‘Nationalism’ Over ‘Conservatism’

If the headline above confuses you, please understand that this column is intended as a refutation of a piece appearing here at The American Spectator by Aidan Grogan, a doctoral student of history at Liberty University and the donor communications manager at the American Institute for Economic Research, on Monday.

Grogan laments that what he calls “Nationalism,” which is a term he’s applying to the Make America Great Again agenda, has overtaken conservatism as the active ingredient on the American Right. It’s a long lament, nearly 800 words, and it’s worthy of analysis — if not a friendly examination.

Grogan begins by attacking Theodore Roosevelt as a progressive nationalist rather than a conservative one, reaching back 114 years to reference Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” speech. In that speech, Roosevelt touted a muscular federal government that could sweep away the confusion and inconsistencies of state legislatures which then held sway over most social and economic issues.

He claims that Roosevelt is the new patron saint of the National Conservatives, owing to fond statements about the Bull Moose by Tucker Carlson and Sen. Josh Hawley and others who identify as devotees or allies of Donald Trump.

But shortly thereafter, Grogan attacks the Nat-Cons as insufficiently conservative on the issue of abortion. “In 2024, the GOP is pro-choice and only opposes ‘Late Term Abortion,’” he writes. “It regards the defeat of Roe v. Wade as the final victory in the abortion debate, not the actual end of abortion in the United States.”

Why? Because the party’s platform explicitly leaves the question of abortion to the states rather than calling for a federal abortion ban.

So which is it? According to Grogan, a federal abortion ban is preferable to what’s in the “nationalist, but not conservative” GOP platform. But that platform is explicit in calling for federalism and devolving power from Washington on the abortion issue. He’s either dishonest here or he hasn’t thought things through.

Or more to the point his political instincts are not quite fully informed by experience, because there is no national consensus for a federal abortion ban like there is at the state level in places like Oklahoma, Louisiana, and South Carolina, and smart politicians of the pro-life stripe know it’s best to take what you can get for now.

We’re past the point at which this grousing about the Nat-Cons has become irritating. And it’s always a certain stripe of “conservatives” doing the grousing.

With apologies to Grogan, whom I don’t know and suspect has not fully considered the history of the past 50 years — though he seems to have boned up quite well on the early progressive movement — this contingent of anti-Nat-Con scribblers, who invariably melt into the NeverTrumper camp, make a big show of how Reaganite they are.

Elements of Broken Conservatism

But upon examination it’s usually revealed as a lie. These people aren’t Reagan conservatives. They want you to believe that, but their “conservatism” is Stupid Party Bush Republicanism. You’ll see very little of A Time For Choosing in what they’re offering. Instead, you see a demand that the Right return to its long death march from 1988 to 2012.

We see a lot of talk about Reagan’s three-legged stool, which is a more relatable construct of the old “fusionist” mindset said to have built the modern conservative movement. The elements of this are social conservatism, anti-communism, and free market economics. Grogan’s complaint, which mirrors others out there, is that the Nat-Cons repudiate the three-legged stool.

But that misses reality completely.

The reality is that the three-legged stool has been broken for a long time.

It’s comical that Grogan should groan over the GOP platform going “soft” on abortion and gay marriage when it was the Bushie crowd who failed to fight off the Left’s aggressions on both issues. George H.W. Bush pretended he was for a “kinder, gentler nation,” which translated into an abject surrender on social issues, and his son called for “compassionate conservatism,” as though conservatism wasn’t compassionate.

At the end of that bookended betrayal of the social conservative leg of the stool we found ourselves with transgenderism and the normalization of pedophilia on the way.

It’s fair to note that Reagan wasn’t particularly animated by social conservatism in his time, though 1980’s culture was certainly conservative by today’s standard. It was in the 1990’s and 2000’s when the battles were lost and the Left was able to consolidate full control over our cultural institutions with zero effective pushback from the “conservatives” then in charge of the GOP.

Anti-communism gave way to Reagan’s formulation of Peace Through Strength, a concept which works regardless of the nation’s threat profile. But what did the Bushie gang do with it? Endless wars which have given us neither peace nor strength but instead a feral military-industrial complex tied in with an unaccountable intelligence community which has turned against the American citizenry.

Worse, because the Bushies were incapable of holding the center in American politics they paved the way for Obama Democrats to purge the warfighters from the upper echelons of the military and turn it woke, so patriotic and traditional Americans no longer want to join. Now there are wars flaring up all over the world and a real concern exists that we will lose the next one we engage in.

As for free-market economics, we now have an economy which is less free than at practically any time in our history. Capitalism, under the guiding hand of the Bushies, gave way to corporatism, at the same time the Bushies allowed corporate America to go woke, and now we essentially have a version of Italian economic fascism in control of our markets. Meanwhile the nation is saddled with $35 trillion in debt, crisis-level deficits no one knows how to remedy, and average Americans struggle with runaway household costs, stagnant wages, the inability to buy a house or a new car and other woes.

All “conservatism” has done, in the hands of those who have managed it, is fail. Again and again. As a consequence, adherents to an ideology which was decisively beaten during the Cold War have marched up through the institutions and are actively raining civilizational decline down on our heads.

No, this can’t continue.

