originate in the U.S., where generation of carbon pollutants is declining. Increased carbon emissions primarily originate in China, India, and the Far East; the Chinese especially are massively increasing coal production.

This makes the recent extraordinary American investments in electric car production and a network of charging stations difficult to understand. In at least a third of states, the marginal fuel for electrical generation is coal. Each night, as residents of the Susquehanna Valley are reminded, several hundred gondola cars of West Virginian, Kentuckian, and Pennsylvanian coal pass across the Susquehanna at Perryville en route to the Crane power plant near Baltimore and several plants near the District of Columbia. Congressmen are kept warm and the lights in their offices kept burning by enhanced consumption of the fuel promoted by their electric vehicle policies, which also nurture their campaign accounts. Gas-guzzling cars are effectively replaced by coal-burning electric vehicles. 

In belated recognition of this, the British government has recently pushed back the date of its moratorium on production of gasoline-powered vehicles. Yet California’s Governor Gavin Newsom and his followers plunge forward, increasing America’s coal consumption during the years of transition to an electric-car nirvana. This utopian vision, even if successful, will produce a transportation fleet wholly vulnerable to interruptions in the electrical grid, from human error, storms, or cyberwarfare.

This is so even though it has been estimated that 40 percent of American global warming reduction goals can be achieved through domestic reforestation. Investment in domestic reforestation remains minimal, even though vast areas of forest have fallen victim to deep coal mining in Appalachia, overgrazing and strip mining in the Western states, and now-abandoned industrial sites and shopping centers along the Northeast Corridor. There is no lobby for the plowing up of disused roads and parking lots, let alone tree planting, which is frequently spontaneous and has great potential. 

The extraordinary emphasis on electric cars and charging stations is even stranger in light of the artificial inhibitions placed in the way of other sources of “clean energy.” Offshore wind farms visible from coastal residences have been delayed, as have new power lines to facilitate importation of hydroelectric power from Quebec and Labrador. New gas pipelines and fracking have been obstructed, as has the construction of disposal sites for both high-level and low-level nuclear waste. Although the deepest penetration of the earth’s surface is about five miles, there has been little interest in geothermal development except where there are visible geysers; President Franklin D. Roosevelt remains a century ahead of his time in speculating on the possible exploitation of the tides of Passamaquoddy Bay. Proposals to smooth energy demand through pump-storage plants and time of day pricing on bridges and roads have awakened little interest. The same is true of “new urbanism” policies for reduction of minimum lot sizes and legalization of accessory apartments to produce more compact patterns of land development and less use of personal transportation.

There is a direct correlation between lobbying expenditures and “energy” investments. Billionaires like Elon Musk lobby for charging stations, but do not propose to get much dirt under their fingernails by reclaiming neighborhood vacant lots or planting new trees in their neighborhoods. Only a socialist eccentric like Bernie Sanders urges a revival of the Roosevelt Administration’s successful Civilian Conservation Corps. The National Environmental Policy Act, beloved of the defenders of exotic insects, remains in full force to obstruct both good and bad projects; none of the Western European countries allow a single judge to impose seemingly interminable delays on public projects. Virtue-signaling for the fortunate is accomplished by lovingly fondling their electronic key fobs, but how the environment benefits is not clear, although formidable contributions are made to the world’s supply of hot air.

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The Conservative Movement’s Long Way Home

by AM | Oct 27, 2023 | Aggregate

It is a pleasure to be with you tonight—though to be honest, it’s also a little intimidating. Over at the reception and sitting down at individual tables, you only catch glimpses of some of the luminaries in attendance tonight. Leaders. Writers. Philanthropists. But from up here, you can see the whole rodeo. And let me tell you: this dinner I’m looking at is a neocon’s worst nightmare. 

In fact, I don’t think there has been such a collection of common-sense, populist, nationalist, conservative guts and intellectual horsepower in this ballroom since Pat Buchanan dined here alone.

So it is an honor to join you tonight to honor, in turn, the men and women who make The American Conservative the indispensable journal it is.

As you know, tonight’s program has already showered thanks and praise on TAC’s founders, its masthead, and its writers. And with good reason.

The American Conservative’s first issue in October 2002 came at a time that was fashionably called the end of America’s “holiday from history.” Today we know that moment is better understood as the middle of the American Right’s holiday from conservatism.

