Understanding Conservative Political Philosophy: A Comprehensive Examination

Part I: The Foundation of Conservative Thought

The Essential Difference Between Liberal and Conservative Perspectives

The contemporary political landscape in America reveals a fundamental division that extends far beyond superficial disagreement about policy. This division represents two fundamentally different attitudes toward the world itself, two distinct ways of approaching human existence and social organization.

The modern debate between liberals and conservatives has been described in various ways by political theorists and philosophers. However, understanding this division requires moving beyond abstract theory to examine what actually motivates each perspective. The most revealing approach involves examining the emotional and intellectual foundations underlying political positions.

Conservative political philosophy emerges from a particular stance toward human experience. Certain moments in life reveal what might be called the normal condition of human flourishing. These moments occur unexpectedly, without warning or planning. They might arrive during a quiet morning, an evening with friends, or time spent with family. The setting often includes natural beauty. What characterizes these moments is a quality that can only be described as rightness, a sense that life is proceeding as it should.

Such moments do not arrive regularly. They cannot be scheduled or manufactured through effort. They emerge spontaneously from the ordinary conditions of life. When they do arrive, they generate a response best characterized as gratitude. A person experiencing such a moment recognizes something that has been given, not earned. This recognition of grace, of undeserved good, forms the emotional bedrock of conservative political thought.

This observation points toward a crucial insight. The majority of what human beings enjoy in life falls outside the reach of political action. Laws and governments cannot create happiness, contentment, or love. At best, they can create conditions in which these goods become possible. More commonly, they either leave these goods untouched or actively prevent them.

Samuel Johnson captured this understanding when he observed that human hearts endure much that neither laws nor kings can cure. Equally true, human hearts enjoy much that neither laws nor kings can create. If the end of all human endeavor is to be happy at home, as Johnson suggested, then politics must accept a profoundly limited role in human life.

This realization distinguishes conservative from liberal political perspectives. The conservative notices what is already present in life and culture. The conservative recognizes that most human satisfaction comes from activities that politics cannot touch: family relationships, work that feels meaningful, participation in communities of belief, the simple pleasures of ordinary life. Before pursuing any program of political change, the conservative believes one should first appreciate what already exists.

The liberal, by contrast, focuses attention on suffering, injustice, and problems. From the liberal perspective, politics exists to eliminate these conditions. This focus on what is wrong rather than what is right shapes every aspect of liberal political thinking. The liberal is perpetually dissatisfied, always discovering new injustices requiring remedy through political action.

The conservative respects tradition and established institutions because these represent accumulated wisdom about how to live well together. Changes should be made carefully, with full awareness of what might be lost. The liberal views tradition with suspicion, seeing it as an obstacle to progress and justice. For the liberal, the fact that something has always been done a certain way constitutes a reason to change it, not a reason to preserve it.

Burke articulated this principle when he argued that a constitution should be the subject of enjoyment rather than altercation. Citizens should be able to take satisfaction in their fundamental laws and institutions. The conservative perspective emphasizes this appreciation of what already exists, while simultaneously recognizing that human institutions, being imperfect, require maintenance and careful adjustment.

This difference in fundamental outlook produces different vocabularies and different concerns. The conservative writer and thinker addresses readers who already possess some appreciation for the existing order. The appeal is to expand and deepen this appreciation, not to create it from scratch.

Michael Oakeshott expressed this principle of appreciation in political terms. He identified conservatism with the virtues of affection, attachment, familiarity, and happiness. These are not abstract values but concrete realities that flow from stable institutions and predictable social relationships. The conservative insists that politics should not disturb normal life and the ordinary activities through which people find meaning and satisfaction.

Chesterton, despite his profound critiques of conservatism in his own era, understood this principle. He argued that to discuss reform without reference to form is futile. The modern tendency to sacrifice the normal to the abnormal, the stable to the exceptional, represents a profound mistake. When a society treats itself as something exceptional, like a house on fire or a shipwreck, it loses the capacity to appreciate and preserve what makes it functional and healthy.

The liberal frequently asks what can be reformed, what can be improved, what can be built anew. The conservative asks a prior question: what exactly is wrong with society as it currently exists? This is not mere rhetorical obstruction. It reflects the understanding that because human beings lack omniscience and omnipotence, they must work with existing materials rather than imagining themselves as creators constructing reality from first principles.

Richard Whately identified the problem precisely: those unaware of their ignorance will only be misled by their knowledge. The liberal socialist, communist, and other political ideologies proceed from a fundamental blindness to what is constant and enduring in human life. They fail to notice what already exists and functions. They demonstrate no appreciation for how ordinary people actually live and what makes their lives meaningful.

The conservative does not claim that existing society is perfect. Rather, the conservative maintains that before criticizing something, one must first appreciate it. One must understand what it accomplishes, how it functions, what purposes it serves. Without this appreciation, criticism becomes destructive rather than constructive.

This principle extends to the role of the malcontent in political life. The modern world has given surprising moral prestige to the malcontent, to those perpetually dissatisfied with the existing order. We praise as “ideals” what are really fantasies: perpetual peace, universal brotherhood, perfect justice. These concepts have lured people toward totalitarianism again and again throughout history. Yet the malcontent is allowed to speak as though he possesses moral authority.

The malcontent can be identified through certain linguistic habits. What conservatives recognize as cohesive elements, as the glue binding society together, the malcontent calls barriers. Ordinary people’s indifference to politics, which might reflect healthy contentment, the malcontent calls apathy. Programs of state control and redistribution are labeled compassion. Behavior regarded traditionally as wrong is rebranded as a right.

Burke captured the principle perfectly: we must build out of existing materials. The old politics of repair has been replaced by the politics of destruction and creation. The utopian radical destroys what he has failed to appreciate while promising to create something new. Communism represents the ideal type of this approach. It has destroyed the cultural life of Russia, which flourished even under the czars. Communist regimes devote their energies primarily to suppressing the energies of their own populations, trying to impose their fantasies through force and terror. Their real achievement can be measured in the armed borders designed to prevent people from escaping.

Nothing could be easier than to imagine some notionally perfect state. But excessive credit is given to this debased form of imagination, which becomes ruthless once it takes itself seriously. Appreciation, by contrast, means imagining the real. It involves discovering use, value, beauty, order, and purpose in what already exists. This form of imagination is most appropriate for creatures who should not confuse themselves with the Creator.

The highest form of appreciation is worship. While conservative political philosophy does not require formal religious belief, an attitude of appreciation precedes any specific creed. This attitude recognizes that human beings have received good things they did not earn and cannot claim to deserve. The opposite of piety is not disbelief but crassness, a failure to recognize and honor what has been received.

Even inventors demonstrate this principle of appreciating existing reality. The inventor who finds a way to create soap from peanuts exercises genuine imagination by discovering hidden potential in the real. This differs fundamentally from the revolutionary who imagines destroying the entire existing order to build something new. Understanding how gravity works and harnessing it represents true imagination. Imagining oneself able to fly by disregarding gravity represents dangerous fantasy.

The Practical Importance of Appreciation in Everyday Life

The practical significance of this principle of appreciation becomes clear when one examines how ordinary people actually spend their lives and what constitutes their freedom. Most people do not engage in abstract philosophical thinking or grand political theorizing. Instead, they occupy themselves with concrete choices: buying and selling, selecting careers, developing relationships, finding appropriate language for their thoughts, making judicial decisions, finding homes.

None of these activities involves utopian thinking. Neither does voting. Human beings constantly exercise their imagination on the real and the given rather than the purely hypothetical. Their energy goes into actual decisions that express the evaluations they can realistically make with their power of choice. This simple fact is what human life is fundamentally about for normal people.

Every individual possesses the capacity to make choices within limits. The freedom that genuinely matters to people is the freedom to exercise these choices within their own sphere of life. This freedom is far less dramatic than abstract libertarian freedom or utopian liberation. It is the freedom to decide how to spend a Tuesday afternoon, how to raise one’s children, what to spend money on, what risks to take in one’s own life.

Under regimes dominated by the dream of building a completely new society, the state makes the major evaluations. Very little room remains for the ordinary exercise of the appraising imagination that normal people possess. Everything becomes frozen at the level of those in power, whose imaginations are limited by ideology and self-interest. The state eliminates space for development in philosophy, art, and science because these threaten its control. A state willing to usurp the faculties of those it rules, preventing them from thinking, working, and discovering freely, has already proved itself barbarous.

In a healthy political system, a free and civilized one, individuals have scope for a wide range of practical acts of appreciation and evaluation. The system is designed by experience rather than theory to enable people to live this way. The individual functions both as a fact and as a social institution. Society benefits from the little evaluative acts of every member. Law exists to make people free in the way people should be free, as opposed to anarchic freedom or the false freedom that communism claims to offer.

Most of the world remains a mystery. Consciousness is a small clearing in a vast forest. Each individual has a unique relationship to this larger mystery and special discoveries to contribute. By definition, discovery is unpredictable. It is absurd for the state to foreclose the process of learning by declaring all mysteries solved. This attitude resembles the congressman who introduced a bill over a century ago to close the Patent Office because every possible invention had already been created.

The world is inexpressibly complex. Every individual presents a mystery to every other person. Communication is difficult and fleeting. The past is also a mystery. Very little of it can be permanently possessed. Societies maintain continuity through various devices: words, rituals, records, commemorations, and laws. These provide continuity against the constant dissolution caused by death and forgetting.

Resisting change is not the conservative aim. Rather, the question concerns what should be salvaged from the passage of time. Conservation is labor, not idleness. It requires discrimination to identify and save certain strands of tradition as the endless flow of change continues.

Conservation cannot be achieved through sheer conscious effort. Most of it must happen through habit. People speak in ways that allow themselves to be understood without others having to consult dictionaries. In this way, language, a strand of tradition, retains some permanence. People observe their laws largely by habit. It would be far too burdensome to consciously learn new language or new laws every day. Habit allows many things to remain implicit, letting people deal with ordinary situations without fully understanding every element.

Habits of conservation depend heavily on affection for one’s way of life, which always includes far more than any person can be consciously aware of at any given moment. People speak their language and observe their laws habitually. Only a madman would propose changing the entire environment, attempting to build a wholly new society, or speak as if such a thing were even possible. And yet this has become the current political idiom, completely out of touch with traditions whose benefits are taken for granted and not appreciated.

The Role of Moral Habits in Political Systems

Any political and legal system must be based on the moral habits of its citizens if it aims at anything more than raw power. The maxim that the government is best which governs least is not a yearning for anarchy. Rather, it means that the best laws are those requiring minimal enforcement apparatus. This ideal works when laws reflect deep-rooted ways of life.

The foolishness of Prohibition demonstrated this principle clearly. The law pitted itself against deeply rooted habits and preferences. Socialism makes the same mistake on a vastly larger scale. Burke stated the problem with clarity: no person can bring himself to such presumption as to regard his country as nothing but blank canvas upon which he may write whatever he wishes.

The conservative is not embarrassed by the particular character of his traditions. The conservative loves these traditions precisely because they are particular. The liberal, by contrast, feels passionate about eliminating traces of Christianity from law. Yet Christianity has formed our very ideas of law. Accepting this historical fact is no more establishing religion than writing laws in English is discriminating against those who do not speak English. Christianity forms the basis of our moral vocabulary. Anyone doubting this should try imposing the U.S. Constitution on a Muslim or Hindu country.

Attempts to root Christianity out of our political tradition resemble efforts to eliminate Latin-derived words from English dictionaries. These Christian elements remain embedded even when not noticed. There is little point in attempting to remove them or add more of them. The tradition incorporates such implicit elements that Joseph de Maistre correctly spoke of the profound idiocy of supposing nations can be constituted with ink alone.

Yet liberalism constantly tries to do exactly this. It manufactures new laws and new rights while repealing old ones with equal facility. The liberal regards the past with contempt and shame, describing it as the dead hand of the past. Naturally, such an attitude inspires no affection, leaving nothing to admire. The liberal reserves affection for kindred spirits, particularly socialists abroad who are busy imposing new schemes and cutting their nations’ ties to the past.

Part II: The Rule of Law

Understanding Civil Society and Civility

Political conservatism is fundamentally focused on the rule of law. This may seem obvious and non-controversial, yet the rule of law is a highly specific concept, not always rightly understood and already seriously corrupted.

The secular way of life of the West is summed up in the term civility. Civility means far more than simple courtesy. It describes a particular kind of relationship among people that differs from other coexisting relationships like kinship, friendship, or business partnership. It also differs fundamentally from incompatible relationships like slavery, feudal obligation, or socialist comradeship.

Civility is the relationship among citizens in a republic. It corresponds to the condition we call freedom, which is not merely the absence of restraint or coercion. Rather, freedom means the security of living under commonly recognized rules of conduct. Not all these rules are enforced by the state. Legal institutions of civility depend on an ethical foundation and collapse when this foundation is absent. Colloquial civility as good manners is directly relevant to political civility. Citizens typically deal with each other through consent, requiring them to say please and thank you.

The hermit in the desert might be free in a trivial sense, able to do as he likes without interference because he exists without society. Civility, however, represents the kind of freedom humans can enjoy socially. This is the freedom that matters to civilized people.

The civil condition is natural to human beings. It is not a dream or utopian fantasy, but something actually realizable and partially realized constantly. It is anything but utopian, even though perfect realization remains elusive.

Friedrich Hayek observed that humans are by nature rule-observing creatures who even observe rules they cannot formulate. People sitting in a restaurant relaxing together are effortlessly keeping numerous rules without directing conscious attention toward them: taking turns speaking, keeping noise reasonable, giving each other the benefit of the doubt, suppressing unflattering observations. If all rules required conscious effort or maximum enforcement vigilance, social life would be impossible. A large influx of outsiders uninitiated into local rules causes disturbance for exactly this reason.

If civility is natural to humans, why is civil society so rare? Civility is rarely totally absent, but usually also far from perfect. Most social and legal orders have some form of stratification based on race, caste, religion, or something else. Members of one group often feel they owe members of other groups different ethical consideration. Groups may secede from the civil condition or participate in it fraudulently. The Mafia endures because members keep their own rules among themselves while violating the rules of the broader polity. Otherwise civil societies have excluded some people from normal membership, as America once did with black people.

Any group owes its cohesion to commonly accepted rules. What distinguishes the modern West is its moral ambition to include every competent individual in civic membership. In ancient times, liberty was a special status. Hardly anyone imagined it as potentially universal or as a natural right.

Harry Jaffa observed that the Founding Fathers used free and equal as synonyms. They saw no tension between these terms, but rather understood them as truly one. Men were free in being equal, and equal in being free. Free meant being free from subjection to arbitrary will, whether of monarch or slaveholder. Slavery was an anomaly bound to cause trouble if not eliminated.

Laws, Commands, and Corruptions of the Rule of Law

The expanded legislation of recent times has obscured understanding of law’s true character. Aristotle observed that ideally there should be few laws, seldom changed.

This principle holds for several reasons. Laws are best that require minimal enforcement, laws rooted in the moral habits of citizens who respect their permanence. This sort of respect should not be presumed upon or wasted by imposing trivial laws. A law passed yesterday cannot command the same assent as a law existing for centuries.

Laws also serve the general function of making social life predictable. If the law itself becomes unpredictable, it loses its appropriate character. Even an imperfect law may gain authority through time as people take it into account and base private arrangements on it. Familiarity is a supreme virtue in a rule. Reformers ignoring this reality often cause more harm than good. Their improvements can prove destructive.

Positive law should seem to be discovered from or elicited from shared moral understandings rather than imposed through an effort of will. The very nature of civil equality makes it wrong for one part of the community to use legislation as an instrument of special interests. This practice makes the rest of the community subject to the arbitrary will of those controlling the legislature, a circumstance the Constitution’s Framers were anxious to avoid.

An important distinction exists between laws and commands. Laws are impersonal rules, general and disinterested, typically negative in form. They do not specify what substantive actions people must perform, but rather attach conditions to whatever courses of action people choose. Commands, by contrast, are positive expressions of will. They leave no alternatives. Laws are observed. Commands are obeyed.

Living under the rule of law makes one a citizen. Living under commands makes one a subject or even a slave. This distinction is real and important. One major corruption of the rule of law occurs when many contemporary state actions are actually commands masquerading as laws. American government at all levels forces some people to serve others’ purposes, particularly through misuse of the taxing power.

Taxation increasingly has become a method of confiscation. The old sense of taxation as a fee collected from everyone to pay for government serving no faction has been lost. Now taxation simply means all revenue the state collects, including growing portions not used by government itself but given to powerful private interests.

Frédéric Bastiat offered a simple test for whether state power is abused: using public means to do what would plainly be criminal if done privately. If the state taxes Peter to benefit Paul, then it is robbing Peter on Paul’s behalf. This practice is so normalized that people routinely speak of increases in Social Security as though no moral principle were at stake.

When people do justify such state action, they often invoke compassion or the need to protect the weak, or they claim that democratic process legitimates the action. But these justifications deserve scrutiny.

Those in power obviously represent politically powerful interests when they provide government money to large numbers of people. Those people might be individually weak but at the ballot box are stronger than those outnumbered or unorganized. This is plain.

The rule of law by its nature protects the weak. Strong and weak are relative terms. A heavyweight champion might be weak compared to a dwarf with a pistol. Even in a nominally egalitarian socialist society, those doing the equalizing are far from equal to those being equalized.

Genuine rule of law treats people alike, impartially. This is all the protection the weak can rightly demand. Majority rule easily degenerates into another form of the rule of the strong.

A major source of confusion is simple misunderstanding of law’s nature. Those unable to distinguish between rules and commands in principle fail to distinguish them in practice. Some people, like Lenin, acknowledge the distinction yet cynically view laws as merely commands masquerading as rules. The real question from this perspective is who will do what to whom. This view goes back to Plato, who puts into the mouths of Thrasymachus and Gorgias the claim that justice is nothing but the interest of the strong.

From this perspective, existing societal rules were made by the strong for the strong and are inherently exploitative. The weak need protection not through maintaining rules but through making exceptions. The fluidity of who constitutes the weak creates confusion, yet liberalism continues making zigzagging demands of the law.

