Protect Our Progress!

by Julie Robison

Liberals have a new slogan (new to me, at least). They say, “Protect Our Progress!”

According to the Organizing for America website, they recently held a phone bank in North Carolina. The informational page read:

We’ve made significant progress together in the last two years. There are those who want to stop our country moving forward to undo the progress we’ve achieved, but our community is looking toward the future. We’ll be meeting at the Charlotte OFA Office to protect our progress- - defending healthcare reform. Your voice is needed, so come out and join us at 6 p.m. to call Republican representatives and remind them that we are holding them accountable.

I have to admit- I like this little blurb! I like holding government officials accountable. I admire their tenacity in defending healthcare reform, which is more like healthcare overhaul and a love letter to special interests groups. My teeny-weeny remark I do have to make is this: the two year mark. I know that is the length of President Obama's presidency to date, but President Obama's passed legislation is not a proper measure of progress.

Video Lecture on John Randolph and the Old Republicans

Readers of TIC might be interested in a lecture CSPAN has been airing on CSPAN3 regarding the Old Republicans, a groups of 19th-century American statesmen and men of letters who believed Jefferson and Madison had (almost) destroyed the republic during their respective presidencies.


Taken as a whole, Russell Kirk argued in his first book, John Randolph of Roanoke, the Old Republicans believed in several principles, including: 1) natural law and the inability of a legislature to accomplish anything meaningful beyond ratifying what is discovered in nature/creation; 2) a profound agrarianism and fear of cities and industry; 3) true individualism of the human person (promoting a true diversity of talents); and 4) a strict construction of the U.S. Constitution.

The Founding Fathers – Our First Neocons?

By Gleaves Whitney

The imaginative conservative champions certain first principles in response to the fragmenting forces of modernity.  Burke articulated a humane order to counter the “armed doctrines” of French revolutionaries in the eighteenth century; in turn, Kirk opposed the galloping statism and rapacious totalitarianism of the twentieth.  These avatars set down principles that are drawn from the tested wisdom of the species.  They provide a compass, anchor, and rudder for Homo viator – man the pilgrim – in his long voyage on rough seas. 

One paradox of this conservatism is often overlooked by its champions, and in the present essay I would like to begin to explore the implications of this “disconnect.”  The paradox is that most of conservatism’s first principles are derived from history’s greatest revolutionaries.   Consider briefly:

(1) The belief in a transcendent moral order came not from the conservatives but the revolutionaries of their day.  The Hebrews – led first by Abraham, and then by Moses and Aaron – launched the radical idea of transcendent monotheism amid numerous nature deities.  Such innovative ideas as linear time, a people’s covenant with God, the separation of the Creator from creation, the ethical critique of rulers, the moral evaluation of history, and the end of human sacrifice are all notions we take for granted today, yet they were dramatic departures from the norm between 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

(2) Sitting in our comfortable pews on Sunday, we also tend to forget that Christianity was once the most radical spiritual force on earth.  (It likely still is.)  Jesus and St. Paul alienated their conservative Jewish teachers even more than their imperial Roman masters.  The blood of the martyrs testified to the gospel’s departure from the status quo.  Centuries later, Gibbon would lay the blame for the fall of the Western Empire at the feet of Christians who preached the counter-cultural beatitudes and proclaimed a new creation under Christ’s dominion.

Gather Round the Hearth to Enjoy Things

Imaginative conservatives in the school of Kirk take long views, and, as Dr. Kirk often reminded us, religion and ethics trump politics. Nevertheless, it is easy to understand why many of us grieve the passing of the old Republic. As John Randolph defined it - and where Dr. Kirk began his foray into historical scholarship - republican principles meant "love of peace, hatred of offensive war; jealousy of the State Governments towards the General Government, and the influence of the Executive Government over the co-ordinate branches of that Government; a dread of standing armies; a loathing of public debt, taxes, and excises; tenderness for the liberty of the citizen; jealousy, Argus-eyed jealousy, of the patronage of the President...."

Our pessimism begins with the realization that very few of our neighbors subscribe to such views today, maybe excepting the "loathing of public debt, taxes, and excises." As Professors Frohnen and Birzer state, with the Louisiana Purchase, the original republican himself, Jefferson politically succumbed to the impulse to expand the nation and inflate the desires of a restless people. The modern American identity has become synonymous with expansion, with inflationary expectations, where a wise understanding of limitation, or "inner-check", has become anathema. Richard Weaver called this "the spoiled-child psychology," the belief of the mass man that "there is nothing that he cannot know...and there is nothing that he cannot have." In this decadent world, order is not transcendent, it is not the result of the great work of time, but is rather the ephemeral result of the consumption faculty. "We have given them a technique of acquisition," wrote Weaver, "how much comfort can we take in the way they employ it?"

As conservatives - as teachers - we must stand with the philosophers and the theologians against the sophists and keep asking, "to what end?" Kirk urged us to look deeper than politics, to take long views, to seek out clearer distinctions, and to flesh out a deeper understanding.

How do we redeem the time? As everyone on the blog has affirmed, we start by "brightening the corner where we are," by improving ourselves, by helping our neighbors, by loving our families, by setting high standards for our students, and by exercising the inherited liberty bequeathed to us from the founders, responsibly, yet joyfully. "Freedom is something that gathers around the hearth, inheres in local associations, and endears to a man his place of habitation. It was a protection to enable him to enjoy things, not a force or power to enable him to do things," wrote Weaver. And always reflect upon and advocate the permanent things.