A generation hence, it must be said: the globalist, ideological hubris that overtook the Washington Republican establishment at the end of the Cold War—and still dominates elite institutions today—was wrong from the beginning. It was never strategically sound. It was never recognizably conservative. It never won a mandate from the American people. And it never overcame its inexcusable blind spot for—and indifference to—the struggles besetting working American families.

It must also be said—including, with some humility, by me, as a recovering neocon and now president of The Heritage Foundation—that for the last 20 years, there has been one major institution on the Right consistently driving us back to our conservative roots: The American Conservative.

It is a testament to TAC’s intellectual rigor and tenacity that in the last few years, the ideas of international realism, constitutional sovereignty, and economic patriotism have leapt from the pages of a bimonthly magazine to the center of American politics. No publication has so driven the national debate or won so many converts this past year. None has guided so many conservatives home to the principles and people our movement has always served and fought for. 

But even as we celebrate and thank TAC for its unprecedented successes these past twelve months, I come to this gala tonight not simply to praise the TAC family…but to challenge it. You know I do so as a friend and a supporter. And, as I have written in TAC itself, I do so as someone whose own misunderstandings about the proper conservative national security approach found his way largely because of persistent soundness of the arguments found at TAC. 

Thus my challenge is not to change what you’re doing or who you are–but to do more of it. Because I believe the most important work this magazine ever does will come in the next twelve months.

From Ukraine to Israel, from the Southern border to Iowa and New Hampshire, from Brussels to Beijing, from Big Tech to small towns, America’s trajectory for the next decade—maybe the next generation—will be set in motion before TAC’s next annual gala.

The same issues that for 30 years have tempted the United States to abandon its founding values and vital interests will reemerge with greater force than ever before. The same voices of globalism, elitism, and materialism that squandered our victory in the Cold War and severed the sacred bonds of trust between Americans and their government will again try to smear, marginalize, and demonize dissent, especially from their Right.

In these coming fights, it will not matter that The American Conservative was—as its tagline says—“right from the beginning.” What will matter is whether TAC’s writers, editors, and contributors are ready to help lead the post-neoconservative, post-globalist, post-corporatist, post-libertarian American Right that TAC helped create.

That the conservative movement has taken the long way home to ideas this magazine has espoused all along is a vindication, to be sure. But it is precisely in moments of vindication that we are most vulnerable to the pride and complacency that threaten everything that went into bringing out those moments in the first place.

We know this, first, as students of human nature. But we know this, too, as observers of our own movement over the last thirty years.

Those same temptations will soon confront the populist, nationalist Right as it finally takes its hard-won place at the head of the conservative movement and the Republican Party—at this uniquely dangerous moment in history. Success, then, requires the men and women in this room to see this moment not as a victory or vindication at all, but as an opportunity. The opportunity that generations of conservatives fought for so long.

It is an opportunity that may never come again and which we cannot afford to miss, like our last generation of leaders did, plunging us into three decades of decadence, debt, and defeat.

Remember just how this story began.

In November 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, President George H.W. Bush’s public approval rating hit 70 percent. Soon it would reach 80 and even 90 percent. In November 1991, Saturday Night Live aired a skit about prominent Democrats smearing themselves in a debate parody titled, “Campaign ’92: The Race to Avoid Being the Guy Who Loses to Bush.”

Yet a little over two months later, a syndicated newspaper columnist named Patrick Buchanan won 37 percent of the vote against the president in New Hampshire’s Republican presidential primary.

Buchanan’s Granite State ambush was immediately dismissed by the press and the establishment as a fluke—the death rattle of an old, backward, conservatism of the past. Little did they know that it represented in fact the first breaths of a new, forward-looking conservatism of the future. As a young man living in Louisiana at the time, I knew this full well, having volunteered for his campaign.  

The official narrative of the 1990s says that it was driven by personalities: Bill and Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Al Gore, Monica Lewinsky, and the rest. But the superficial, partisan soap operas of that era obscured—and distracted the public from—tectonic shifts in federal policy that upended our national life. All of them were shamefully bipartisan. And most of them deliberately excluded the American people from providing meaningful input and accountability.