In 1964, liberalism sought and obtained a federal civil rights law seeming to have the neutral character of real law, understood to mandate color blind behavior. Then liberalism demanded the law be applied in color conscious ways, implying that the previously promised color blind application would be essentially discriminatory. A law impartial in form became a device for racial privilege. Citizens who supported the law expecting it to protect the weak found themselves told that its application would favor the strong.

The argument that confiscatory or factionally favorable legislation is sanctified by democratic process confuses additional issues. Democracy is a principle of succession. It rests on the reasonable notion that people have the right to choose or consent to their government officers. This can prevent tyranny by stripping the state of immunity from the discontent of the ruled.

But democracy cannot make right what is inherently wrong. It cannot authorize government to exceed proper limits. A principle of succession says nothing about the nature of the office undergoing succession. It ensures orderly authority transfer. It cannot expand authority beyond the rule of law’s rational limits.

If rights are unalienable, no government, regardless of popularity, may abridge them. A people cannot rightly choose Communism even by unanimous vote. Even if this absurd right existed, people would have no right to abolish rights for descendants.

No majority has ever wanted everything decided by majority rule. Democracy succeeds when it helps secure personal liberty. The end of political liberty is private liberty.

The Framers envisioned a kind of democracy designed to achieve liberty, filtering devices intended to prevent 51 percent from pushing 49 percent around. They hoped republican virtue would check factional interests, but provided structural filters assuming virtue might fail. Their main hope was that republican virtue would usually prevail and no majority would try to make life miserable for minorities.

It is forgotten that modern democracy originated in revulsion against arbitrary government. Majoritarian government’s ideal was providing a rule of law approximating unanimous consent as closely as possible. Consensus is not always possible, but it represents something to aim for. Some scholars argue that even Rousseau’s general will envisioned the state not as a vehicle for popular passion but as an institution restricted by consensus. This ideal has been trampled by special interest politics.

Bruno Leoni noted that the new meaning of legislation corresponds not to a common will presumed to exist in all citizens but to the particular will of certain individuals and groups lucky enough to have a contingent majority of legislators on their side at a given moment. Legislation increasingly resembles a diktat that winning majorities impose on minorities, often overturning long established expectations and creating completely unprecedented ones.

Such legislation can have negative effects on rules’ very efficacy and the homogeneity of feelings and convictions already prevailing in society. Instead of promoting stability as genuine law does, interest bound legislation undermines it.

This is extremely important because the state can never establish by decree what it must instead continue. The state cannot arbitrarily assign value to things either. People value things for their own reasons. That is what it means for something to be valued. One main consideration in how things are valued is their security and permanence, which the state can interrupt instantaneously but can only guarantee over the long run.

The chief warrant for thinking something will last is that it or similar things have already lasted. Crime devalues property the same way that confiscation or heavy taxation does. The prospect of confiscation reduces any wealth’s value quickly, even while short term political benefits attract many politicians. The democratic plague of inflation, devalued money, is the most vivid example.

The rule of law regularizes a pre existing manner of living. Harry Truman’s complaint about the do nothing Congress reflected a boor understanding little about his heritage and assuming the state should be incessantly engaged in legislation. Maintenance is demanding activity. The state maintaining a traditional order against all decay forces is not doing nothing. It is doing nearly all that can or should be asked.

The Distinction Between Civil and Enterprise Association

Oakeshott identified an important distinction in kind between civil association and enterprise association. This distinction has occurred to relatively few people yet traditional political conduct presupposes it.

Enterprise association arises whenever people unite to achieve a shared purpose: salvation, gain, victory, or charity. Enterprise association is generally regulated by some form of civil association, which arises when people of diverse purposes agree on framework procedural rules governing pursuit of their goals. A baseball team is enterprise association. The American League is more nearly civil association. This also corresponds to the difference between a law firm and a bar association.

One might think an underworld gang would represent pure enterprise association. Yet Lucky Luciano introduced civil association elements when he abolished the chaos of warring autocracies among the old bosses and instituted new federal structure recognizing territories, reducing open warfare, and replacing the boss of bosses with a nine man commission. By bringing more non Sicilians into mobs, Luciano even made organized crime open to talent. By making crime more civilized, he facilitated criminal enterprises’ success.

Oakeshott, Hayek, Raymond Aron, and Bertrand de Jouvenel identified two types of state. The state devoted to some enterprise such as conquest, redistribution, or economic growth is a teleocracy. The state confining itself to maintaining the rule of law is a nomocracy. Hayek also refers to these as end governed and rule governed states. Under teleocracy, laws become commands instrumental to achieving the state’s substantive purpose. Under nomocracy, the state has no overarching purpose. Its concern is purely the rule of law’s character. Citizens are united in civil association.

The United States is obviously an uneasy mixture of both types. It began as nomocracy but has increasingly become teleocratic. The Soviet Union approaches pure teleocracy. When talk turned to the two systems converging, Aron raised the pertinent question: why should the West, moving toward teleocracy, suppose this would induce Soviets to move toward nomocracy? He predicted what subsequently happened: the Soviet Union remained a system designed to achieve substantive goals. Current confusion has not abated. Even conservative commentator George Will enthusiastically claims government should give citizens a sense of being united in a great common enterprise.

Civility recognizes the moral priority of more intimate relations. Citizens do not owe fellow citizens the same obligations owed to family, friends, or those sharing one’s faith. Civic relations respect this order of duties and affections, as when spouses are excused from testifying against each other. In teleocratic regimes, everything collapses into political membership. Children may be ordered to inform on parents or removed from those who subvert their loyalty to the state, such as parents teaching religion. The Soviet Union fostered a cult honoring Pavel Morozov, a boy reporting his father to secret police during Stalin’s purges and killed by furious relatives.

Most teleocracies lack such ruthlessness, usually leaving some personal loyalties untouched. But when the state’s purposes become the governing purposes for all, such enormities become at least possible. Will correctly emphasizes the primacy of private life. That is what the rule of law is fundamentally about. If being happy at home is the end of all human endeavor, then political health consists in a legal system governed by the modest recognition that this may be so.

Liberalism has made teleocratic assumptions the lingua franca of American politics. Speaking of a war on poverty, most people feel troubled by reservations about such grandiose ambitions but do not know how to respond. Civility is a subtle refinement. By their very nature, civil relations are not primary in anyone’s life. Most people have no idea how even to begin resisting political demands that would absorb these relations into a radically different social order. For the civil man, politics is a distinctly part time matter. For the political fanatic, politics is everything.

Civility is natural in that even a band of Gypsies living by theft and fraud need some rules among themselves. In the West, civility developed as a principle for cultural reasons. Christianity distinguished between the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s. Even secularization has advanced on Christian principles, showing up in the public/private distinction where the private is recognized as having certain inviolability.

This specific civility development has continued for a long time. John Murray Cuddihy points out that for certain latecomers to modernity, accustomed to more intimate cultural surroundings with few sophisticated differentiations, civil life’s impersonality becomes the ordeal of civility. Such people favor politics promising more immediate emotional rewards than civility offers: warmth, brotherhood, compassion, the comfort of leadership that cares about ordinary people. These people experience civility as coldness, inhumanity, and alienation.

During the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt converted such feelings into a new political coalition including immigrant groups and cultural natives whose faith in the rule of law had suffered shock. Roosevelt allegedly ended or led Americans through the Depression, though the truth is probably that he somewhat prolonged it. But for his admirers it mattered little. He really offered the image of a loving autocrat who would dispense with the rule of law if necessary to help ordinary people. He conveyed this disposition through cozy Fireside Chats. He was actually one of the great demagogues of the 1930s and dealt American constitutional government a blow from which it may never fully recover.

As Oakeshott reminds us, a rule does not initiate action. The rule of law cannot supply motive power. It can only support normal energies already existing in people. It may help maintain things’ value but is not a value source in itself.

No mere system of law can substitute for real people’s affections, desires, and imaginations. The project of building a new society is worse than idle. Governing is specific and limited activity easily corrupted when combined with anything else. Dreaming and ruling together generate tyranny. People dreaming of what government could accomplish generally fail to appreciate what it does.

Part III: Alienation and Political Disorder

Understanding Nativism and Alienism

Two fundamental attitudes toward social reality exist. One, called Nativism, represents a prejudice favoring the native, the normal, and such. Its extreme form manifests in lynchings and pogroms. German National Socialism represented its most ghastly expression.

The other attitude, called Alienism, represents a prejudice favoring the alien, the marginal, the dispossessed, and the eccentric. Its extreme form manifests in attempts to build new societies by destroying basic native institutions. Communism represents the most terrible fulfillment of this principle.

It might seem natural to assume Nativism would be more destructive because native forces would seem better situated to destroy the alien. However, history has not worked this way. What is clear is that Alienism is far from marginal. It offers malcontents of all sorts an ideology enabling them to interpret normal life maliciously as a crude struggle between oppressors and victims.

Alienism becomes gnosis that provides explanations for everything. If oppression is not obvious, it is because oppressors are cunning and victims are totally subjugated, with their very perceptual powers in thrall. The process of acquiring this liberating gnosis is called consciousness raising. This enables initiates to strip away oppressive structure masks and see capitalism as exploitation, freedom as repressive tolerance, and prosperity as invisible poverty.

Liberalism and Marxism are variant Alienist forms. Feminism and gay liberation are also Alienist. Liberalism accommodates sister ideologies without overtly endorsing them and insists that real peril always comes from some form of Nativism. This explains its obsession with the Nazi period, endless searches for old Nazis, wild alarm at eccentric neo Nazism expressions, and attempts to link enemies with Nazism. The liberal campaign against South Africa, whose racial caste system is far milder than tribal systems in places like Burundi, symbolically aims to identify a clear successor to Nazism. The scale of actual evil and suffering caused by apartheid has nothing to do with its liberal demonology status.

Americans do not have to choose between Nativism and Alienism. A healthy native is not an all out Nativist but has a code of hospitality and gallantry accounting for the alien’s position. The reasonable marginal member is not bound to be a fanatical Alienist, even though some want to inflame resentments. Both perspectives have stories to tell and can be accommodated by civility and the rule of law without privileges for either.

There is no militant Nativism to speak of in America, but there is militant Alienism with power in law, media, and academia. The fact that Alienism was nameless until now while invidious Nativist term abundance exists shows how thoroughly entrenched Alienism is.

The meaning of Alienism’s vocabulary changes with its aggressive success against traditional America. Once McCarthyism referred to smearing putatively innocent liberals as Communists. Recently, identifying Communists as Communists has earned victims the McCarthyism label.

Racism once referred to conscious discrimination against blacks by whites who would probably have agreed the term fit them. Now it intimidates opposition to racial quotas and busing by labeling people still holding the old liberal position, that the state should be color blind, as racists.

Shakespeare was well acquainted with alienation. Several major characters are social malcontents. But he takes a different liberal culture view: he depicts them less as victims than troublemakers. While allowing eloquent say, Richard III, Shylock, Iago, and Edmund remain villains despite their situations. Their societies must deal sternly with them. Their self rationalizations mean nothing when things matter. Whatever just resentments their situations generate, they are expected to behave themselves.

Coriolanus is more magnificent and monstrous than other malcontents. When finally cut down, his tragedy lies in creating his own doom despite wrongdoing. America, morally conditioned by liberalism, cannot maintain such objectivity about evildoers bearing victim credentials. All have had consciousness raised willy nilly. Serious moral criticism of ethnic and sexual subcultures is pretty much taboo despite unpleasant visible facts.

Alienism will accept nothing less than completely inverting the normal perspective. Jean Francois Revel captured this arresting theme: Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power works to destroy it. The native in the West has accepted the Alienist critique with remarkable passivity. His morale is at an all time low. He regards tolerating people wanting to destroy his way of life, prey on his children, and desecrate what he held sacred without even voicing objection as his duty.

Alienism even had a hit TV show, All in the Family, whose message was that the native American is a bigot and buffoon. Archie Bunker had a liberal son in law providing live in moral monitoring who corrected his grammatical and political solecisms. Archie used double negatives and voted Nixon and Reagan.

Ronald Reagan himself committed what Alienism considers the ultimate solecism by describing the Soviet Union as an evil empire and the focus of evil in the modern world. He had affronted Alienism’s great earthly embodiment. The Soviet Union is not evil to liberals. It is an embarrassment. Far more terrible than Nazi Germany at massive scale, it cannot receive the direct moral attention Reagan gave it. It is a reality we must learn to live with. Its stupendous crimes are consigned to unreality by liberalism. All liberal South Africa protest is a concerted distraction from history’s supreme moral horror, liberalism’s near relation in Moscow, which can neither be acknowledged nor completely disowned.

The Evolution and Mechanisms of Alienism

Nativism is the belligerent moral self assertion of the native. Alienism is the subversive insistence that something is wrong with the world. Comparing them is illuminating, but they are not exactly parallel. Alienism is subtler and can exercise more discretion in deciding where to strike.

One principal Alienist target is capitalism, a blanket term for free economy. Because attacking all economic transactions simultaneously is impracticable, liberalism issues general wealth distribution inequality condemnation while targeting vulnerable points. By calling overall wealth distribution unjust, it authorizes itself to call for state intervention anywhere without bothering to specify final desired distribution.

Private transactions embody greed. State redistribution programs to liberal client groups represent compassion. In good gnostic fashion, liberalism damns the entire material world but redeems selected parts through piecemeal collectivization.

Like any political machinery, liberalism distributes booty among favored dependents in victim succor guise. Its moral pretensions are so successful and claims of idealism so unchallenged that nobody thinks to call the liberal machinery a greed and corruption system.

The gnosis comprehensively denies that anyone in a free economic system can ever earn or deserve income. Accepting normal market success legitimacy would require accepting the normal, violating every Alienist principle. Liberalism prefers establishing a tacit standard no capitalist could possibly reach.

One highly successful Alienist strategy establishes standing guilt presumption against the native. His motives are always questioned. His racism and bigotry are just beneath the surface. But the native is forbidden this game. Suggesting certain Alienist forces are not on the up and up means thinking Communists are under every bed. His bad faith can be inferred from discrimination patterns. He must make good faith efforts to cleanse himself before Alienist arbiters of good faith.

Kenneth Minogue’s study of Alienist ideology and techniques in his book Alien Powers is excellent. According to Minogue, ideology typically interprets the whole world under power aspects, with every concrete situation in oppressor and victim terms. A key strategy assumes both insight and honesty monopoly. The ideologue thus positions himself as the privileged accuser, always judging, never judged. Ideological thought structure is heads I win, tails you lose.

The native American has fallen for this con. He accepts the most malicious construction of his own words and acts while extending courteous doubt benefit to enemies. Alienist motives are never questioned. The native lets Alienism take his wallet and not even count the change. He grumbles a little each April 15 but never connects liberal ideology, government spending, and his own tax rates. He least suspects how those people he constantly tries to assure of good intentions actually hate him.

Liberalism has succeeded brilliantly in controlling the perspective from which public discussion proceeds. It speaks piously of Left and Right extremes, that is Communism and Nazism, Alienism and Nativism, while actually only equating these two extremes tactically to help one: it conceals its own Left alignment while assigning conservative critics to the Right.

Part IV: The Socialist Phenomenon and Strategy

Socialism as Pure Alienism

Socialism is the pure expression of Alienism. It rejects in principle the entire current and traditional societal form and insists on total transformation. To accomplish this, it must replace consent with unlimited state power.

Those espousing democratic socialism are either fools or time servers. They refuse to acknowledge that socialism, a total coercion system, is incompatible in principle with civility.

To say only this is to be harsh. Humanly speaking, there exists a naive and excusable socialism, a notional socialism occurring to everyone at certain moments, as when King Lear’s blinded Gloucester prays that gods punish the rich to teach them compassion for the poor, so distribution should undo excess and each person have enough. But for some people such sentiments become the beginning of a political career.

At one time it was plausible thinking socialism could be instituted with just and happy results. Young George Orwell predicted mechanical progress would greatly increase once socialism was established. But that was in the 1930s. Today socialism must be fired by different motives.

The best motive is weariness with the world as it is, a world of contention containing both surplus and need. One need not be utopian to lament this situation, but the error propelling men toward socialism is blaming everything on production forces.

The naive mind sees capitalism as anarchy, unbridled competition in which desire distorts distribution patterns. Reasoning that the earth is abundant enough for everyone but the price system prevents equal need satisfaction, it concludes that controlling demand will direct supply to proper recipients.

What this view overlooks is that a price system itself tames desire. Desire exists regardless. It can be satisfied through rape and pillage or even stimulated by such opportunities. The rule of law forces desire to find satisfaction in compromise and consent.

A price system is one consent mechanism. As Tom Bethell put it, a price is the agreement point between buyer and seller. Eliminate such mechanisms and desire will take other forms than monetary offers. A warrior society or band of Gypsies may find its satisfaction modes, but neither encourages production.

The naive socialist imagines abstract humanity in which all desires are roughly identical and people produce steadily without varying motives like status striving, revenge, worship, diverse lust forms, and envy, all the things making this world messy. The socialist is obsessed with single motive greed, which he misconceives as blamable for our problems and controllable through imposed order. He fails seeing these random motives persist. Furthermore, he fails seeing that socialist systems actually give some worst motives new scope.

In the Soviet Union, power lust unites with greed in the ruling class enjoying privilege and wealth despite worker comradeship, whose production it appropriates for itself. The naive socialist has given little attention and much less indignation to this exploitation form, though the Soviet laborer is virtually a slave, forced accepting state set wages far lower than Western laborer wages and forbidden striking or emigrating.

Socialism’s moral prestige is such that we are still warned about capitalism excesses after tens of millions of people were exterminated under socialist regimes. It makes no difference that socialism’s actual record is terribly bloody. Socialism is forever judged by its promises and supposed possibilities while capitalism is judged by worst cases. It also makes no difference that immigration to America peaked during capitalism’s freest period when its robber barons were politically powerful and sometimes criminal, or that socialism not only attracts no immigrants but must hold native populations captive.