First, there was President Bush, in the lead-up to the first Gulf War, unilaterally declaring a “New World Order” to be governed by the United Nations and policed, at its behest, by the United States Armed Forces.

There was the North American Free Trade Agreement, which gutted America’s industrial Midwest and lit the fuse on an illegal immigration bomb still exploding today.

The next year, another treaty created the World Trade Organization, wherein Washington surrendered America’s economic sovereignty to globalist bureaucrats just as our working-class communities stood to cash-in their share of the Cold War peace dividend.

Not that peace was on the menu, either.

In 1993, Clinton sent U.S. troops into Mogadishu to referee the Somali civil war, to infamous results in the Black Hawk Down debacle. He orchestrated a bombing campaign over the former Yugoslavia.

All along, Clinton and his Republican counterparts on Capitol Hill turned most-favored-nation trading status with communist China into a bipartisan article of faith.

And all along, the voices of America-First nationalism, economic patriotism, and social conservatism were ignored, dismissed, or belittled.

The same Washington establishment that celebrated serial predators in the Oval Office and the United States Senate condemned America First conservatives as beyond the pale.

And all this was before George W. Bush, his team of neocon mediocrities, and their dog-eared copies of The Weekly Standard strutted America into the successive catastrophes of Iraq, the financial crisis, No Child Left Behind, the Great Recession, and the presidency of Barack Obama.

Less than a generation since middle-American hard-hats and homemakers delivered the West’s greatest international victory since V-J Day, America’s economy, democracy, culture, prestige, and confidence lay in ruins…

Just as “Buchanan conservatives” had warned them all along.

In his speech announcing his rogue presidential campaign in 1991, Buchanan implored the Republican Party:

“We call for a new patriotism where Americans begin to put the needs of Americans first.”

“When we say we will put America First, we mean also that our Judeo-Christian values are going to be preserved, and our Western heritage is going to be handed down to future generations, not dumped into some landfill called multiculturalism.”

At his convention speech the following summer, Buchanan implored his party: “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”

He—and conservatives around the country—warned of the “raw sewage of pornography” before the Internet. They warned of illegal immigration before NAFTA and of the China shock before we poured trillions into a weaponized rival economy aimed right at our middle class.

They questioned the Iraq War—and were declared traitors for it.

On every major policy dispute in this era, populist, nationalist conservatives pleaded with the Republican establishment to remember who and what they were supposed to defend.

And at every turn, Washington elites sided with Wall Street, K Street, and Silicon Valley—and against the working men, women, and communities who comprised the party they led.

And so today, our nation is beset by unprecedented crises around the world, and of course here at home. Along our borders, on our crime-ridden streets, in our gas, grocery, and utility bills. In our toxic and atomized culture. In our exploding national debt and falling birthrates and life-expectancy. In our empty churches, fatherless neighborhoods, failing schools, and overflowing prisons and mental health facilities.

The bad news is, neither the Republican Party, nor the conservative movement, nor the American people can take mulligans on any of the failures that led us here.

But the good news is, we do have the opportunity now to learn from those mistakes, as we work to forge a new governing agenda, coalition, and vision for America’s future.

This work is essential on its own terms. Mandates should be earned, not counterfeited.

But it will also answer, once and for all, that most insidious of all the slanders the establishment hurls at conservatives. Not that the ideas are wrong. Nor even that we ourselves are “deplorable.” Rather, the cowardly, self-righteous lie that populist, nationalist, anti-establishment conservatives are uninterested in governing at all. That we don’t have an agenda, just a grievance. That we are a nihilist peanut gallery, content to criticize the Swamp’s “yes-men in the arena” from the safety of our backbench caucuses, think tanks, and magazines—one magazine in particular.

Just because this slur is false does not mean we should ignore it. On the contrary, we should obliterate it. 

If the Republican establishment really thinks we cannot produce a positive agenda or lead the national coalition they have misled for 30 years, bring it on.

Conservatives, armed with our dog-eared copies of The American Conservative, stand ready to meet them anytime, anyplace to debate any issue they please. As the presidential primary of 2016, the speaker’s races of 2023, and the clear direction of legislative and electoral momentum on the Right demonstrate, we are in the fight and already holding more than our own.

This should not be the surprise it apparently still is to the Washington establishment. After all, our vision for America’s future—The American Conservative’s vision—is and has always been America’s vision, too. 

The American people never asked for NAFTA and the WTO. They never asked to import illegal immigrants or export manufacturing jobs. They never asked to surrender our sovereignty to the Supreme Court, the Administrative State, or international organizations of anti-American frauds and bigots. They did not ask for same-sex marriage, boys playing girls sports, defunded police departments, corporate bailouts, or a woke war against America’s history and heritage. 

These ideas were never proposed in open debate. They were imposed behind closed doors. Because leaders in both parties knew all along their vision of elitist, authoritarian globalism could never have won a mandate from the American people.

Ours can. Ours will.

 For ours is a vision of peace in the world, freedom at home, sovereignty under our Constitution, and solidarity with our fellow countrymen. We reject the default tyrannies of collectivism and cronyism favored by the Washington uni-party. We demand a government that serves its people—not just some of them, and not the other way around.

To those skeptics in the Republican party who declare our values outside the boundaries of acceptable Reaganism, I would remind them of Reagan’s words at his 1980 nominating convention, describing the GOP as “a party ready to build a new consensus with all those across the land who share a community of values embodied in these words: family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom.”

The American Conservative and those in the conservative movement are ascending not because of our vibes, but because of our values. We are inheriting the Party of Lincoln because we embody the Spirit of Reagan.

It is precisely Reagan’s spirit—humble, patriotic, loyal to “Ideas over Ideology and Principles over Party”—that we will need to lead our coalition and nation effectively. To succeed where a generation of Reagan’s successors failed.

Ironically, the substance is the easy part. We don’t need to start from scratch to develop the agenda that will help realize our popular, patriotic vision of 21st century America. The American Conservative has for 21 years hosted the constructive, conservative policy debates that Republican leaders mostly ignored. Policy shops like the one I run are already working with elected leaders like Senator J.D. Vance to turn these proposals into policy.

A more realistic national security policy is not rocket science, after all. All we need to do is reorient our international strategy toward our national interests. A generation of American globalism has made our world more dangerous and our nation less secure.

Europe is at war. The Middle East, too. Asia is dominated by a genocidal, totalitarian superpower, now making strategic inroads in the Western hemisphere. Migration crises are destabilizing five continents. Yet the institutions that were supposed to manage our New World Order spend most of their time and budgets shrieking hatred at Viktor Orban, Brexit, and of course, our Jewish brothers and sisters. 

Spare us any more establishment platitudes about norms and rules-based-order and U.N. and E.U. resolutions. In this moment, it’s the party of the status quo that is reckless, dangerous, and extreme. 

And yet, true to form, this crowd who in 2003 read Iraq-skeptics out of polite society are now trying to do the same to anyone who asks what America’s strategy in Ukraine might be. In lieu of presenting such a plan, President Biden and Mitch McConnell want to tie U.S. aid to Israel to another blank check to Kiev. 

But I have good news on this front of national security realism: in spite of all their barbs, name-calling, intellectual dishonesty, fear-mongering, and finger-wagging…they’re losing, and we’re winning. 

The reason why is obvious: the American people are on our side. And they always have been. Consider, for example, President Reagan’s wisdom—dare I say “populism”?—in his January 1989 Farewell Address: “Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: ‘We the People.’ ‘We the People’ tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us. ‘We the People’ are the driver; the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world’s constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which ‘We the People’ tell the government what it is allowed to do. ‘We the People’ are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I’ve tried to do.”

Indeed, as Reagan would remind us, to govern is to choose, and once again Washington is choosing not to serve the nation’s values, but to leverage them against us.

Frustrating as uni-party globalist mischief like this may be, we must remember that it is not a perpetual motion machine, like entitlement programs or teacher union contracts. As we saw under President Donald Trump, national sovereignty and national security can be corrected – quickly—to make our nation stronger and safer. It really is just a matter of will.

So, too, is economic reform. If presidents from Bush to Biden found it easier to make globalist policy unilaterally through treaties and regulations, so too is it easier to unmake it in the same way. 