The historical record turns dictionary socialism definitions into jokes. The reality extends far more comprehensively than government means of production control. It extends even to state control of reproduction means. China has recently revealed not only mandatory contraception but forced late term abortion.

True, socialism begins with a command economy. But it does not stop there. It cannot because socialism is by nature anti civil. A price system is civil because a price is a compromise between two free equal agents. A command system is uncivil because whoever commands imposes their will on those commanded. It matters not whether the strong party calls the weak party comrade. Under socialism, some enjoy the socialist planner position. The rest have the unenviable New Socialist Man role.

Not all socialist theorists are fanciful. Robert Heilbroner was unusually frank facing what socialism entails. Like most fellow believers, he envisioned a wholly new society free of invidious striving built on cooperation and confraternity motives. His candor appeared in identifying the necessary means.

Heilbroner was well aware socialism’s real enemy is the entire way of life of people it would transform. He devoted several lines to non economic measures necessary for hoisting a backward people into the wholly new society.

Economic development objectives do not lie exposed like military citadels to a single daring campaign. Instead, the development assault is better likened to a long grueling march through hostile hinterland. Real resistance to development comes not from old regimes quickly overcome but from masses who must be wrenched from established ways and pushed, prodded, cajoled, or threatened into heroic efforts, then systematically denied well being increases so capital can accumulate for future growth. This painful whole culture reorientation, judging by past experience, will be difficult or impossible without severity measures. When we add the need to maintain participation fervor beyond initial spontaneous enthusiasm, stringent opposition limitations necessity and forcible economic cooperation assurance seems virtually unavoidable.

Some nations, unfortunate in resource endowment or political industrialized nation connections, may be forced undergoing more or less total totalitarian transitions.

Generally, projecting socialism problems in underdeveloped areas, we cannot sidestep the probability that intellectual stiflement, political repression, and enforced social conformity will figure prominently.

This sounded like Cambodia 1975 forecast or prescription. But Heilbroner left no doubt that at his grim cost accounting end, the dream was worth all the blood.

Taking socialism seriously means more than acknowledging difficulties as a political movement. It means understanding that socialism expresses a collective mankind hope, its idealization conception of itself as capable. When socialism’s fires no longer burn, it will mean mankind has extinguished that hope and abandoned that ideal.

Here we have a rare case of a socialist really laying his cards out, explicit in his contempt for both physical suffering and cultural loss imposed by new society pursuit. This requires little comment, but we may note it is ideologue typical to treat socialism as a universal mankind aspiration, with all habits, customs, beliefs, and desires obstruction of this supposed aspiration as mere dross.

Endowed with universalism, the socialist dream gains its imperialism right. If purges and forced marches are necessary, they will happen.

Modern socialism’s history illustrates Burke’s dictum that criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred. And yet the thing has somehow kept moral credentials as the political idealism model. We still give proponents credit for good intentions instead of condemning their blind arrogance and others’ power hunger. We apologize on human nature’s behalf for its failure to live up to the socialist ideal instead of condemning socialism for violence it inflicts on human nature.

We even let socialists escape by disowning actual socialism results. We allow them saying more grisly results are excesses to distinguish from essences never realized, or that socialism has been betrayed when it has only been remorselessly applied.

Various socialism forms took root in Europe between wars. To this day, European democracies have powerful socialist parties. But American socialist parties never won more than tiny national vote fractions. This might lead one thinking the socialist plague missed us. Unfortunately, it has not.

True, nominal socialist parties have stayed weak. But this means only that the socialist label lacks popular appeal, not that the socialist impulse does not exist. That impulse has merely adopted disguises and indirect means.

America’s socialism ideological form has been liberalism. Its political vehicle has been the Democratic Party. Unlike what we might call wholesale revolutionary or programmatic socialism forms, liberalism is a retail form. It brings socialism piecemeal, dividing politics into discrete issues and choosing the collectivist option at each turn.

Modern liberalism is careful not to embrace socialism totality, but it has no line drawing method against total collectivization and does not want one. It condemns as ideological any principled socialist opposition, admires socialist experiments abroad, and treats anti Communism rather than Communism as the major peace threat. In any socialist and anti socialist forces conflict, liberalism blames the latter if it plausibly can. By now its behavior has shown itself so reliable that Europeans matter of factly explain to each other that when Americans say liberal they mean what Europeans mean by socialist. This is said not as accusation but simple translation.

Liberalism used to mean devotion to certain procedural freedoms, making the semantic perversity of taking it for coercive collectivism cause a feat. Most liberals do not fully realize what they have done. They prefer thinking themselves engaged in expanding personal freedoms. They therefore use procedural rhetoric masking a substantive agenda: civil rights, civil liberties, sexual freedom, choice freedom, economic democracy.

They insist their social engineering programs are pragmatic regardless of program failure or backfiring and deny any overall drift. But under everything, socialism contours can be seen.

Igor Shafarevich points out in his book The Socialist Phenomenon that socialism is only the modern word for a perennially recurring power formation. Socialist regimes have appeared in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, in medieval Catharite communities, in South America under both Incas and Jesuits, in post Reformation Europe, and of course over the last two centuries. They have had common structural features: power concentration in equality name, individualism annihilation, wives community or free love, and private property abolition.

Socialism consistently attacks three basic social institutions offering independent action, loyalty, and authority bases that impede state monopoly power: private property, family, and religion. Marxism attacks these things directly: confiscating property, breaking families, and persecuting worshippers. It may be forced coming to terms with all three to avoid collapse, but in early phases it tries abolishing them, accepting them later only as state subdivisions.

Liberalism avoids direct attack. It prefers subverting property, family, and religion gradually, undermining definitions rather than attempting open violence.

The socialist oversoul governing modern liberalism appears in the American Civil Liberties Union, that most typical liberal organization. Despite rhetorical state encroachment resistance, the ACLU has not opposed collectivization slightly. Its national board members have been Communists, and the ACLU was founded principally to advance Communist and socialist causes. Founder Roger Baldwin stated that Communism was the goal. He said the Soviet Union needed no civil liberties organization because workers already ruled.

The ACLU eventually distanced itself from Communism. Baldwin repented his pro Soviet days. But it has always opposed the Left conceived state: the capitalist interests’ servant state. For this reason the ACLU has regularly sided with unions, tenants, and protestors against private property claims. It has sided with sexual deviants, children, and feminism against the family’s privileged status. It has sided with unbelievers and deviants against religion and private religious institutions.

All this is not saying the ACLU is always wrong. Only that its passion structure betrays its conception as a socialist enterprise. One of the few occasions it sided with parental authority was sponsoring Walter Polovchak’s parents who wanted taking their unwilling son back to the Soviet Union. Of course many clients have been Communists. It has tried demonstrating evenhanded free speech concern by defending Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen, but its strategic goal has always been promoting agitation and subversion. Besides, no Nazi or Klan member has ever sat on its national board.

In good liberal fashion, the ACLU tries presenting itself as conservative, affecting to defend our constitutional rights. But its rights concern has been purposefully uneven. Though it wants expanding certain rights, the pornographers’ expression freedom for instance, it has shown no desire expanding the right to keep and bear arms or even defending it against gun control laws. Nor is it interested in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments as federal expansion bulwarks. On the other hand, it vigorously supported the Equal Rights Amendment though the ERA was never ratified. This proves the ACLU is not simply engaged in preserving the Constitution as it exists, but is bent on filling selected Constitution provisions with socialist substance regardless of original meaning.

In broader sense, it is obvious the ACLU and liberalism generally are not concerned with preserving the Constitution’s actual sheltering way of life. We may recall Burke’s words about French Revolution sympathizers behaving as if our Constitution were altercation rather than enjoyment subject. These are restless people, sometimes unaware of their own motives, not explicitly aiming at socialist outcomes, but deeply alienated from normal American social affections and feeling that old arrangement change compulsion is itself a moral virtue.

Such people find it hard enjoying or appreciating normal social life. They see it as a perpetual spreading emergency in which, if apocalypse is not immediately looming, at least we face crucial freedom devotion test cases. If some misfit or malcontent, Communist, homosexual, or radical feminist is not accommodated by law, all freedoms are endangered. Day to day freedoms everyone constantly exercises count next to nothing. These people take no prosperity satisfaction. Pockets of poverty, though poverty is only relative, make general wealth scandalous.

These people are not only restless. They will allow the majority no repose. We must never congratulate ourselves on what we have already achieved and inherited. If our common possessions have value, they are currently threatened by a Republican Administration, a Moral Majority, or some similar fascist menace. Witchhunts and Inquisitions, though never the Gulag, are always imminent.

Liberal book titles tell this story by tone: The Fate of the Earth, The Closing Circle, The Population Bomb, Our Endangered Rights, Friendly Fascism, The Second Civil War. Though apocalypse sentiment is fashionable, the threat never comes from the socialist tyrannies ruling half the earth. The preferred enemy, as James Burnham put it, is always to the right. The white race is history’s cancer. The entire male sex conspires against women. Ronald Reagan launched a new class war. Nestlé’s kills babies and Jerry Falwell would deprive us of baby killing rights.

Liberalism has been in hysteria for two decades, not only because this is its mood but because it cannot imagine equilibrium states. It constantly tends toward socialism without being able even to idealize socialism. It is process obsessed without clear nature or normality vision. Lacking such vision, it cannot appreciate good right under its nose.

Shafarevich thinks socialism is driven by a death wish, a secret humanity annihilation desire. This may or may not be so, but we need no such hypothesis. We can certainly say that what distinguishes the liberal is an ordinary life rhythm pleasure incapacity. It is hard imagining a liberal taking Montaigne introspection enjoyment, politics, fashion, and competition removed, willing to be eccentric in solitude and finding human folly pageant amusement.

The liberal may not wish death, but it is hard for the conservative understanding why he is so anxious preserving a life that liberal rhetoric suggests is always precarious and never fulfilled. Is there never to be a moment for harvest and thanksgiving, for idleness or celebration? Apparently not. Although liberals are generally intelligent people, even what we call intellectuals, they have a remarkable causes and slogans penchant in which their individuality is submerged and whatever expression powers they may have seem sacrificed in positive cliché aspiration, as if they feel their ready made phrases gain authority through repetition. Not only do they form independent minds herds. They are always in stampede, marching, petitioning, chanting. They are accused of elitism, but they are happiest feeling themselves part of surging masses.

In fact one important and malign American culture development is that the scholar living the mind life in relative event seclusion has been displaced by the intellectual trying to conscript scholarship for mass movements. The intellectual is wrongly seen as living in an ivory tower. He is in the streets, an activist. The problem is not that the liberal intellectual criticizes America. Self criticism even conservatism needs. But he criticizes by wrong criteria. He blames America not for departing from traditions but for adhering to them. He measures her against socialism false ideals, less because he is a conscious socialist than because he does not know how to criticize socialist criteria themselves. They are all he has.

The Jews are a highly self critical people, but they judge by centripetal standards: Are we acting loyally? The liberal American, by contrast, demands not loyalty intensification but attenuation of his country. He sneers at patriotism notions and demands subversive tolerance while wanting local attachments dissolved in generalized humanity concern waters. For him, American history is largely sin records against blacks, Indians, dissenters. At times it seems his only identity is shame’s negative one. He is, as I say, alienated, a native alien sort.

The Liberal Strategy and Tactics

Socialism is usually discussed in terms of alleged ideals like social justice and most conservative rebuttal takes showing it does not work: the socialism supposed ideals are not realized under socialism. This is true enough, but it is relevant noting that socialism enthusiasts have never felt disappointed enough to abandon the dream. For the socialist ruling class, socialism works very well.

Nothing is more obviously characteristic of the socialist impulse than wealth redistribution desire. But the end, social justice, is less important than the means, the power to control an entire economy. In its raw wholesale form, socialism confiscates outright. Land is seized, major landowners are shot, and farming is state supervised collectivized. The state takes the produce and unilaterally sets farmworker wages at considerable profit to itself. Since there are no competing employers bidding for workers’ services, workers have no choice but accepting what they are given. This is, of course, enslavement.

Trotsky appreciated this practical advantage. When the state is the sole employer, he remarked that disobedience means slow starvation death. The Soviet Union actually starved about seven million Ukrainian farmers during the early 1930s implementing what Stalin blandly called his collective farm policy against recalcitrant elements.

Those seeking power have natural interest in creating self dependence on themselves. Where limited government and the rule of law prevail, politicians can only do this limitedly through appointments and some patronage. In this regard, socialism opened new vistas. Where the state can command an entire economy, it can make millions dependent on it for life itself. It is in this sense that socialism works, and the socialist ruler is not necessarily inconvenienced by the scarcity the system causes. The more desperate people are, the more at his mercy they are. Why should he want them to enjoy leisure and independent means? Rebellion has hatched in such circumstances.

Liberalism, retail socialism, does not seek direct property confiscation. Although it furtively admires such policies abroad, it knows they would create bitter enemies and organized opposition in America. It prefers incremental measures: progressive taxation, piecemeal redistributive programs, private property use regulations, and inheritance taxes. It resents being identified as socialist and pretends its assorted measures are ideologically unrelated pragmatic. It proceeds gradually, masking the involved principle while being consistently guided by principle: at each step it moves toward socialism and furiously attacks any proposal rescinding its progress.

Liberalism is tactful. Its modus operandi is anesthetizing its victims. It rarely seizes already physically possessed property. It prefers intercepting wealth at transmission points through devices like withholding taxes, so the owner’s loss is regularized and made painless. It makes good inflation use. Combined with the graduated tax system, inflation drives the entire population into higher tax brackets without sudden tax increase necessity, bracket creep being liberalism’s Invisible Hand version. Since inflation makes retirement saving hard, the elderly become increasingly Social Security dependent, which can be adjusted upward by inflaters themselves to keep pace. The whole system is just complicated enough that not everyone comprehends it simultaneously, and those penetrating the fraud are only an electorate minority.

Any politician rash enough challenging dependency programs can be put in his place by fearful demagoguery spates calculated to terrify and enrage dependent voters. He will be accused of lacking compassion. If he tries representing taxpayer interests against these programs, which are likely unconstitutional at the federal level given the Tenth Amendment and Federalist Papers, he will be accused of representing greed and favoring the rich. Liberalism, of course, professes speaking for the poor, even though, given a choice between the poor and a program whose real effect is hurting the poor, it will choose the program.

The poor are to liberalism roughly what the proletariat is to Communism, a formalistic device for power assumption legitimating. For practical liberals what matters is not that the black illegitimacy rate nearly tripled since the Great Society beginning but that a huge new beneficiary class has been engendered, beneficiaries voting and feeling entitled to money taken from others. It is too seldom pointed out that a voter is a public official and that using proffered entitlements to win votes amounts to bribery. John Stuart Mill pronounced it axiomatic that relief recipients from the state should be disfranchised. But such a proposal would now be called inhuman, accounting for the federal spending gargantuan increase in size and scope.

Corrupt politicians make headlines. But no honest politician dares referring to corrupt voters who use the state as gain instruments. And nobody identifies such gain with greed. To hear liberalism talk, mostly uncontradicted by conservatism, greed is exclusively a private free exchange economy people’s vice. Compassion is identified with state redistribution. Greed, in short, means capitalism and compassion means socialism.

Conservatives have adopted various economic and pragmatic strategies coping with redistributionism. One highly publicized has been the supply side approach, arguing that revenue maximization way is reducing tax rates to certain optimum levels. High tax rates can be self defeating even from the tax collector’s viewpoint. True enough. But supply siders made the mistake thinking they were dealing with economists rather than ideologues. They argued that the goose given little more latitude would lay more golden eggs. But liberals did not want the golden eggs. They wanted the goose. It was principle matter, not utility, though perverse principle. Conservatives must stop being shy about arguing from the opposite principle.

Consider compassion word implications. As liberalism uses it, it implies that we owe a duty of sympathy payable in cash through the liberal regime to total strangers, a duty in other words dischargeable through redistributionism acquiescence. The simplest reply is that the world does not work this way, and it is morally presumptuous to censure nature for this fact. Even kindhearted people take no satisfaction in beheld paycheck portions taken in taxes regardless of whether they can infer that some money helped the poor. As far as they are concerned, the money is simply gone, they know not where, and the effort expended earning it was wasted. A futility sense ensues, the futility of all action divorced from knowable consequence and purpose. How can they feel compassion for others they cannot know or see? Who can possibly feel satisfaction looking at a gutted paycheck withheld portion?

There are natural sympathy limits, limits liberalism can only condemn, never respect. No reason exists to credit its attitude with idealism. A robin taking worms to every nest in the forest would not be an ideal robin. It would only be odd. Liberals are odd birds. They insist essentially that we should be ashamed of ourselves for being unable to pity strangers who are, as far as we are concerned, strictly hypothetical. We have no assurance that lost wealth taxes serve their alleged purposes. We are expected trusting politicians who themselves cannot be confused with Mother Teresa of Calcutta to act more compassionately than we ourselves would in normal life courses.

People will not exert themselves for the redistributionist state, not because they are selfish, but because they are rational. Acting means being purposeful. When a man does not even know what purpose his action has served, he hardly can be said to have acted. His effort has been rendered meaningless to him. He is, as Marxists would say, alienated.

It would be inadequate saying redistribution reduces profits. It deprives human action of the tangible results making it even intelligible. Working for money is already somewhat abstract activity. Working for money that strangers will spend on other strangers means the worker literally does not know what he is doing.

Any system disposing of wealth this way is demoralizing to its members from the start. It routinely asks of people an altruism that is not so much heroic as simply unnatural. It is idle seeking morality in a system rooted in fantasy. But positing fantasy as a norm is a useful mystification device, and liberalism has gained and consolidated power by alternately imposing new political obligations and releasing people from traditional family obligations. By this means it approaches total politicization of both society and personal identity.

For liberalism there is no stopping point. As a socialism species, it cannot draw a firm socialism line. It can only continue improvising new occasions and excuses for increasing state power. As Alienism a form, it keeps finding or inventing new exceptions undermining rules. It has kept a rich and overfed nation whose supermarket checkout counters have Miracle Diet tabloid racks gearing politics to poverty and hunger. When all else fails, liberal ideologues speak of invisible poverty and hidden hunger, in a reverse on the Emperor’s New Clothes. Michael Harrington, the great consciousness raiser in this department, urged us ignoring mere statistics, that is facts, and perceiving passionately.

We have been taught that we must tax Peter to feed Paul, even a suppositious Paul. It is hard not feeling that the liberal regards feeding Paul as mere taxing Peter excuse. He is not solving problems that always seem worse after he favors them with his attentions, but creating his own ideal order at whatever reality cost.

Nor has liberalism acknowledged any taxing power limitation. The good Lord asks only 10 per cent, lacking liberalism’s ambition. Now the taxing power is serious, since prison terms await tax evaders. Yet daily press brings stories of frivolous tax money use in reports of federally financed research on the goldfish love life and like. These reports amuse us but also intimate modern government anarchy. Anarchy, Chesterton reminds us, consists not in doing something irregular but in being unable to stop. And liberalism has no desire to stop.

Mill remarks that progressive taxation is a mild robbery form. Friedrich Hayek points out that it provides for no limitation and recommends as reform that the top tax rate apply to most citizens so they will not be tempted hurting others more than they are willing being hurt themselves. I voted for Mitterrand because he promised making the rich pay, a middle class French woman lamented to a reporter a few years ago. Now the government tells us that we are the rich.

George Will insists that we are undertaxed, an opinion shared only by our elected representatives. To say that is not so much to err as misstate the issue. The question is not how much the state should tax us but for what purposes. Which is another way raising the fundamental governing what government is for question. Governing, says Oakeshott, is specific and limited activity. When Federal Government powers were specific and limited, few and defined as Madison put it, taxes were low. They were held down not so much quantitatively as constitutionally, even philosophically. When government power is unfocused and unlimited, its taxing power will be correspondingly great.

Promiscuous taxation has turned us into a defendants nation. Not only property rights but privacy rights and innocence presumption have been casualties of the limitless state and its taxing power. Every adult citizen must give government a full annual financial account with the burden of proof resting on him if questions are raised.

This state of affairs ought to enrage us but does not. It evokes no leftist civil libertarian protest who see public school prayer threats to our precious liberties. We take for granted the liberal regime’s materialist premises so thoroughly that although religious inquisition ideas horrify us, an economic inquisition actuality, armed to extort highly personal information from us, is second nature. It may be that our Spanish Inquisition horror is due less to our liberty love than to our being an irreligious people. We accept the huge and frightening economic surveillance and enforcement apparatus much as most Spaniards probably accepted their Inquisition, as an unpleasant institution entailed nonetheless in a whole way of life. We acknowledge its right to do these things to us.

And yet we do not, not completely. The redistributive regime conflicts with our moral habits, even our nature, which is why so much menace and power must be mobilized against us. Tax evasion has become as common as Prohibition drinking. One survey found that three of every four people questioned would not turn in a tax cheat. Tax shelters, some permitted by the IRS and others more or less capriciously disallowed, have proliferated.

The person seeking a tax shelter has nothing to be ashamed of. The money, if honestly acquired, is his. He instinctively tries protecting it from federal bog absorption where it would lose identity, rationale, and would be channeled to heaven knows what purposes.

The money, in other words, was his property. It was proper to him. The Constitution Framers were emphatically partial not only to property rights but to acquiring property rights. One of the great eighteenth century political and legal battles concerned freeing property from primogeniture and entailment constraints limiting disposition and exchange rights. Property rights were truly rights to property rather than men rights to some extent. Our commercial republic, as it was called, was to honor and protect different and unequal property acquiring faculties, in other words, opportunity.

Property rights are hard justifying or even explaining to those beginning with a utopian disposition because property is always concrete, here and now, irregular and unequal, even incommensurable. It cannot be equated with its market value. Every human being needs possessing something, having a little material world sovereignty area to both express will and guarantee independence. Someone will have matter disposing power. Ownership is society’s acknowledgment of a continuing right of that power in a given individual. If it is not settled by law and convention, it will be settled by force. Stalin virtually owned the entire Soviet Union and everyone in it because there were no property rights. Property is, among other things, a freedom base. When it goes, freedom perishes.

Socialist rhetoric has done wonders obscuring property rights’ nature and positive value. It implies that these rights, because they are unequal in effect, are mere raw power expressions. But in fact they are safeguards against such power. Like all genuine laws and rights, they protect the weak against the strong. They proclaim that what a man owns cannot be taken without consent. They prevent the chaos of what Burke calls a general scramble for physical possession. It is not the rich and powerful property that needs protecting, but the poor property and the poor’s property acquiring right.

Socialism begins its course with an envious rich campaign but ends, of course, in universal subjugation. Acquisition opportunity, by contrast, is conducive to social peace. Tocqueville ascribed America’s domestic tranquility to the circumstance that property ownership was nearly universal. Everyone had something to enjoy, appreciate, and lose. Burke defended the English system as an essentially happy one because it leaves acquisition free but secures what it acquires.

Most Burke Reflections on the Revolution in France is a polemic against revolutionary confiscation and a property security vindication. Conservatives should pay close attention to his argument form. Though he was a fervent free market champion, Adam Smith said he found he had nothing to teach Burke, they agreed so closely, his emphasis is always on property rights and property security as the free and civilized society basis and tyranny’s first target. From that right and security, prosperity flows naturally. But our first political consideration should be property itself’s lawful security, not wealth maximizing. The free market derives from private property. It is impossible without it.

Calvin Coolidge said sagely that the prime element in any property’s value is the knowledge that its peaceful enjoyment will be publicly defended. In maintaining property rights, therefore, the state is not doing nothing. It is doing all it can do for liberty and prosperity alike.

The settled rule of law is therefore like a whole society high credit rating. The project of building a new society is vain in part because, although the state can destroy suddenly, permanence takes somewhat longer. The business of innovating, so widely assumed to be glorious political adventure, is usually a great vice. But in our time innovation has become a sort of venerable custom. Both Burke and Madison would have been shocked at the levity with which modern governments inflate their currencies. Sober men of their time rightfully recognized inflation as outright crime, the moral and virtual equivalent of private counterfeiting.

So committed was Burke to property rights and economic freedom that he denounced as immoral government measures to relieve famine. To his mind this was not callousness but strict political morality. If we disagree, we can at least appreciate from experience the readiness with which principle departures turn into permanent habits. When the state becomes absorbed in activities not proper to governing, it neglects its essential functions. The crime rate in America, a far worse problem for the poor than hunger, bears witness to that.

It is true, as liberalism says a little too often, that there are limits to property rights. But what liberalism really means, as its own practice testifies, is that there are no limits to property rights violation. There is always some excuse—safety, civil rights, poverty—for a new spending program, a new regulation. We have ceased regarding departures from the norm as abnormal. We have nearly forgotten what the norm is.

Redistribution can only consume wealth and dry up its springs. New wealth is created by imaginative men having property freedom and freedom to acquire and use it and the insight to appreciate natural objects’ latent value. It is the economic imagination entirely beyond economists’ calculations that turns natural objects into natural resources. Henry Ford created the Arabia oil wealth. Silicon Valley saw a world in a grain of sand.

The free market is a constant daily little acts arena of appreciation where people surrender bits of their property in exchange for things they value more. To the socialist mind, this is mere chaos, a maldistribution riot calling for firm correcting hand. To the buyers and sellers, it is an opportunity ocean to fashion their own worlds, domestic empires each with unique order types. It is a riot of happy sacrifices.

There is no reason to idealize the market, but there is every reason to appreciate it. The socialist cannot appreciate it because he cannot appreciate appreciation. But the market order, with all its irregularity and unpredictability, is better than any order he can envision. He denounces the profit motive while thinking his own power motive as innocent and even noble. To prosper as a capitalist, you must please people. To prosper as a socialist, you must threaten them. That distinction is worth appreciating too.

The market, in other words, is civil. Men meet there as free equals. The socialist tells them they are unfree and unequal, points a gun at them, and tells them they are now his equals. And for some reason the wretches are ungrateful.

But the market, even more than the voting booth, is a consent institution. Nobody has to accept another’s price. There, as Kenneth Minogue puts it, conflict is turned into competition under conduct rules. And this is what socialism finally fails appreciating. It can only interpret orderly competition as disguised conflict or coercion, not as an essentially different thing. It blames the very system that tames desire for inflaming desire. It fails seeing that desire is unquenchable. It fails comprehending its own desires and the conflict it reintroduces into civilized life. It seeks to protect by coercing, never dreaming that it is the very thing civilized men need protection from.

Part V: Family, Sexuality, and Civil Order

The Strategic Role of Sexual Liberation

The socialist vision of a social order in which all share with all, driven by what Robert Heilbroner calls new cooperation and confraternity motives, is sheer sentimentalism. But the socialist’s conception of the alternative—a society of unfettered greed and selfishness—is sheer cynicism. It is perfectly normal for people to share and take satisfaction in generosity. But they do not do so impersonally, anonymously, through the state medium. A man may give a million dollars to a specific child or charity, but he will not leave a single dollar in the street as a benevolence gesture to the next person arriving. Such undifferentiated bounty is not in our nature because we are rational creatures who like knowing what we are doing.

Love makes the world go round, true, but the love in question is not a boundless all mankind love, which may be an ideal of sorts but is pretty useless as a social norm. In the long run the most reliable love is family affection. This is neither altruistic nor selfish and therefore eludes the socialist’s false dichotomy. A man regards his children as self extensions. It hardly is selfish of him to work long hours to provide for them, enduring hardships that would strike a carefree bachelor as absurd short life waste. On the other hand, the father’s sacrifice is not what we regard as philanthropy because we understand that he has a certain emotional investment in his children.

This common and intermediate love makes up society’s fabric.

Since the 1960s America has learned in dear school experience what it would not submit to learning from tradition. Family breakdown means social disorder. We were told incessantly that poverty causes crime, even as crime rates soared along with general prosperity and special anti poverty measures. A more telling crime and illegitimacy correlation occurred, as fatherless young men terrorized the cities.

George Gilder points out that young single men making up only 13 per cent of the population commit 90 per cent of violent crime. An even more disproportionate number of these men have grown up with absent fathers. We should not need careful statistical studies confirming the intuition that children need parents giving them love and initiating them into the human race traditions. Anyone with warm parental memories will shudder with pity for those missing primal childhood affections, surely a worse deprivation than mere relative poverty.

And yet the Alienist disposition is so preoccupied with the hard case that it will sacrifice the family to succor the orphan. It is as if the family existence somehow constitutes an injustice to those without them. Families create what socialism calls privileges and accidents of birth and result in what socialism sees as gross inequities. Socialism is always correcting for the family, finding family fault and monitoring it for pathologies like wife beating, child abuse, and incest that can warrant state intervention. Children must be accorded rights against their own parents and education must be reformed on what Chesterton calls the principle that a parent is more likely cruel than anyone else. Sweden has even passed a law against parental cruelty defining spanking and harsh words as child abuse punishable by the state.

In natural reaction against this, conservatives are prone to glorify the family as if they had never heard of Agamemnon or King Lear. The truth, as C.S. Lewis reminds us, is that since Adam fell every human institution has had a fatal bad going tendency. Lewis points to the savage anti domestic literature typified by Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh arising in reply to Victorian family sentimentalization.

But the real fault is not in the family itself. It lies in human pride, egotism, sloth, blindness and all the other defects that can pervert our most intimate affections and make the home a hell even where there is nothing to provoke Swedish social worker attentions. We fail in love all the time. Real love, aptly defined as practical concern, takes patience, perseverance, imagination, restraint, and simple good manners.

The point is not that the family is perfect but that there is no substitute for it. If parents fail in domestic virtues, if children choose to misbehave, there is not much anyone can do. No social program could have saved King Lear.

The modern state, in trying to disregard, improve, or supersede the family, has done far more harm than good. Family violence in our time is almost a joke compared with the state violence. And part of the state harm lies in its attempts to liberate people from family ties while increasing its own demands on them.

Santayana remarked that the only thing the modern liberal wants to liberate man from is the marriage contract. And it is true that the liberal passion for sexual freedom seems an anomaly set against the liberal’s general penchant for augmenting state power at every turn. But Igor Shafarevich has explained the apparent anomaly as an essential feature of the socialist phenomenon.

Traditional sexual morality, Shafarevich says, makes the family a loyalty and authority locus. Sexual freedom breaks down the sacred kinship bonds and deprives sex of its sacramental character. It profanes. It reduces us to interchangeable mass units and destroys the intricate particular ties social structure that impedes state power. Every socialist movement has included a campaign for what is variously called sexual freedom, free love, or community of wives. Once in power, of course, a socialist regime may be prudish and puritanical. But this is only because it wants to regulate the populace’s breeding habits and control its general behavior, not because it wants to restore the family’s autonomy. The Soviet regime has conducted an erratic population policy: legalizing, banning, and then again legalizing abortion. It has promoted birth control and then encouraged even illegitimate births. There is no real inconsistency in these fluctuations. The very phrase population policy means that the birth rate has become a subject of state concern, one more production standard to be set by the authorities.

Liberalism may be faintly embarrassed by certain Communist policy twists, but it is essentially at home with the whole population policy idea. It looks on the statist approach to reproduction as progressive, though it dares being fully explicit only where backward nations are concerned. In domestic discussion, the liberal plays down state supervision prospects and stresses personal choice in premarital sex, homosexuality, birth control, divorce, and abortion. But he is not really indifferent to the choices people actually make. More or less consciously, he is aware that he is promoting some behavior forms at the expense of others.

Liberals profess being pro choice on abortion and resent being described as pro abortion. But when it transpired that Communist China has been imposing not only mandatory birth control but forced late term abortion, liberal objections were curiously muted. Some openly justified the Chinese policy on the grounds that China has a serious overpopulation problem. The state was assumed to have the prerogative deciding when a country is overpopulated and prescribing remedies. So much for choice. A group of liberal congressmen even had an amicable lunch with visiting Chinese population control program administrators.

Again and again we find proof in liberal behavior that liberalism is not what it pretends. It pretends being concerned with procedural freedoms, but its concerns nearly always turn out to mask a substantive agenda whose actual substance is socialist. This is the key to all the notorious liberal behavior double standards. Free speech is demanded for the Left’s subversive, the liberal assures us, not because he favors the Left but because all points of view should be heard. But as conservatives in liberal strongholds like the academy and mass media have discovered, the liberal will often take active measures preventing reactionary views from being heard. Behind every double standard lurks an unacknowledged single standard: promoting socialism.

Consider another apparent liberal behavior contradiction. The liberal argues for state subsidized abortion on the grounds that a woman who cannot afford exercising her abortion right is effectively denied that right. But when conservatives and those maverick liberals actually meaning what they say propose an educational voucher system enabling poor parents to choose their children’s schools, the liberal community abandons the logic it adopts for abortion. It condemns private education as a privilege while helping to keep it so, or as a racism subterfuge. What emerges from this contradiction is the inference that liberals do not regard parental education choice as a serious right.

A further inference is that liberals do not regard education itself as a parental prerogative. They want public schools to have a monopoly with some openly advocating private school abolition. They want those schools to be rigorously secularized with religion strictly excluded. What about parents regarding religion as central to education? The liberals’ answer is contained in their stony silence on this question.

The secularized public school, ironically, now enjoys an established church status. Everyone has to support it. If a dissenter prefers a different school system, he must pay for that himself. His doing so in no way diminishes his obligation supporting the established system. He can expect no sympathetic establishment keepers, only thinly veiled hostility.

It is instructive noticing when the liberal resorts to choice rhetoric and when he abruptly drops it. There is consistency behind his inconsistency. His alleged substance neutrality tactically serves a body of very positive commitments.

Not all liberals are fully conscious of a family hostility. Far from it. But liberalism inexorably chips away at any preferred family status. Its method is not abolition but neglect and redefinition. It will say that our traditional family concept is outmoded and unrealistic. It will broaden the concept to include, for example, homosexual households, again professing to be value free when affirming the right of homosexuals to adopt children. How can you be neutral about values when announcing a right.

The combination of graduated tax rates, inflation, and redistributive programs has had a family punitive effect, reducing the personal exemption to a fraction of its original value, roughly one fifth of what it was worth in 1948. This has made large families prohibitively expensive for many people. The number of working mothers has tripled since World War II.

The liberal regime has never said in so many words that it opposes large families. But does anyone suppose that it is merely neutral about them? Is it anxious ensuring them equal opportunity with small families, childless couples, or even homosexual couples?

It is interesting noting that New York City was recently found subsidizing a special private school for homosexual youths. City officials insisted that the subsidy in no way implied approval. The same officials would insist that even a slight subsidy to a private religious school would fatally compromise the state’s religion neutrality. The total pattern of liberal concerns tells its own story, so to speak, over all liberalism’s ad hoc policy justifications.

More and more parents see the public schools as threats to their children’s safety, well being, and even educational needs. Liberalism’s response has been tightening its own grip. It accuses parents of failing in sex education, for example, and assumes this constitutes a mandate for schools doing the job. It may be that parents also fail in religious education, but here again liberalism switches its logic according to the issue at hand. Parents whose children are economically trapped in the public schools are denied any right controlling the curriculum. Their attempts exercising even a veto power over teacher selected materials are denounced as censorship. The young minds must be kept under the liberal monopoly regardless of how egregiously the public schools may be thought to fail.

Liberalism has of course had a serious culture impact beyond the schools. The catch phrase freedom of expression has been broadened covering even the crudest pornography. What began as a campaign for privacy, consenting adults, plain brown wrappers and all that, has become an open traditional public morality overthrow. It is practically impossible shielding children from raw filth. What used to be called fornication is now a standard popular entertainment feature, even on prime time television. The explicitness degrees vary. The chastity denigration is nearly complete regardless, even where bodies remain clothed.

And once again liberals take refuge in choice and freedom clichés flagrantly contrasting with their usual government control preference. The liberal ordinarily hostile to commercialism and suspicious of advertisers’ manipulative wiles becomes an utter laissez faire advocate where sexual appetite stimulation is at stake.