With strong conservative leadership, China would never see another dime’s worth of American investment, consumer spending, or access to our markets. Every American oil rig worker—my people, quite literally—could be back at work tomorrow, and every woke busybody in the federal bureaucracy could be fired. The Southern border could be secured, and sanctuary cities and states defunded. Critical Race Theory could be—What’s the word? Oh, yes.—canceled at American schools, government agencies and contractors, and our military. A president could, in an afternoon, leave unfavorable trade agreements, and sovereignty-sapping international organizations.

The federal government that has for so long put its thumb on the scale for Big Business, Big Banks, and Big Tech against working families could finally remove that fat thumb, getting out of the way of the plans, dreams, and initiative of everyday Americans. 

And despite the Establishment’s shameful inaction, there is much elected conservatives can do to use the power they have to heal America’s cultural rot as well. Again, the public stands with us and against elite lethargy and indifference.

On pornography and Big Tech’s conspiracy to addict our kids to screens and smut. On drugs and crime on our streets. On the sexualizing and grooming of children in our schools. On parents’ rights and girls’ and women’s safety. On freedom of speech and religion. On the Second Amendment right to self-defense. On the need for more and better options than a bachelor’s degree from “Woke U.” and $60,000 in student loans.

We can revamp the welfare and tax systems to stop penalizing marriage, kids, and stay-at-home moms, and start incentivizing them for the benefits they provide to society. 

The Heritage Foundation is proud to work together with TAC on these major issues through Project 2025. Some of you know this story, but all of you should. Informed by five decades of the “Mandate for Leadership,” Heritage set out to create a program of goals, policies, individuals, and programs for the next conservative administration based on three initial observations.

First, that the magnitude of the challenges we face requires a transition plan larger in scope than anything we had ever done before.

Second, that a project this large could not and ought not be the product of a single organization. Heritage could coordinate, but Project 2025’s work required a coalition of partner organizations almost as large as the conservative movement itself. We’re proud to say that coalition has grown to 75+ strong—a true representation of the movement.

And third, we knew that if we wanted Project 2025 to succeed as a political and intellectual endeavor, one of those partners had to be The American Conservative.

Thank you, Emile, for your wisdom and guidance in this indispensable work.

If the policy battles ahead are the easy part in this moment of opportunity for the Right, the hard part will be staying true to the ideas and especially to the people that got us here. Going forward, conservatives, so accustomed to being ignored by the Republican Party, will increasingly be in charge of it.

With that success will come temptation: complacency, entitlement, hubris.

That is the story of the last generation—how our own leaders sold out our republic’s Cold War triumph for a mess of globalist pottage. But it is not the end of the story. And in the long arc of history, it may end up only being a footnote to it.

Every day, more conservatives are turning their back on the leaders who betrayed them, and returning to the fold, joining this fight, against the Marxist Left and the globalist elite. The Right is not lost. It never was. It has just taken the long way home.

The “long way home” is how Pat Buchanan described his own endorsement of George H.W. Bush at the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston. His speech, which I cheered on from the convention floor as a college freshman—is mischaracterized today as “declaring” a culture war in America, when everyone—then as now—knew he was only describing a war already well underway. A war of choice launched by the Left and the GOP elite against the working families their New World Order would leave behind.

The decades that followed saw Republicans win control of Congress and dominate it since. They won the White House, twice, and even, finally, secured a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. But look at our nation and our world: winning elections isn’t enough.

Neither is simply “being right.” There are no referees handing out awards to conservatives for winning Twitter debates against woke fanatics or Republican insiders. 

The great task remaining before us remains—“to bind up our nation’s wounds,” to rescue her sovereignty, Constitution, and rule of law. To restore her social solidarity and economic opportunity. To secure our borders from an illegal invasion, and our culture from woke theocrats and globalist usurpation. And to do it all with the grit and humility few successful political movements ever retain after tasting success.

That is why The American Conservative’s crowded hour is still ahead. And why the new, populist, nationalist conservative movement it helped create needs its flagship journal more than ever. 

And we know there is no institution or publication more able—or, thank God, more willing—to tell us the hard truths we need to hear when we least want to. Like its founding editor—Mr. Buchanan, who could not be with us tonight—TAC has made its mark in the world by being a thorn in the side of elites who badly deserved one.

As TAC ascends to its moment of opportunity and influence, it will need that same friendly thorn, that same filial correction, that same honest, incisive analysis.