What is sad and horrible is the crassness of it. At one time the liberal held at least the aesthetic high ground. It was the censor with narrow anxieties who seemed crass, ready banning any book dealing frankly with serious subjects from the local library. But it is no longer Ulysses banning that is in question. No genuinely artistic purpose is served by 99 per cent of popular entertainment sexual themes. No Renaissance has come of breast baring in public. It is as if, as old taboos have fallen, new taboos have taken their place, taboos on the spiritual. Popular culture has adopted a general smirk. If the movies were really candid, they would show people praying, marrying, and having children as well as fornicating. The fornication might at least occasionally result in pregnancy, disease, and the heartache and shame that more than occasionally accompany such inveterate behavior in real life.

Have liberals had any regrets or second thoughts about the sexual revolution? Of course. At the personal level, many liberals recoil from the porn explosion. Some must have noticed that the new freedom has failed paying the promised art dividend that nudity is a distraction rather than an aesthetic experience enhancement.

But the liberal ideology has no way accommodating these human reservations. It can only propose more programs, bigger government research budgets for latest venereal disease cures, new campaigns to educate the public about behavior consequences now declared licit. And the remedies are as crass as the malady. The real problem is that sexual freedom has meant, for millions of people, a cluster of debasing addictions.

Socialist utopianism has gone hand in hand with sexual utopianism. Many people who would never buy the socialist delusion have fallen hard for the sexual one. But the price, in disease, abortion, guilt, frustration, hostility, suspicion, and coarseness, has yet to be acknowledged.

The feminist movement, with its bitterness against men, is at least an understandable reaction against all the sexual liberation lies, which has been particularly injurious and insulting to women. There was no such movement in the days when marriage was the norm. A woman was expected to be chaste, and though this was derided as a double standard, it gave woman a special male aggression protection. There was no confusion about what a lecherous man was asking of her. She had the right not only to refuse but to take offense at improper advances. If women could be virgins again, there would be no feminism. Women are now fair game for the men who prize them least. They know it and resent it and are right. But they also know that speaking of a woman’s honor is to sound ridiculously quaint. By the same token, a man’s honor used to consist largely in respecting woman’s. That has changed too. Is everybody happy?

The sexual revolution declared in the name of privacy has resulted in a gross privacy devaluation. The intuition that there are personality recesses deserving withholding from easy exposure has been lost. The more of a thing that can be seen at a glance, the less there is of it in the first place. Human beings are mysteries deserving respect as mysteries, not stripped open like a cellophane package. Sex is delicate and deserves being handled with delicate restraint and ritual. Society should be organized to prevent the boor’s tyranny and easy sex culture prevalence. Young people should be protected from making irreversible mistakes and taught that love is a career, not a vacation.

People do fail in love all the time. That is why the essential love types need social support. The problem is that we are currently supporting not the right people but the wrong side of our nature, the side wanting love on the cheap. We are offering human beings the kind of freedom appropriate to dogs. The gain they experience is really part of an overall loss.

We get what we pay for. What is natural, natural to human beings as distinct from animals, is not necessarily easy. But that is all the more reason to insist on it. The price is high, but the rewards of loyalty and fidelity are priceless. To be a parent is more than joy. It is to be related to the world in a radically different way from the way of youth, to see another who is not wholly other but a strangely free part of yourself.

Every parent knows this. The wonder is that knowledge so widely shared no longer forms the heart of our law and culture. It is almost as if parental affection has become a love that dare not speak its name instead of being the social reality from which all other things take their bearings. To love a child is to love uniquely. It is astonishingly insensitive to denigrate as privilege or accident of birth the parent’s deep desire to give. From the receiver perspective, every gift is an accident. No child asks to be born. Life is a gift. The first birth accident is birth itself. It becomes the child to learn gratitude for this, though it is best if the parents do not insist on gratitude.

Of course no parent is perfect. To have a child under the best circumstances is to court tragedy not to mention population planners’ disapproval. All one can say is that most of humanity has always found it worth the risks for reasons hard explaining to outsiders such as those writing New York Times editorials. It is as well not to be too calculating about having babies, who will upset all calculations anyway. As Chesterton says, if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. Even King Lear might agree.

Part VI: Organized Irreligion

Why Progressive Politics Fears Religious Authority

In the Catholic Church, a doctrine takes centuries to harden into dogma. In progressive circles, the equivalent process happens in months. A position that was fringe in January is mandatory by summer, and the person who held the mainstream view in January is now the extremist. This is not an accident of a fast-moving culture. It is what happens when a movement has no fixed reference point outside itself, nothing it answers to but its own most recent conclusion.

No institution triggers deeper alienation in the progressive mind than religion, or as he prefers to call it, “organized” religion, as though the problem would dissolve if believers just stopped meeting each other. He can tolerate a private, interior spirituality that makes no claims on anyone. What he cannot tolerate is a believer who answers to an authority higher than the state, higher than the moment, higher than him.

This is worth pausing on before moving further, because the distinction does real work throughout the rest of this book, not just this part. Every institution examined across these nine parts, the family, the church, the free market, the constitutional order itself, functions as a check precisely because it answers to something other than the state’s own current preference. Weaken any one of them and you have not simply removed a single obstacle. You have removed a structural type, one more independent source of authority the state does not control, and made the remaining ones bear more weight than they were ever meant to carry alone.

That is the actual issue. Authority and power are not the same thing, though the fully politicized mind can no longer tell them apart. Power is the capacity to make people do what you want. Authority is a standard of truth or morality that stands in judgment over power, indifferent to what anyone currently wants. A church, a scripture, a long-settled moral tradition: these function as authorities precisely because they do not move when the political wind shifts. That is exactly what makes them intolerable to anyone who needs the wind to keep blowing his way. If God has spoken, the progressive agenda has a competitor it cannot outvote and cannot outspend.

This is why religion produces such disproportionate anxiety on the left. Progressives can recite the historical failures of organized Christianity from memory: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch trials, wars fought under a cross. They rarely run the same audit on avowedly atheist regimes. In under a hundred years, explicitly atheist governments killed more people than every religious war and persecution in recorded history combined. You will search a long time for the progressive who holds Christianity’s episodic failures and Communism’s systematic ones to the same standard. The first gets treated as the religion’s essential character. The second gets filed as a regrettable footnote to an otherwise noble project.

Watch how the double standard plays out in real time. American fundamentalists, one of the most law-abiding, non-violent populations in the country, get treated as a looming danger to the republic. Meanwhile the actual killing fields of Cambodia and the actual re-education camps of Vietnam get filed under “complicated” or ignored outright. The fear is not calibrated to the threat. It is calibrated to who holds an authority the progressive cannot control.

What the Founders Actually Said About Religion

A great deal of modern confusion on this subject comes from a simple historical error, repeated so often it has come to sound like settled fact: the claim that strict secularism, the deliberate scrubbing of religious reference from public life, is somehow “the American Way,” woven into the constitutional order from the start. Scholars including Robert L. Cord have shown this to be false. The very first Congress to convene after the Constitution’s ratification voted to promote the spread of religion through the Northwest Ordinance. Several states kept official religious establishments for decades into the nineteenth century. The Declaration of Independence itself rests on openly theological ground, invoking a Creator as the source of unalienable rights.

None of this means the Framers wanted a national church. They explicitly declined to create one. But declining to establish a single national denomination is not the same as declining to acknowledge religion’s place in public life. The First Amendment’s actual text bars Congress from making a law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Both halves of that clause matter, and the second half gets far less attention than the first in most modern retellings. The Framers’ actual goal was to let religion operate freely and on equal footing with every other participant in the republic, not to exile it to the margins. The federal government’s refusal to adjudicate theological disputes was no more a rejection of religion than its refusal to referee a scientific controversy was a rejection of science. Read the founding generation’s own words, and the modern secularist’s confident appeal to “the American Way” collapses under its own weight.

You do not need to take this on faith. Pull the actual debate records from the First Congress. Read what the state constitutions said about religious establishment in 1791 and what they still said in 1830. The historical record on this question is available and specific. It rewards the reader who checks it against the version he was handed in school.

Consider what actually happens in the perennial fight over prayer in public schools. The entire conversation orbits a single figure: the hypothetical outsider who might feel uncomfortable during a morning prayer. That concern is legitimate and worth taking seriously. It is not, however, the only consideration that exists. Nobody asks whether prayer might do the praying child some good. Nobody weighs the social value of shared reverence against the discomfort of the occasional dissenter. The debate has been engineered so that only one variable counts, and the rest of the question never gets asked at all.

There is a second question buried underneath the first one that almost nobody raises: should children even be told what religion is? The honest answer is obviously yes. A student who understands nothing about Christian doctrine cannot fully understand Hamlet, since the play is saturated with heaven, hell, purgatory, sacrament, and the moral weight of suicide and revenge. He cannot fully understand the American founding, the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, or two thousand years of Western art, law, and philosophy. Schools that teach sex education in granular detail while treating religion as an unmentionable have their priorities backward. A child kept ignorant of the beliefs that shaped his own civilization is not being protected from indoctrination. He is being shortchanged on his own inheritance.

The claim that state neutrality on religion is best achieved by silence about religion does not hold up under its own logic. By that reasoning, the most neutral policy on clothing would be a rule requiring everyone to go without any. A culture that draws on its own moral vocabulary, the one that actually shaped it, in its public deliberations is not “imposing” anything on anyone. It is being honest about where its moral language came from. Pretending otherwise, acting as if a Christian-shaped society holds no Christian assumptions, is a kind of theater, a forced pidgin spoken so that no one present might be offended by hearing the actual language. Some beliefs are shared widely enough that treating dissent from them as a live, symmetrical option misdescribes reality. As Chesterton put it, those who reject certain foundational beliefs “are not so much a minority as a monstrosity.”

None of this requires the state to declare America a Christian nation, a claim too imprecise to do much work either way. Elizabethan England and Byzantine Greece were both Christian societies in radically different ways, and the specific texture of a culture’s faith resists blunt labeling. What can be said plainly is that the alternative, an official secularist “pluralism” that quietly favors every claim except the traditional one, is not neutral either. It is simply a different establishment, one that pretends it is not an establishment at all.

Two Kinds of Unbelief

Not every loss of faith looks the same, and the distinction matters. A man can lose his faith honestly, through a genuine inability to believe. Faith, if it is a gift, is sometimes rejected without malice. But a man can also refuse to believe, not because the evidence failed him, but because belief would demand something of him he is not willing to give. C.S. Lewis noted that unbelief can be its own kind of wish fulfillment, no less than belief can be. Assuming the atheist always argues in good faith is a courtesy the historical record does not always earn.

Unbelief itself comes in more than one flavor, and the flavor usually tells you where it came from. A visitor to Northern Ireland once asked, appalled at the violence between Catholics and Protestants, whether the country had any atheists at all. “Oh yes,” he was told. “We have Catholic atheists and Protestant atheists.” The joke carries a real point. Unbelief typically grows out of a specific prior belief and keeps that belief’s shape even after rejecting its content. Atheism, in that sense, is less a blank slate than a denomination of its own, defined by whatever faith it left behind.

There is also such a thing as the man who has lost his religious faith but retains real appreciation for what it built. An ancient Roman who converted to Christianity did not need to despise the Aeneid, the Pantheon, or the old myths that shaped his culture. A modern man who has lost the faith of his fathers can still treasure its inheritance: the art of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, and Mozart, along with the philosophy, science, and law that grew out of a civilization built on belief in a Creator. Only a small mind writes all of that off as worthless.

What this section is actually about is something else: organized irreligion, militant and systematic, contemptuous of everything the religious tradition produced rather than merely unpersuaded by its claims. Under Soviet rule, a performance of Rigoletto in Moscow had Gilda’s dying aria cut because the lyrics mentioned heaven. That is not a trivial detail. It is a preview, in miniature, of what happens to art, language, and memory under a regime that treats religious reference itself as subversive. Chesterton warned about this decades before it fully arrived: “Earnest freethinkers need not worry themselves about the persecutions of the past. Before the liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.” He was right, and almost nobody who needed to hear it was listening.

American secularism goes by the name “secular humanism” now, a term its own adherents coined and later disowned once it stopped serving them. It began as a euphemism, a way to make a militant hostility to Christianity sound like a neutral procedural preference. Nobody serious is fooled by the euphemism anymore. When conservative Christian political activity gets described as “dangerous” and “unconstitutional,” by the same commentators who found nothing unconstitutional about decades of left-wing clergy activism, the pattern speaks for itself. The objection was never to religious people doing politics. It was to religious people doing politics for the wrong side.

The pattern has a name attached to it, not just an abstraction. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who in 1975 welcomed the Communist takeover of Cambodia as the arrival of a “vision of a new society,” spent the 1980 presidential campaign warning that the political activity of conservative Christians was “unconstitutional” and “dangerous.” The same writer who found language of hope for the Khmer Rouge could not extend even neutral language to American churchgoers organizing to vote. He never once flagged the decades of left-wing clergy activism, the marches, the sanctuary movements, the pulpit endorsements, as any kind of constitutional problem. You are not looking at a principled reading of the Establishment Clause. You are looking at a preference dressed up as a legal standard, and once you see the pattern once, you will keep seeing it.

Clergy Who Trade the Pulpit for Politics

Since outright persecution of American Christians is not on the table, the alternative strategy has been recruitment: turn the clergy into allies rather than targets. It has worked with striking success in some quarters. A segment of the clergy, particularly in mainline denominations, discovered that the sacred and the fashionable made surprisingly comfortable bedfellows. They rebrand their political activism as “prophetic witness,” a description that only makes sense if you ignore that they are running with the prevailing current, not against it. A genuinely prophetic voice challenges the culture around it. A voice that simply repeats the culture’s own settled opinions back to it, with a theological accent, is doing something else entirely.

Watch what this does to their theology over time. It becomes infinitely adjustable, capable of dropping any passage on sexual ethics or the structure of the family that has gone out of fashion, while insisting that the earliest, rawest form of the faith somehow endorses this month’s cause. Scripture becomes “culturally conditioned” exactly when it is inconvenient, and eternally binding exactly when it is not. These clergy will “speak out” against familiar political targets with great confidence. They will not speak out against the persecution of their own fellow Christians under the very regimes their politics has made them sympathetic toward. Some of them talk hopefully about a “Christian-Marxist dialogue,” a phrase that only sounds reasonable if you have never tried substituting a different totalitarian ideology into the same sentence and noticing how it reads.

Even institutions with centuries of doctrinal weight behind them have not been immune. Parts of the Catholic hierarchy have adopted the vocabulary of secular progressive activism, treating economic materialism dressed up in compassionate language as though it were something other than materialism, and treating the church’s central mission, the saving of souls, as something that can be quietly supplemented by a policy platform. The doctrine sometimes called the “seamless garment,” which links opposition to abortion with opposition to a long list of unrelated political positions, has won the hierarchy warmer coverage in some quarters. It has not converted the institutions it courted, and it has been read on every side, correctly, as a signal that traditional moral teaching is negotiable if the trade is right.

You can see a version of this generational pattern in how each successive wave of clergy activism justifies itself. The activist clergy of one decade insist they are simply recovering the moral seriousness of the early church, stripped of centuries of institutional accretion. A decade later, a new wave insists the same thing about a different set of causes, often ones the previous wave would not have recognized or endorsed. What stays constant is the confidence that this particular political moment, and no other, finally represents the faith’s true and original spirit. A tradition treated this way stops functioning as a tradition at all. It becomes a costume, put on and taken off according to the political weather, which is precisely the opposite of what gave it any authority in the first place.

There is a real difference between belonging to an institution confident enough to stand apart from the fashions of the age and belonging to one perpetually scrambling to catch up with them. The first can be genuinely countercultural, a fixed point people can navigate by. The second is just culture, dressed in vestments, one news cycle behind.

C.S. Lewis made a sound and simple point about where Christian political judgment should come from: laypeople experienced in the actual business of politics, not clergy who are not, in the same way that Christian literature comes from Christian novelists rather than from bishops writing plays in their spare time. Burke made a related point with more bite, warning against “political theologians and theological politicians” and observing that clergy who abandon their proper role to meddle in politics usually understand neither the role they left nor the one they have assumed. The church, Burke thought, ought to be one place where the daily hostilities of political life are allowed to rest, a single day’s truce in an otherwise endless argument.

There is a further irony worth naming plainly. The same secularist framework that insists religious argument has no place in public deliberation has no comparable objection to its own moral claims occupying that same public square, claims about compassion, fairness, and justice that are every bit as unprovable by strictly secular method as any theological premise. Every public argument, religious or secular, ultimately rests on some contestable first premise about what human beings owe each other and why. Pretending only the religious premises count as premises, while the secular ones get to pass as neutral, is not a principled distinction. It is a rule written by the side that benefits from it.

None of this means religion has nothing to say to politics. It means religion has the most to say to politics when it speaks from its actual authority, as custodian of a moral vision that outlasts any particular policy fight, rather than as one more interest group competing for headlines. Samuel Johnson observed that people more often need reminding than informing. A clergy chasing relevance is trying to inform you of things you can read in any newspaper. A clergy secure in its own authority reminds you of things a newspaper cannot tell you at all, and that reminder is worth more than a hundred press releases.

How to Spot the Pattern in Your Own Community

This is not a distant, abstract problem confined to national politics and Supreme Court opinions. It shows up locally, in your own school board meetings, your own city council votes, your own neighborhood disputes over a nativity display or a menorah on public property. The test is the same one this book has applied throughout: watch which traditions get treated as automatically suspect and which get treated as automatically neutral. A moment of silence gets challenged as a potential establishment of religion. A curriculum built entirely around secular assumptions rarely gets challenged as an establishment of anything, because secularism has successfully marketed itself as the absence of a position rather than a position of its own.

You can push back on this without becoming the aggressor in the exchange. Ask, plainly and without hostility, what specific harm a given practice causes, rather than accepting “someone might be offended” as a self-executing veto. Ask why the same “separation” standard applied so strictly to a Christmas display gets applied so loosely to other cultural or political displays on the same public property. These are not gotcha questions. They are the same questions this book has asked of the national debate, scaled down to the size of your own town, and they tend to produce more honest answers locally than they do in Washington.

What Organized Irreligion Costs You

None of this is academic. When authority collapses into power, the believer loses a defense he did not know he had. A church, a scripture, a settled tradition, these have historically stood as one of the few checks on state ambition that did not depend on the state’s own permission to exist. Strip that check away, replace it with a clergy that answers to the culture instead of to something above the culture, and the state loses one of the few voices that could tell it no on grounds it cannot simply overrule by statute. That loss lands on believer and skeptic alike, since the same authority that once told Caesar he could not have everything is the authority both depend on whether they know it or not.

None of this requires you to hold any particular theological position yourself. You can be a devout believer, a skeptic, or genuinely undecided and still recognize the structural argument being made here: a society that systematically disables its own oldest sources of authority, in the name of neutrality, does not end up with more neutral ground. It ends up with one fewer check on whoever currently holds power. That is a civic observation before it is a religious one, available to believer and non-believer alike, and it is worth carrying into every local debate over what belongs in the public square and what does not.

Chesterton deserves the final word here, because he saw exactly what was coming: “We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers.” The tyranny worth naming today is rarely the old one. It is the one still being built, still fresh, still calling itself progress, still expecting your silence as the price of good manners.

Part VII: Reds

Communism and Liberalism as Variants of the Same Principle

Communism treats the United States as its primary obstacle, and it says so without embarrassment. Soviet strategic literature routinely called America “the main enemy.” The official anthem of Communist Nicaragua called America “the enemy of mankind.” Anti-Americanism is not an incidental feature of the worldwide left. It is close to the defining one, present in every branch of the movement whether or not that branch flies a Communist flag.

This should shape how you read American foreign policy debates, and yet it rarely does. Liberalism keeps the conversation confused, redirecting attention away from Communism itself and onto “superpatriotism,” “the arms race,” and “cold-war rhetoric,” as though the danger were American vigilance rather than the ideology it watches. Conservatives readily admit that plenty is wrong with America. The disagreement is not about whether flaws exist. It is that the specific things liberalism identifies as flaws are often the very things holding the system together.

Communism and liberalism are both variants of socialism, distinguished mainly by their tolerance for sentiment. Communists are the unsentimental version. They understand that socialist and civil principles cannot coexist indefinitely and treat that incompatibility as one more contradiction of the West to be exploited. Liberals are the sentimental version. They believe, or claim to believe, that socialist redistribution and a free civil order can run side by side forever. Even committed Marxists find this liberal optimism a little embarrassing. Genuine Communist theory dismisses talk of “democratic socialism” as bourgeois sentimentality, a phrase worth sitting with the next time someone insists the two are unrelated.

This is not a conservative accusation invented to score points. The identification of liberalism with socialism has been made openly by figures on the left itself. Michael Harrington, no conservative, once wondered aloud why the Democratic Party, whose major factions are functionally socialist, does not simply say so. Lenin had a term for the non-Communists who reliably carry Communist water without formal membership: useful idiots. Stalin built an entire strategy, the Popular Front, around recruiting socialists and liberals who would never call themselves Communists but would march, vote, and argue exactly as needed.

You can watch this play out at any large “broad coalition” demonstration organized around a supposedly universal cause like nuclear disarmament. Look at who actually shows up. At one such march in New York in 1982, organizers described a “rainbow spectrum” that “cut across all ideologies.” Reporters searching the crowd for conservatives, libertarians, or anyone identifiably on the right came back empty-handed. What they found instead was a familiar lineup: liberals, Communists, Communist-front organizations, Trotskyists, and assorted allied activist groups. If nuclear disarmament were genuinely a universal interest transcending political philosophy, you would expect a genuinely mixed crowd. You never get one, because everyone present understood, without needing to say so, that this was a left-wing event with a left-wing guest list.

Liberals almost never acknowledge the affinity Communists openly claim with them. More than that, they rarely even acknowledge that the acknowledgment exists. Point it out, and the conversation gets waved off as a right-wing fantasy, even when the source is a Communist party document rather than a conservative pamphlet.

None of this is a claim that every liberal politician or commentator is secretly disloyal, a charge this book has no interest in making and explicitly rejects. Most people who hold these positions hold them sincerely, having absorbed a set of assumptions about compassion, fairness, and international relations from their education and their social circle rather than from any conscious study of Marxist strategy. That sincerity does not change the actual effect of the pattern, which operates the same way whether the people carrying it forward understand its origin or not. A useful idiot, in Lenin’s own coinage, was valuable precisely because he did not think of himself that way.

The Zone of Morality and the Zone of Reality

Consider how differently the same underlying behavior gets labeled depending on which government engages in it. A right-leaning government that restricts a hostile press gets called censorship, correctly. A left-leaning government that does the identical thing gets described, if it gets described at all, as maintaining social stability or protecting the revolution from counterrevolutionary elements. A right-leaning government that limits emigration gets called a human rights violation. A left-leaning government that erects armed borders specifically to prevent its own citizens from leaving gets described, when it gets described at all, in the passive voice, as though the wall had built itself. The underlying fact pattern rarely changes. The vocabulary applied to it changes completely, and the vocabulary is doing the actual moral work while pretending to be a neutral description.

Clarity is what the West actually needs in facing Communism, more even than weapons, and clarity is precisely what liberal rhetoric works to prevent. Liberals resist an arms buildup on the theory that ideas defeat ideas. Fair enough as a principle. But watch what happens when a conservative American president uses plain language about the Soviet system, language that does no more than repeat what Lenin said about his own project. That president gets accused of “stridency,” “bellicosity,” and “cold-war rhetoric,” as though his words were themselves an act of aggression. Soviet propaganda attacking the West in far harsher terms gets waved off as background noise.

Liberals gave up trying to sell the Soviet system as admirable decades ago. What they settled on instead was treating it as an unpleasant “reality” the West simply has to live with, and even naming that reality honestly counts, in their framing, as a provocation. Refugees from right-wing regimes, Chile, apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany, are treated by liberal commentators as credible, sympathetic witnesses. Refugees from Communism get the opposite treatment: dismissed as embittered, unreliable, too personally invested to be trusted. Even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a man who survived the Gulag and wrote its definitive record, got only grudging attention from the same commentators who lionize dissidents from regimes they already opposed for other reasons.

You will not hear liberal commentary organized around the phrase “victims of Communism.” The armed borders, the religious persecution, the total elimination of property rights: none of this generates the sustained moral attention that liberalism reserves for other regimes. Liberals have generally favored expanding East-West trade, which carries its own dark irony. Wages in the Communist bloc were set by the state rather than by any market, which meant Communism offered Western investors exactly what Communism claimed to have eliminated: labor priced below its real value, with workers holding no leverage to demand otherwise. Call that arrangement “exploitation” when a private company does it and the same word disappears the moment a socialist government does it instead.

If liberals will not speak of victims of Communism, they have found no shortage of sympathy for Communists cast as victims instead. Domestically, this shows up as the enduring insistence on “victims of McCarthyism,” a framing so absolute that the people most certain of Alger Hiss’s innocence tend to be the people least troubled by the possibility of his guilt. The Soviet Union itself gets cast in the same victim role internationally. It lost some twenty million people in World War II, the story goes, which explains its wariness of conflict, an explanation that conveniently forgets Stalin killed a comparable number of his own citizens without becoming any less committed to Communism. It feels “encircled by hostile forces,” a description that omits how reliably hostile it was to every country on its own borders. It found Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric alarming and its own invasion of Afghanistan merely “defensive.”

None of this means liberals actually admire the Soviet system. Their posture toward it is stranger than admiration. They treat it as something closer to a force of nature that must be managed rather than confronted, indignant not at the regime itself but at whoever is accused of “provoking” it. In practice, liberalism operates as though the world were split into two zones with no moral continuity between them. Call the first the zone of morality, where ordinary standards of judgment still apply, and the second the zone of reality, where moralizing simply stops at the border. Soviet strategists had their own version of this same map, dividing the world into a “zone of war,” open to subversion, and a “zone of peace,” where Soviet control was treated as settled and unchallengeable. Leonid Brezhnev summarized the doctrine in four words: “What we have, we keep.” As Jean-Francois Revel observed, Soviet territorial claims were the only property rights in the entire world that liberalism never questioned.

Liberal commentary reliably describes Soviet leadership as “paranoid,” and does not intend the word as criticism. It is offered instead as an understandable condition, one that obligates the United States to respond with “restraint” and avoid “overreaction” whenever the next invasion occurs. On question after question of plain fact, the attempted poisoning of a pope, chemical weapons use, arms-control violations, the shooting down of a civilian airliner, liberal commentary consistently gives the Soviet account the benefit of the doubt it would never extend to a right-wing government under the same suspicion. It has become fashionable to say the Soviets themselves no longer believed their own ideology by the 1980s, that men like Gorbachev were far too sophisticated to lie awake over the labor theory of value. That may well be true, and it misses the actual point. The machinery of subversion and the accumulation of power worked perfectly well without sincere belief attached to it. Marxist ideology still did its job: demoralizing the societies it targeted, recruiting sympathizers within them, and lending the whole system a borrowed legitimacy it could not have earned on results alone.

This dynamic depends on a prior sentimentalizing of the state that took hold over the twentieth century, replacing an older sentimentalizing of the family that dominated the century before it. Despite an enormous accumulated record, entire mountains of documented human cost, the underlying prejudice in favor of solving human problems by politicizing them has proven remarkably durable. Each new generation gets warned anew about the dangers of unchecked private enterprise, as though the historical ledger on unchecked state power were not sitting in plain view the entire time.

Communism has a genuine talent for locating the exact nerve of self-doubt in any society it targets, and it does not need believing Communists to do the damage. Non-believing non-Communists, willing to accept its critique of their own institutions, do most of the actual work. Every government is sometimes unjust. Every population includes greedy and selfish people. Every religious community has its hypocrites. Every family fails somewhere. Take those ordinary, universal human shortcomings and measure them against a utopian standard no society could ever meet, and the case for radical intervention writes itself. This is the actual mechanism, not secret agents but a borrowed standard of judgment that guarantees the home country will always come up short.

The pattern echoes a dynamic James Hitchcock identified inside liberal Catholicism. The disaffected Catholic does not see himself as the church’s missionary to the world. He sees himself as the world’s missionary to the church, certain that it is the church, not the world, standing in need of conversion. Political liberals extend the identical posture to their own country. “Hard-liners” within America get treated as the true obstacle to global peace, never Soviet ambition itself. No core American principle gets treated as sacred, as something that cannot be traded away for the sake of accommodation with international socialism.

The clearest evidence of this double standard is how liberal moral outrage behaves over time. Liberal indignation against “corrupt and repressive” regimes in Vietnam, Chile, Iran, Rhodesia, Nicaragua, and South Africa reliably faded the moment a “progressive” government replaced the old one. Once a socialist regime is installed, it stops being measured against any standard at all, moral or otherwise, and starts being treated as a “reality” the West should simply “normalize relations” with. Even criticism at that point becomes recast as an attempt to “impose our standards” on a sovereign nation. Socialism functions, in this framework, as a kind of absolution. Cross that line and the scrutiny stops.

Totalitarianism’s Unprecedented Ambition

Communism is not simply an unusually severe form of government. It is the first modern movement with the ambition not just to govern a society but to remake it down to the studs, including the nature of the people living inside it. That is the real content behind the clumsy word “totalitarianism,” and it was visible to careful observers before the word itself had even entered common use.

E.J. Dillon, who spent half a century living in Russia, captured the distinction with striking precision in his 1930 account Russia Today and Yesterday. Even the most radical French revolutionaries, he noted, never dreamed of abolishing the family itself, the authority of the father, marriage, or the basic concept of property. The French Revolution, for all its violence, preserved and even strengthened these institutions, and eventually restored a formal place for religion in the new order. Bolshevism took the opposite path from the start. It set out, deliberately, to destroy the roots of the past: religious, social, and pedagogical alike, along with anyone who remained loyal to that past and refused conversion. It manufactured a “new woman” with total authority over her own body and mind, discarded the entire moral vocabulary of the old penal codes, and reduced marriage to a renewable experiment. Between the French Revolution and the Bolshevik one, Dillon concluded, there was no meaningful kinship at all. They differed in everything that mattered.

In practice, though nobody states it so bluntly, liberalism has functioned for decades as a looser, informal extension of the old Popular Front strategy. Whatever Communism targets abroad tends to draw liberal indignation too, at least until a socialist government actually takes power in the country in question, at which point the outrage evaporates on schedule. The free speech of Communists operating in free countries is treated as a genuine liberal cause. The free speech, religious liberty, and voting rights of people trapped inside the Soviet bloc barely register as a liberal concern at all. That asymmetry is not a flaw liberalism occasionally slips into. By this point in the record, it looks like the operating principle itself.

Liberalism’s central failure is its refusal to name the Communist project for what it is. When Anthony Lewis of the New York Times described the Khmer Rouge’s forced march of three million people out of Phnom Penh, a march that killed enormous numbers of those forced onto the road, he framed it as evidence of a “vision of a new society.” He meant the phrase as something close to a justification, not an indictment, and he managed to write the passage without once using the word “Communist.” Liberalism has never held the historical record of Communism against a new Communist regime the way it instantly holds any hint of fascist symbolism against a new right-wing one. A new government that adopted the swastika would be condemned everywhere, immediately, and permanently. A new government that adopted Marxist-Leninist iconography gets a far warmer reception in the same rooms.

None of this requires believing that liberal officeholders are secretly working for Moscow, a charge that misdescribes what is actually happening and gives liberalism an easy way to dismiss the whole critique as paranoid fantasy. The far more accurate description is narrower and harder to wave away: liberalism works with the same broad current Communism has always relied on, sharing its vocabulary of “dialogue,” “cooperation,” and “areas of common interest,” language liberal commentary never extended to Hitler’s Germany and never extends to South Africa under apartheid. Common ground gets proposed with one kind of authoritarian regime and never with the other, and the selection is not random.

There is no meaningful Communist party presence in American politics today. There is, however, a real communistic presence, diffuse and largely unnamed, running through institutions that would never accept the label. The most effective piece of camouflage in the entire arrangement is the word “liberalism” itself, a label that has come to mean, in practice, the habit of judging every institution, including socialism, by socialism’s own preferred standards. Once you notice that habit, you cannot easily unsee it, and you start reading the news very differently.

The Method Outlasts the Regime

A regime can fall while the method it perfected keeps operating under new management. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed under the weight of its own economic failures, a vindication, however delayed, of everything this book has argued about the price system, property rights, and the impossibility of centrally planned abundance. But the rhetorical machinery described across this part, the zone of morality and the zone of reality, the double standard on victims, the reflexive extension of good faith to any regime willing to call itself progressive, did not require the Soviet Union to keep functioning. It had already been absorbed into a much broader, more diffuse set of habits, present in commentary, education, and popular culture long after the specific regime that incubated it was gone.

This is worth understanding precisely because it means the argument in this part cannot be filed away as a closed historical case. The specific enemy named at the top of this part belongs to a particular era. The pattern of thought it perfected, treating one’s own country as the default suspect and its adversaries as the default victims, does not expire on the same schedule. Recognizing the pattern, independent of whichever regime or movement currently wears it, is the actual skill this part has tried to teach.

How to Read Foreign Policy Coverage After Learning This

You do not need a security clearance or a graduate degree in international relations to apply any of this. The next time a foreign policy story crosses your feed, run it through a simple test. Ask which zone the story is set in, the zone of morality or the zone of reality, and watch how the language shifts depending on the answer. A right-leaning government under scrutiny gets adjectives: repressive, authoritarian, corrupt. A left-leaning government facing the identical accusation gets euphemisms: complicated, a product of its history, a reality we must accept. The adjective is not describing the regime. It is describing which zone the writer has already assigned it to before a single fact gets reported.

Ask a second question while you are at it: who is being asked to show restraint, and who is being excused for provoking the need for it. This one pattern, once you know to look for it, explains an enormous amount of foreign affairs commentary that otherwise reads as simply inconsistent. It is not inconsistent. It is following a rule, just not the rule it claims to be following. You are not being asked to become cynical about journalism itself. You are being asked to read it the way you would read any other document with an identifiable author and an identifiable set of assumptions: carefully, and with your own judgment fully engaged rather than parked at the door.

Part VIII: Minority Rule

Roe v. Wade and the Court’s Assumption of Oracular Authority

In January 1973, the Supreme Court handed down the most sweeping ruling in its history. In a single stroke, it struck down the abortion laws of all fifty states. Abortion clinics opened across the country within months. A grassroots political movement, still active decades later, sprang up almost overnight in response. Few controversies in American politics have burned as hot or as long, and for good reason. The Court had overturned a deeply rooted piece of the Western moral and legal tradition, then expected the country to accept the reversal without protest. When pro-life advocates organized, using the same normal legislative channels that had governed the issue before Roe, they were accused of trying to “impose their views” on the nation. Nobody leveled that same charge at the five justices who had just overridden fifty state legislatures at once. As Justice Byron White wrote in dissent, what the majority had exercised was not judgment. It was “raw judicial power.”

The procedural detail of Roe gets less attention than it deserves, precisely because the underlying moral question generates so much heat. The Court did not strike down only the strictest state abortion laws. It struck down every one, including the most permissive. That made Roe a far more sweeping intervention than even Brown v. Board of Education, the Court’s other landmark ruling, which affected roughly a dozen states and rested on far broader public moral consensus. In Roe, the Court effectively held that all fifty state legislatures had misunderstood their own constitutional agreement from the start. Not one had gotten it right until nine unelected justices corrected the record.

Look for the earlier warning signs of this constitutional discovery, and you will not find them. There is no trail of nineteenth-century legislative debate questioning the constitutionality of abortion restrictions. No trail in the law journals. No trail in earlier lower-court rulings. Abortion had been argued for more than a century on its moral and policy merits, never once framed as a constitutional question, until the moment advocates for legal abortion settled on the judiciary as the fastest path to their goal. The Court then “discovered,” through a chain of reasoning even some sympathetic legal scholars found strained, a “right of privacy” nowhere named in the constitutional text, and located a right to abortion in what it called the “penumbra” of that phantom right. A century of varied state legislation, whose common thread was some minimal legal regard for unborn human life, was swept away in one ruling.