Just as the political establishment lost our trust over the last generation, this magazine has earned it. Through each issue. Each fight. Each neocon barb and establishment purge. We reached this moment for one reason: they were wrong, and you were right.

The establishment already proved the first point; soon we will have the chance to prove the second. We can, and I believe we will, as long as American conservatives stay true to The American Conservative, and The American Conservative stays true to itself, its vision, and to us.

Together, we can show our movement and our country that the long way home was just the beginning of the right way forward.

Thank you, and God bless America.

The post The Conservative Movement’s Long Way Home appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Whole World of Fraud

by AM | Oct 27, 2023 | Aggregate

Last week, the House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee held a hearing on Covid relief fraud, which may go down as the biggest scam in history. The amount stolen from taxpayers during the pandemic dwarfs anything the United States has ever seen, totaling hundreds of billions of dollars—and a large chunk of the money ended up abroad, including in China.

During the pandemic, the federal government made a deliberate decision to prioritize getting money into people’s hands as fast as possible. The result, as the subcommittee heard, was that many basic precautions were not taken. Unemployment insurance is usually processed through employers, who verify basic facts about the person claiming benefits. In order to include self-employed people in pandemic relief, state unemployment offices allowed them to vouch for their own lost wages on the honor system.

In the Paycheck Protection Program, the law specifically instructed lenders to accept at face value documents that borrowers submitted. The Small Business Administration was not permitted to ask applicants to submit past tax returns. “In other words, SBA could not cross-check a loan application against the most credible data on income and expenses in the government’s possession: prior tax records,” writes auditor Bob Westbrooks in Left Holding the Bag: A Watchdog’s Account of How Washington Fumbled Its Covid Test.

The bureaucrats who designed this system assumed there would be fraud. They just thought there would be a manageable amount. That turned out to be optimistic.

In a single two-week period, the state of Colorado received 50,000 fraudulent unemployment assistance claims. The state department of labor later estimated that 75 percent of claims from self-employed workers and independent contractors were fraudulent. When the state implemented the basic safeguard of phone verification, to make sure people were who they said they were, applications for benefits fell 40 percent.

Amy Simon, formerly of the Department of Labor, told the subcommittee that the total amount lost to fraud during Covid could be $240 billion or more. In light of that massive number, waiting to catch fraudsters until after the crisis starts to look like a bad plan—there may be too many fraudsters for the Department of Justice to catch.

A review of the DOJ Covid-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force in August found that over 3,000 individuals had been criminally charged in fraud investigations. The fraudsters included the actor who played the Red Power Ranger in the 1990s TV show, a former U.S. Olympic skater, and a former NFL player.

Less amusingly, at least $20 million in pandemic benefits ended up in China thanks to a single group of hackers with links to the Chinese government. Nigerian identity fraudsters and Russian mobsters have also been implicated. The largest domestic fraud ring, involving nearly 50 defendants and $250 million, had an international and multicultural aspect that is clear from the DOJ writeup.

How did the federal government get it so wrong? Were they naïve to think fraud would stay within manageable bounds? 

To be generous, we might say their assumptions were outdated. International fraud on this scale has only been a problem for a relatively short time. “Organised crime has traditionally been seen as a domestic problem bedevilling a relatively small number of states such as Italy, the United States and Japan,” an academic expert wrote in 1995. “In the last few years, however, there has been a recognition that the problem is no longer limited to a few states and can no longer be treated as something that falls within a single jurisdiction.”

Thirty years later, governments ought to take for granted that any program involving large amounts of money will attract predators from all over the world. And not just organized crime. In 2014, Italian authorities discovered a $1.3 billion scam involving selling fake carbon credits where the money ended up in the bank accounts of the Taliban.

“Waste, fraud, and abuse” is usually a laugh line. Conservatives say they want to shrink government by targeting it when everyone knows that you could eliminate every last instance of waste, fraud, and abuse and not make a dent in the size of government. 

Yet in the case of the pandemic, the amount lost to fraud is definitely not small change. The exposure of Americans—workers, consumers, and bureaucrats—to risks that previously were too remote or too trivial to worry about is now a commonplace. Not everyone in the global village is a good neighbor.

The post A Whole World of Fraud appeared first on The American Conservative.