Strip away the emotional weight of the subject and imagine the Court had done the same thing to, say, the traffic code. Had it announced that it alone had finally divined the true meaning of the Constitution regarding speed limits after two centuries of judges, legislators, and scholars missed it entirely, the sheer institutional audacity of the claim would be the story. With abortion, the moral stakes crowded out that conversation. But the audacity is the same either way. Roe marked less an exercise of judicial expertise than a claim to something closer to oracular authority, the power to reveal hidden constitutional truth that had eluded every prior generation of Americans who read the same document.

For a full generation, the Court used this same posture, discovering or “expanding” constitutional rights, to implement a policy agenda that never could have survived a straight legislative vote: public school prayer, aid to private and religious schools, criminal procedure, legislative districting, pornography, contraception, and abortion. Even a comparatively cautious later Court has mostly left these earlier rulings standing, adjusting details without reversing the substance. That restraint is not really restraint. A Court that admitted its predecessors had simply erred would damage its own institutional authority, the same way a pope who overturned a predecessor’s dogma would damage the papacy’s claim to permanence. It is easier, strategically, to preserve the fiction of unbroken consistency than to admit that entire bodies of constitutional law were manufactured rather than discovered.

How the Tenth Amendment Became a Dead Letter

None of this could have happened without help. The institutions that dominate the academy and the press have consistently run interference for the Court whenever its rulings advanced the broader liberal policy agenda, particularly on the issues least likely to survive an honest legislative vote. Elected officials in the other branches have generally welcomed this arrangement. It let them avoid the political risk of championing legal abortion or pornography before actual voters, while shrugging that constitutional interpretation is simply the Court’s job under the Constitution itself, and that legislative interference with judicial independence would be improper.

Add to this a citizenry with only a thin working knowledge of its own founding document, and the result is a public that defers reflexively to judicial expertise it has no real way to evaluate. Most Americans do not know that the Constitution was designed as a social contract any citizen could invoke directly, that earlier generations routinely argued constitutional questions on the floor of Congress rather than leaving them to judges, or that treating constitutional interpretation as the judiciary’s exclusive province is a comparatively recent development, not a founding-era assumption.

The consequences of that deference are substantial. A body of nine unelected officials, effectively unremovable and answerable to no election, can now reshape major features of American life. The Constitution’s celebrated checks and balances barely touch the judiciary in practice. Few citizens, including conservative ones, have any real appetite for impeachment proceedings against a sitting justice, let alone a majority of the Court. There is no routine mechanism, comparable to a veto or an override vote, for correcting judicial errors as they happen. Far from occupying a status merely equal to the other two branches, the Court has effectively claimed a kind of supremacy over them. Congress retains the formal power to limit the Court’s appellate jurisdiction, but treats that power as an emergency measure, rarely invoked, in part because the Court’s rulings have quietly served interests many members of Congress share but would rather not champion openly themselves.

The Framers pictured something far more modest. Alexander Hamilton, writing as Publius in the Federalist Papers, called the judiciary “the least dangerous” of the three branches, since it commands “neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.” That description no longer fits. Under the doctrine of stare decisis, the authority of precedent, a Supreme Court ruling can only be undone through the equally rare paths of self-reversal or constitutional amendment. In practice, a single ruling can carry nearly the force of an amendment, since every lower court is bound to follow it. Publius likely would have found this troubling. Applying rigid precedent to constitutional interpretation effectively converts “judgment,” the deliberative reasoning he promised, into something closer to “will,” a fixed edict binding the very branches meant to check the Court in the first place. Publius even suggested the executive branch could decline to enforce a genuinely dubious ruling, much as Andrew Jackson later did. It is hard to read that observation and conclude he expected the judiciary’s word to become functionally final and unreviewable.

A second, less visible expansion of judicial power compounds the first. Since 1925, the Court has used an increasingly aggressive reading of the Fourteenth Amendment to “incorporate” provisions of the Bill of Rights against the states, one right at a time. States are now bound, in various rulings, to observe separation of church and state, free religious exercise, freedom of speech and press, protection against self-incrimination, and more. Notably absent from this incorporation project, a detail worth sitting with, is the right to keep and bear arms, a gap that tells you something about which rights the incorporation doctrine was actually built to protect. Through this mechanism, the Court now strikes down state and local laws roughly a hundred times as often as it strikes down federal legislation, in part because states have far weaker means of pushing back against the Court than Congress does.

Compare this to Brown v. Board of Education for a moment, since the comparison sharpens the point rather than muddying it. Brown struck down state-sanctioned racial segregation, a policy that violated the plain text and evident purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee, and it did so with the weight of a rapidly building moral and legal consensus behind it. Whatever criticisms can be made of the Court’s specific reasoning in Brown, the ruling addressed an actual violation of an actual constitutional guarantee. Roe did something structurally different: it manufactured a right nowhere stated in the text, applied it against fifty state legislatures simultaneously, and did so without the kind of deep historical and textual grounding that made Brown, whatever its flaws, a defensible exercise of judicial review rather than an example of the abuse this section describes.

An institution originally conceived as a check on federal overreach has become, through this same machinery, an engine of federal expansion. Since the New Deal in particular, the Court has actively assisted the centralization of power and the erosion of the original federal structure, the very opposite of the role Publius described. Just as significant, and far less discussed, is what the Court has chosen not to strike down. Article I, Section 8, read together with the Tenth Amendment, clearly limits Congress to its enumerated powers. Otherwise, why bother enumerating them at all? Publius described the powers of Congress as “few and defined” and the powers reserved to the states as “numerous and indefinite.” A largely passive Court, unwilling to enforce that boundary, has let the Tenth Amendment go functionally dormant. Congress now legislates on nearly any subject it wishes.

Willmoore Kendall once observed that the First Amendment is really just the Tenth Amendment applied specifically to religion and speech, which tells you how central the Tenth was meant to be to the entire constitutional design, not a footnote but close to the whole theory of the document in miniature. Publius explained why a formal bill of rights mattered less under a genuinely limited government than under a monarchy. A government with only the powers explicitly granted to it by the people does not need to be told it cannot regulate the press, since it never had that power to begin with. Listing rights as exceptions to state power, Publius warned, risks implying the state holds a general power in the first place. That warning shaped the Ninth and Tenth Amendments directly. Their near-total abandonment in practice is not a minor technical drift. It is a genuine constitutional loss, one most Americans have never been told to notice.

Constitutional Scholarship Is Recovering What Was Lost

Most Americans hold only a vague picture of the Constitution, generally filtered through a handful of Bill of Rights provisions as construed by a run of liberal justices and commentators. That interpretation is now so deeply established that even a justice as conservative as William Rehnquist could challenge it only around the edges, not at the foundation. Real reform requires something close to a public renaissance of constitutional literacy, since at this point the Constitution most Americans think they know is largely identical with its own corruptions.

The encouraging part of the story is that serious scholarship has been chipping away at these corruptions for years, and not exclusively from the right. Leonard Levy, no conservative, found that the Framers understood freedom of speech far more narrowly than Justices Black and Douglas later construed it. Robert Cord’s research on religious establishment told the same story: the liberal Court’s version of church-state history does not hold up against the documentary record. Raoul Berger did comparable work on the Fourteenth Amendment, showing in detail how loosely the modern Court has read it against the actual historical record. Taken together, this body of scholarship, produced by writers with no shared political program, points toward the same conclusion: the liberal reading of the Constitution is not a neutral discovery of hidden meaning. It is a substantial departure from what the text and its history actually say.

Even confronted with that evidence, the standard evasion holds firm: the intentions of the Framers, we are told, simply do not matter anymore. Levy himself, despite his own scholarship, criticized Berger’s work on the Fourteenth Amendment as an attempt to be ruled by “the dead hand of the past.” The usual phrase deployed to shut down the historical argument is that the Constitution is “a living document,” a description that sounds humble and flexible right up until you notice what it is actually licensing: a judiciary free to exercise raw will rather than the disciplined judgment the Framers actually asked of it.

Rehnquist’s own limited success at pushing back is instructive precisely because of how limited it was. Even a justice with a clear, consistently articulated preference for restraint, textualism, and deference to the political branches found himself operating inside a body of precedent so thoroughly settled that reversing it wholesale, rather than chipping at its edges, would have looked less like judicial modesty and more like the very kind of disruptive activism restraint is supposed to guard against. That is the trap the “living document” framework sets for anyone who wants to argue against it using the Court’s own tools. Precedent accumulated through decades of will dressed as judgment cannot simply be waved away by a single dissent, however well reasoned. It has to be dismantled patiently, opinion by opinion, over a period measured in decades rather than terms, which is exactly why constitutional literacy among ordinary citizens matters as much as it does. The correction, when it comes, comes slowly and depends on a public that has not forgotten what it is owed.

Predictability is not optional to a functioning rule of law. It is close to the whole point. But predictability is precisely what the “living document” framework sacrifices, since it authorizes justices to rule capriciously, to “expand” rights and “broaden” protections and “discover” new implications lurking in the “penumbra” of existing ones, all without any fixed standard telling you in advance where the next discovery will land. Given a judiciary operating on that basis, it should not surprise anyone that nobody can say with real confidence what the nation’s supposedly fundamental law will mean a decade from now.

What the Framers Feared Most About a Bill of Rights

Publius’s own apprehensions about the Bill of Rights are worth recovering in full, because they cut directly against the modern assumption that more listed rights automatically means more protected freedom. He argued that a formal bill of rights made the most sense under a monarchy or another form of government where state power was general and essentially unlimited, since freedom in that setting could only be carved out as a specific, named exception to an otherwise unrestricted power. Under a genuinely free government, one holding only the specific powers the people had explicitly granted it, the logic reversed entirely. Freedom was the default condition and government power was the narrow exception, which made listing individual rights almost beside the point. If the federal government held no granted power to regulate the press in the first place, Publius asked, why declare that it may not do a thing it was never authorized to do at all? Enumerating a right in that setting risked implying, falsely, that the power to violate it existed and simply needed to be waived.

That objection was taken seriously enough at the time to produce the Ninth and Tenth Amendments specifically as a corrective, closing the exact gap Publius worried the earlier amendments might open. The Tenth Amendment, understood this way, is not a minor closing clause tacked onto the end of the Bill of Rights. It contains, in compressed form, the entire theory of the constitutional design: a government of enumerated powers, with everything not explicitly granted reserved to the states and the people. Its long practical desuetude across the twentieth century is not a technical footnote. It is close to the central constitutional loss this entire book has been describing from a dozen different angles, the mechanism by which a government meant to hold only specific, named powers acquired something close to general and unlimited authority instead.

Federalist No. 10, Faction, and the Abiding Majority

Federalist No. 10 remains the most quoted paper in the entire series, and one of the most consistently misread. Publius identifies “the violence of faction,” what we would now call special-interest politics, as the most common failure mode of popular government, and he is explicit that this is “this dangerous vice,” not a feature to be celebrated. His ideal is the “enlightened statesman,” motivated by patriotism and the public good, though he is realistic enough to know that “moral and religious motives” alone cannot be relied on to produce that statesman reliably.

His proposed solution is structural. The constitutional design filters the influence of narrow interests through multiple layers so that legislation tends to express what Publius calls “the deliberate sense” of the nation rather than the raw “passions” of momentary factions. The design does not merely permit majority rule. It is engineered to produce rule by a particular kind of majority: broad-minded, public-spirited, oriented toward the common good rather than narrow advantage. Publius was not building a machine that lets one faction cancel out another and calls the resulting gridlock good government. He was betting that the structure itself, by presupposing certain “qualities in human nature,” would tend to draw out patriotic rather than factional impulses in the people operating within it.

That same logic runs directly through Federalist No. 78’s treatment of judicial review. Publius denies there that judicial review implies “a superiority of the judicial to the legislative power.” What it actually reflects, he argues, is that “the power of the people is superior to both.” But the “people” doing the reflecting are the people who ratified the Constitution as fundamental law, an abiding majority whose settled constitutional consensus outranks whatever a current legislative majority happens to want at a given moment. When a court strikes down a law that conflicts with that deeper constitutional agreement, it is not substituting its own preference for the legislature’s. It is enforcing the abiding majority’s will against a passing one. Judicial review, properly understood, is one more structural defense against faction, not an invitation for the judiciary to become a faction of its own.

That is exactly what makes the modern record so troubling. The Supreme Court since the New Deal has, in significant part, become a willing partner to special-interest politics rather than a check on it, and the flood of laws and taxes that follow reflect the very “violence of faction” the constitutional design was built to restrain. The Court has itself operated as a faction, animated by a fairly consistent liberal ideology, and it has largely escaped scrutiny for that fact by attributing its own preferences to the Constitution itself rather than owning them as preferences. The traditional judicial role, combined with rhetoric borrowed from that role, has sustained a convenient fiction: that a Court striking down old laws on pornography or abortion is defending the abiding majority against a temporary one. The actual pattern runs the other direction. The Court has repeatedly represented a current minority, the liberal policy minority, against both the abiding constitutional consensus and the actual current majority.

Liberalism’s success in reshaping the judiciary reflects real strategic skill, whatever else you think of the project. Large portions of its agenda could never have assembled a legislative majority on their own merits, so the more effective route has been to rebrand that agenda as “constitutional values” waiting to be discovered rather than policy preferences waiting to be voted on. Justices most associated with the Court’s liberal peak, William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, were also, in their personal and political lives, committed advocates for the same causes their opinions happened to “discover” embedded in the Constitution. Douglas went further than most, admitting outright that he preferred creating precedent to finding it and that his opinions were guided by his “gut” as much as by doctrine. That admission tells you plainly how much of this body of law reflects considered constitutional reasoning and how much reflects policy preference wearing a judicial robe.

What This Means for Your Wallet and Your Vote

This is not a purely academic argument about legal theory. The erosion of the original federal structure has direct, measurable consequences for you. Federal spending levels, persistent tax burdens, and the recurring budget crises that dominate news cycles all trace back, in part, to the removal of effective constitutional limits on federal power. A large share of what the federal government spends goes toward programs with no explicit authorization anywhere in Article I, a state of affairs Publius would likely have described as Congress acting beyond its granted authority. Once constitutional limits on congressional power stop functioning as real constraints, citizens are left fighting a defensive, uphill battle against spending growth using political tools rather than constitutional ones, a battle that gets harder to win every year it continues. The recurring budget standoffs you read about are not isolated fiscal events. They are symptoms of a much longer-running constitutional crisis that most coverage never names as such.

There is a simpler failure sitting underneath all of this, one that has nothing to do with advanced legal theory: a basic loss of common sense about what the Constitution was ever supposed to do. An informed citizen does not need a law degree to know the Constitution was built as an instrument of popular self-government, not the private property of credentialed specialists and mystagogues. That same citizen would also know, if he still remembered his civics lessons, that the freedom of speech clause was never understood by its authors to cover hard-core pornography or topless dancing. But deference to credentialed experts has become such a reflex across every field that handing constitutional self-government over to a small class of specialists now feels natural rather than alarming. It should feel like exactly what it is: a transfer of authority the Constitution never contemplated.

Holding the Court Accountable Without Breaking the System

None of this is an argument for ignoring judicial rulings you dislike or treating every unfavorable decision as inherently illegitimate. That path leads somewhere worse than the problem it claims to solve. It is an argument for a specific, disciplined kind of scrutiny, one the Framers themselves expected citizens to apply. Read the actual opinion, not the headline summary of it. Check whether the majority’s reasoning traces back to constitutional text and structure, or whether it leans on a “penumbra,” an “emanation,” or an appeal to evolving standards that could just as easily justify the opposite conclusion next term. Ask whether the same justices applying a given interpretive method here would apply it consistently to a case cutting the other way politically. Consistency, or the lack of it, tells you more about whether you are looking at judgment or will than any amount of legal jargon can obscure.

Support the structural fixes that are actually available rather than the ones that make for better slogans. Congress’s power to shape appellate jurisdiction is real, even if rarely used. The confirmation process, for all its dysfunction, remains the one point where elected officials can ask a nominee direct questions about interpretive method before the robe goes on rather than after. State legislatures retain far more constitutional authority than the last several decades of incorporation doctrine have led most citizens to assume, and reacquainting yourself with the Tenth Amendment’s actual scope is a genuine first step toward reclaiming some of that ground, not a merely symbolic one.

None of this is a call for judicial passivity as some kind of virtue in itself. A judiciary too timid to strike down a genuinely unconstitutional law would fail the country in the opposite direction, leaving majorities free to trample the actual, enumerated rights the Constitution protects. The standard this book has tried to apply throughout is narrower and more specific than either blanket deference or blanket suspicion: does the ruling in question trace back to the text, structure, and history of the document itself, applying Publius’s promised “judgment,” or does it trace back to a policy outcome the Court wanted to reach first and worked backward from, dressing the destination up as a discovery. That is a question you can learn to ask of any ruling, on any subject, regardless of whether the outcome happens to please you politically in a given instance. Applying it consistently, especially to rulings you personally like, is the actual discipline this part has been arguing for.

Set aside the underlying merits of the abortion debate itself, and Roe still stands as the clearest single case of the Court imposing a novel minority position under the pretense of interpreting settled constitutional text. Constitutional objections to abortion law were essentially absent from American legal discourse until legal-abortion advocates decided the judiciary offered a faster path than the ballot box. The Court then “discovered” a right that had never before been suspected of existing, which required treating every prior legislature that had ever addressed the subject as constitutionally mistaken, and required a public willing to accept that verdict without serious institutional pushback. Both conditions were met. In pulling off that combination, the modern Court has managed something close to a full inversion of Publius’s original design. It now exercises FORCE and WILL, exactly the two things Publius insisted the judiciary would never hold, while judgment, the one thing he promised it would exercise, has become the rarest commodity in the whole arrangement.

Part IX: Prospects

The Conservative Instincts Now Working Against Conservation

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recorded something genuinely strange about the prisoners of the Gulag. Some of the long-term inmates came to love the place of their confinement. Given the chance to leave, a few actually preferred to stay. Affection, it turns out, can take root almost anywhere, including inside conditions that would strike any outside observer as plainly intolerable.

That is not really a story about prison. It is a story about human nature, and it explains something that should worry every reader who has followed the argument this far. Most people are not built to rebel against their circumstances. They tend to accept as legitimate whatever they have grown used to, whatever furniture happens to be sitting in the room when they walk in. Even the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, engaged in what was by any definition a radical act, framed their justification as an explanation owed to “the decent opinion of mankind,” not a celebration of rupture for its own sake. They were reluctant revolutionaries, aware that the burden of proof sat with them, not with the arrangement they were breaking from.

This same tendency, properly understood, is a conservative instinct in the deepest sense. People are conservative not necessarily because they hold a defined set of political doctrines, but because they intuitively grasp that the things they actually want out of life, a career, a family, a plan they can act on, depend on continuity and predictability. You cannot build anything on ground that keeps shifting under you. That instinct does not automatically translate into conscious political conservatism. Left alone, it just as easily produces an unreflective attachment to whatever status quo happens to be sitting in front of you, whatever its actual content.

And here is the problem this book has been circling from the opening page. The redistributive, secularizing, family-weakening, judicially micromanaged regime described across the preceding parts is by now itself a status quo. It has been in place long enough, in some form, that plenty of people who would otherwise be temperamentally conservative have quietly attached their conservative instincts to it. They are not defending the old republic. They are defending the new arrangement, simply because it is the arrangement they were born into and it has not yet finished collapsing around them. The task facing anyone who wants to conserve the actual constitutional tradition, rather than whichever version of the state currently exists, has therefore become genuinely strange. It requires convincing naturally conservative people that a dose of real political engagement, in the short term, is the price of conservation in the long term.

What the Conscious Conservative Must Do

That is the actual assignment, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving it implied. The conscious conservative, alienated in his own particular way from a regime that has drifted a long way from its constitutional foundations, has to do a version of the very unmasking work the left has spent decades doing to the traditional order. He has to make the case, patiently and repeatedly, that his instinctively status-quo-oriented neighbor is not actually protecting anything by staying passive.

He has to make several distinct arguments, and none of them are complicated once stated clearly. That property rights are not a mechanism of greed but one of the few reliable checks on greed, specifically the appetite of an unlimited state that never has to answer for how much it takes. That the family is under real pressure from policies and cultural currents that present themselves as assistance and liberation while functioning as neither. That religion is not meaningfully free when it has been squeezed into an ever-shrinking category of purely private activity. That the country faces genuine threats, both from without and from within its own institutions, rooted in the same impulse toward total politicization traced throughout this book. That an entire inherited way of life is being hollowed out, sometimes by the very institutions, like a Supreme Court that has forgotten Publius’s warning about force, will, and judgment, that were supposed to guard it.

None of this is a call to abandon prudence in favor of some rival utopian project. That would simply be trading one form of the disease for another, dressed in different colors. It is a call to recognize that unreflective attachment to whatever currently exists is not the same thing as genuine conservatism, and that telling the difference between the two is one of the harder and more urgent tasks facing anyone who takes the label seriously.

Hard Cases and the Rule by Exception

One obstacle stands squarely in the way of that work, and it deserves its own honest accounting: nearly everyone, conservative and liberal alike, has absorbed the habit of reasoning from the hard case to the general rule, when sound thinking runs the other direction. Raise the subject of school prayer, abortion, capital punishment, or poverty, and the conversation reliably jumps straight to the exception. What about the child who does not want to pray? The girl in the worst imaginable circumstance? The rare wrongly convicted man on death row? The person who genuinely cannot find work through no fault of his own?

These questions are not illegitimate. They deserve real, serious answers, and a decent society keeps working at them. But they are not the place to start, and building policy backward from them, letting the exception write the rule, is precisely the error the old legal maxim warns against: hard cases make bad law. The right sequence runs the other way. Decide first, on the merits, whether school prayer is a good thing in principle, whether abortion is right or wrong, whether capital punishment can be justified, whether it is right to take one person’s earnings to benefit another. Only after settling the underlying question does it make sense to ask how the hard cases should be handled within it. The rule of law loses its coherence the moment it gets reverse-engineered from its most sympathetic exception, and a great deal of the confusion running through American law over the past half century traces directly back to policy built this way, exception first, rule second, if at all.

There is a reason to expect this pattern to shift, and it is worth naming honestly. What sounded like an extreme, easily dismissed position not long ago has increasingly come to look prophetic instead. More and more people can see, without needing a book to point it out, that the politicized “social consciousness” running through this whole account has produced real damage, not always dramatic but cumulative and hard to miss. A government organized around that consciousness has ended up weakening individual freedom and the specific institutions, home and church chief among them, that hold a free society together in the first place. It promised cooperation over competition and delivered something closer to the opposite: bitter, permanent conflict over a growing pool of redistributed wealth, alongside declining incentive to produce the wealth being fought over.

What This Argument Adds Up To

It is worth pulling the separate threads of this book into one place before closing, because the individual parts are easier to dismiss than the pattern connecting them. Part I argued that conservatism begins with appreciation, the discipline of noticing what already works before rushing to tear it down, and that the malcontent who skips this step has usually skipped the harder, more honest work of understanding what he is criticizing. Part II showed what happens when that appreciation gets applied to law itself: a genuine rule of law, rooted in shared moral habit and applied impartially, protects the weak and the strong alike, while a regime of commands dressed up as law protects only whoever currently holds the pen.

Part III named the deeper psychological pattern underneath so much of this: Alienism, the systematic preference for the marginal and the alien over the native and the familiar, dressed up as compassion but functioning as a permanent license to treat your own country’s institutions as guilty until proven innocent. Part IV traced that same impulse into its purest economic form, socialism, and showed how liberalism functions as its sentimental domestic cousin, attacking property, family, and religion gradually rather than all at once. Part V followed the same logic into the most intimate part of life, showing how the sexual revolution and the modern state’s approach to the family both trace back to the identical hostility toward stable, independent, self-governing institutions that answer to something other than the state.

Part VI showed why that hostility extends naturally to organized religion, the oldest and most stubborn authority standing outside the state’s reach. Part VII showed the same pattern operating at the level of nations, with liberalism functioning as Communism’s sentimental cousin abroad the same way it functions as socialism’s sentimental cousin at home. And Part VIII brought the argument back to the institution most Americans still trust more than any other, the judiciary, and showed how that trust has been used to smuggle a policy agenda into the Constitution itself, dressed up as discovery rather than admitted as preference.

Read individually, each part can be argued with, qualified, pushed back against on its own terms, and that is exactly as it should be. Read together, they describe a single, coherent pattern: an ideology that prefers the alien to the native, the state to the family, the expert to the citizen, and its own current preference to the country’s abiding constitutional agreement, operating across law, economics, sexuality, religion, foreign policy, and the courts with striking internal consistency for a movement that insists it has no fixed program at all.

What You Can Actually Do With This

None of this is worth reading if it does not change how you spend your actual time. Start with the plainest step available to you: learn the specific documents this book keeps returning to, rather than the secondhand summaries you were handed in school. Read the Tenth Amendment. Read Federalist No. 10 and No. 78 in full, not in excerpt. Read the actual text of a Supreme Court opinion you have only ever heard described secondhand, and compare what it says to what you were told it says. This is not a research project reserved for lawyers. Every document named across this book is public, short enough to read in an evening, and more legible than its reputation suggests.

Next, watch your own language for the patterns this book has tried to name. Notice when a policy gets defended through its most sympathetic exception rather than its actual merits. Notice when “separation of church and state” gets invoked selectively rather than consistently. Notice when a word like “reform” or “compassion” or “pluralism” is doing the work of an argument it never actually made. Naming a rhetorical pattern out loud, calmly and specifically, does more to defuse it than any amount of raw argument, because it forces the pattern into the open where it has to justify itself on the merits.

Finally, apply the standard from Part I to your own civic life before applying it to anyone else’s. Ask what in your own community, your own institutions, your own family, is actually worth conserving, specifically and concretely, not as an abstraction but as a named, particular good. Conservatism that cannot name what it is conserving collapses into simple resistance to change, indistinguishable from stubbornness. Conservatism that can name its object, clearly and without embarrassment, becomes something durable: a case for a specific, lovable, defensible way of life, made to people who have never had that case made to them plainly before.

Why the Instinct to Wait This Out Is a Mistake

There is a particular kind of complacency worth naming directly, because it is more common among genuinely thoughtful people than any other kind. It is the belief that the excesses documented across this book will eventually correct themselves, that overreach invites its own backlash, that patience is itself a conservative virtue and the wisest course is simply to wait. There is something to this instinct. Overreach often does invite backlash, and impatience has produced plenty of its own damage throughout political history.

But patience is not the same thing as passivity, and the distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A judiciary that has spent a century accumulating power it was never granted does not relinquish that power through simple waiting. A regulatory apparatus operating well outside its enumerated authority does not shrink back to its constitutional boundaries because enough people quietly disapprove of it. An education system that has stopped teaching the specific documents this book keeps returning to does not spontaneously start teaching them again because a critical mass of parents privately wishes it would. Institutions built to expand generally keep expanding until something outside them applies real, sustained pressure. Waiting is not a strategy. It is the absence of one, dressed up as prudence.

The conservative instinct toward patience is not wrong. It is incomplete. It needs to be paired with the second half of the conservative disposition this book described at the very start: the capacity to know precisely what is worth defending, and the willingness to defend it actively rather than trusting that its worth will somehow become self-evident to institutions that have spent decades demonstrating otherwise.

A Realistic Accounting of What Stands in the Way

Honesty requires acknowledging the size of the task rather than promising an easy version of it. The institutions examined across this book, the courts, the major universities, large portions of the press, significant parts of the mainline clergy, did not drift from their original constitutional and moral moorings by accident, and they will not drift back by accident either. Each of them now has its own internal incentives, its own career structures, its own settled assumptions about what counts as respectable opinion, all of which reward continuing in the current direction and penalize any visible movement back toward the older constitutional consensus. Anyone entering this fight expecting a fair, symmetrical contest of ideas is going to be disappointed early and often.

That is not a reason for despair, and despair would be its own kind of surrender, just a quieter one. It is a reason for realism about where the actual leverage points sit. Not every institution needs to be won back at once, and trying to fight on every front simultaneously is a reliable way to lose on all of them. Local school boards, state legislatures, and individual congregations remain far more responsive to sustained, specific citizen pressure than any national institution named in this book. The Tenth Amendment’s original design anticipated exactly this kind of distributed resistance, closer to the ground and harder for any single captured institution to neutralize all at once. Rebuilding constitutional literacy starts there, in rooms small enough that one informed, persistent citizen can actually change the outcome, not in the rooms where the six o’clock news happens to be pointed that week.

Avoiding the Malcontent’s Mirror Image

There is a real risk on this side of the argument too, and a book this direct about the failures of the other side owes its reader an honest warning about it. Part I described the malcontent as someone who has allowed grievance to substitute for appreciation, who has learned to see only what is broken and lost the capacity to notice what still works. That same failure mode is available to conservatives, and plenty of conservative rhetoric has fallen into it: a posture of permanent grievance, an inability to name anything currently functioning well, a rhetorical style indistinguishable from the malcontent this book spent its opening pages criticizing, just aimed at different targets.

The corrective is the same one Part I proposed from the start. Appreciation has to come first, has to be genuine, and has to extend to real, specific things: a functioning local government, a well-run school, a family that is actually thriving, a church that has held its doctrine without becoming brittle or cruel about it. A conservatism that cannot point to concrete goods worth conserving, that only ever names what it opposes, has quietly become the mirror image of the thing it set out to critique. The distinction is not cosmetic. It is the difference between a movement people want to join and a movement people merely tolerate because the alternative looks worse.

What Winning Actually Looks Like

It is worth being concrete about what success in this project would actually look like, since vague victory conditions produce vague, easily abandoned efforts. It does not look like the disappearance of political disagreement, an outcome no free society has ever achieved or should want. It looks like a citizenry that can accurately name the difference between a law and a command, that knows roughly what the Tenth Amendment says and why it was written that way, that can spot the zone-of-morality, zone-of-reality double standard in a news story without needing a book to point it out first.

It also looks, in more immediate and personal terms, like a household that has actually read the documents this book keeps citing rather than absorbing them secondhand through commentary, and a dinner table where the difference between a law and a command can be explained to a fourteen-year-old in under a minute because the adults in the room genuinely understand it themselves. Civic literacy is not primarily a policy outcome. It is a household habit, passed down the same way any other durable inheritance gets passed down, one specific conversation at a time.

It looks like a judiciary that has rediscovered the difference between judgment and will, even if that rediscovery takes a generation of deliberate confirmation choices and legal scholarship to accomplish. It looks like families and churches and local institutions operating with genuine independence from the state, not because the state has been abolished, but because its proper boundaries have been reestablished and are actually respected rather than treated as suggestions. It looks like a public conversation in which “compassion” and “pluralism” and “reform” have to mean something specific again, rather than functioning as all-purpose passwords that shut down further questions.

None of that arrives through a single election, a single court appointment, or a single viral argument, however satisfying any of those might feel in the moment. It arrives, if it arrives at all, the way most durable things arrive: through a long accumulation of people who decided, individually and without waiting for permission, that the specific things named across this book were worth the sustained effort of defending. That is a slower answer than most people want. It also happens to be the true one, and a book built around the discipline of appreciating what is real rather than what is merely wished for owes you the true answer over the satisfying one.

Loving a Country Worth Loving

Burke put the underlying standard about as well as it can be put: “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” That sentence is worth sitting with, because it is not an argument for blind loyalty. It is the opposite. It says love has to be earned by the thing loved, not manufactured by slogan or demanded by decree.

A Word on Temperament, Not Just Argument

Everything in this book has been an argument, built from documents, court opinions, and named sources, because arguments are the currency this conversation actually runs on and vague appeals to feeling have done conservatism no favors over the years. But temperament matters alongside argument, and it is worth closing on that point directly rather than leaving it implied. The disposition this book has tried to model throughout, skeptical without becoming cynical, direct without becoming hostile, willing to name an opponent’s error specifically without needing to declare the opponent evil in order to do it, is not incidental to the argument. It is part of the argument.

A conservatism that wins every factual point while losing its own temperament, becoming bitter, grasping, and unable to enjoy anything it has not already lost, will not hold the ground it wins for very long. It will produce converts on paper and exhaust them in practice, and it will hand its critics the easiest possible argument against it: that the whole project was grievance wearing the costume of principle. The record shows something better is possible. Burke, Chesterton, and Johnson, quoted throughout this book, were not humorless men reciting grievances. They were men capable of real delight in the world as they found it, which is exactly what gave their criticism of its abuses its force and its staying power. The appreciation described in Part I was never meant as a rhetorical opening move, a pleasant preamble before the real business of grievance begins. It was meant as the actual foundation, the thing that makes the rest of the argument worth making in the first place. A person who has genuinely lost the capacity for gratitude has very little left to conserve, whatever positions he continues to hold on paper.

America still earns that love in a thousand ordinary ways: in its natural landscape, in the small, unforced courtesies people extend each other in daily transactions that never make the news, in the accumulated freedom this book has tried to describe honestly, both what remains of it and what has been lost. Its uglier features, the coarseness, the casual violence, the institutions turned against the people they were built to serve, have gotten worse under successive rounds of policy built on the hard case rather than the rule, dressed up as compassion, delivered as dependency. The “Great Society” promised something it has never fully delivered, and the gap between the promise and the result has by now become its own quiet argument for everything this book has tried to lay out with specifics rather than slogans.

There is no need to inflate America’s uniqueness into something mystical to make this case. In the end, people love their country for reasons that resist easy communication, the same way every patriot in every country loves his own, understood by outsiders mostly through the analogy of their own attachments rather than through any argument you could construct from scratch. You do not persuade someone to love his mother by cataloguing her singular virtues or elevating her into an abstraction. You say the word “mother,” and nearly everyone alive understands exactly what you mean without further explanation. There will always be the occasional person alienated from the very idea, convinced the whole concept is outdated. The wiser course, most of the time, is to keep talking to everyone else.

A Closing Word to the Reader Who Made It This Far

If you have read this rather long piece from start to finish, you have already done something most people in a distracted culture rarely do: sat with a sustained argument long enough to see how its individual pieces connect. That alone puts you in a small category. Use it. The specific claims made across these nine parts, about law, about the family, about religion, about the courts, about the difference between authority and power, are not intended to be taken on faith any more than the founding generation’s own political claims were meant to be taken on faith. Check them. Read the Federalist Papers Publius is quoted from. Read Burke’s actual Reflections rather than a summary of it. Read a Supreme Court opinion cover to cover instead of trusting a headline’s account of what it said.

This piece has tried to model a particular way of arguing: specific rather than vague, willing to name names and cite sources rather than gesture at grievance, confident enough in its own position to state opposing views accurately rather than in caricature. That approach demands more of the writer and more of the reader than the alternative. It also happens to be the only approach durable enough to survive contact with someone who actually disagrees with you and wants to argue back. A case built on slogans collapses the moment someone asks a real question. A case built on documents and specific reasoning does not.

That is finally where appreciation, the theme this piece opened with, comes back around. The conservative disposition described on its first pages, the capacity to notice what is already good rather than fixating only on what is broken, is not a passive stance and never was. It is the precondition for the harder work described in every part since: defending the rule of law against its corruptions, naming Alienism and socialism for what they are, protecting the family and religious authority from a state that keeps mistaking itself for both, and holding the judiciary to the modest role the Framers actually assigned it. None of that work is possible without first knowing, concretely and specifically, what is actually worth conserving. This piece has tried to make that case with names, documents, and arguments rather than slogans. What happens next is not a question this piece can answer for you. It depends on whether enough people, having seen the argument laid out plainly, decide the thing being asked of them is worth doing.

---

Margin of the Law publishes constitutional analysis, civic research, and legal education for people who want to understand the system they actually live in. Read the Full Constitutional Analysis Library at marginofthelaw.com.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

For republication or citation, please credit this article with link attribution to marginofthelaw.com.