MAGA, Revivalism, and National Conservatism

To understand the depth of the failure of the “conservatism” Grogan defends, it’s helpful to return to the words of Antonio Gramsci, the father of the cultural Marxism which animates the ascendant Obama Left. Gramsci held that World War I didn’t bring down the market democracies and constitutional monarchies of the West and pave the way for the Great Proletarian Revolution they all just knew was coming, because of three things.

Those were nationalism, Christianity, and charity.

Gramsci understood that economics, as important as it is to the success and prosperity of a nation, is not a primary dispensary of political power. In that respect he was a very poor Marxist but a superior leftist intellectual to the father of modern socialism. And when the Cold War ended, primarily as a triumph of Reaganite conservatism, it was Gramsci’s ideas, rather than Marx’s, which signified the West’s impending decline.

You know, the one the Bushies failed to prevent?

What National Conservatism — the name I would give it is Revivalism instead, and I would perhaps change a few items in its wardrobe to take advantage of electoral and cultural opportunities the Nat Cons haven’t calibrated for (that’s for another column) — intends to do is to finish off Gramsci the way Reagan finished off Marx.

The “national” part of National Conservatism is less about Teddy Roosevelt’s mutterings than it is a rejection of the New World Order globalism that the Bush Republican crowd busily imposed on us. That reality is one which is completely different than Roosevelt’s conceptualization, though there are some similarities. In Roosevelt’s time there was wholesale immigration, though it was orderly and through portals like Ellis Island; within his concept of nationalism was an insistence that immigrants be willing to assimilate into a well-defined American culture, mindset, and civics.

Somehow there is a negative taint to resurrecting this in the face of what is better described as an invasion or a rout than a wave of immigration. At issue is our very sovereignty at a time when nations in Europe are facing rioting and civil unrest over their own demographic suicide; this isn’t relevant to contemporary American politics?

Gramsci suggested that one goal of his envisioned “march through the institutions” was to break down the concept of community implied in “nationalism,” because when Belgians stopped seeing themselves as Belgians they’d be more interested in radical ideology. One of national conservatism’s strongest arguments is that it’s important for Americans to understand what being an American means, and then to enforce a standard of Americanism that will rebuild a national consensus around preserving our constitutional republic.

None of that work would be necessary if the Bush “conservative” gang had done their damned job.

As for Christianity, it’s at the root of the social conservative leg of the stool, which was the primary failure of “conservatism” in the first place. The Bush crowd didn’t want to talk about America as a Christian, or even Judeo-Christian, nation, and as a result we’re now a post-Christian society in which the other side has begun imposing a pseudo-religion of woke socialism and pagan Gaia worship on the public square. If the Nat-Cons come off as a bit theocratic in demanding the return of Christianity to our culture and politics, that’s a small price to pay for attempting to restore Western civilization to the beating heart of the West.

Again, the people who fell asleep at the switch and lost the culture and the public sector to the woke pagans really don’t get to complain about the attitude of the cleanup crew.

Finally, charity. Yes, Bush 41 did talk about “a thousand points of light” as part of that “kinder-gentler nation” speech he gave at the 1988 GOP convention. At the time, American charities were better-funded and more active in their communities than ever before, prompting Nancy Reagan, in the audience in New Orleans for that speech, to ask, “Kinder and gentler than what?”

The facility of charity and philanthropic activity as an effective means of fulfilling the need for social goods, especially in comparison to the creation of government bureaus and public social programs, has forever been an important argument within the conservative sphere.

The fact is, however, that “conservatives” have never given the argument its due attention; something somewhat excusable since charity and the civil society which produces it aren’t a natural matter of public policy. It takes some creativity coupled with restraint to provide constructive leadership on this front, which is a difficult skill set for even an above-average politician to master.

But by the time the Bushies were through promoting “charity” — which they at least initially claimed as their secret “conservative” sauce — they had perverted and ruined even that. Or don’t you remember the mountains of government dollars (deficit spending, by the way, meaning a slow debasement of the currency and an impoverishment of the lower classes) flowing into non-governmental organizations to fulfill various gassy pseudo-public purposes during both the Bush 41 and Bush 43 administrations?

How’d that work out for us? Now those NGO’s are utterly out of control, they’re almost completely controlled by Hard Left ideologues and the vast majority of them are politicized beyond any possible definition of “charity.” So rather than serving communities here, we have Catholic Charities catering to foreigners on our soil with hundreds of millions of our taxpayer dollars.

It’s not irrational to compare the political incompetence of the Stupid Party Bush Republicans to the operational incompetence of the Secret Service and conclude in both cases that malice is a better explanation. And also to conclude that both should be sent to the glue factory and replaced with something new.

Additionally, a few words on the argument over markets. Grogan complains that Nat-Cons tout some form of industrial policy, and from a doctrinaire free market perspective that might be lamentable.

On the other hand, the Bushie crowd kept using words like “free trade” to open the world market to the Chinese communists, under the idiotic theory that with enough commerce they could turn all the little Maos in Beijing into little Thomas Jeffersons. This was never going to happen, and so what we had instead was “free” trade with a command-and-control mercantilist despotic regime.

The Chinese stole our intellectual property, repurposed our corporate institutions against us, bought up our stupid and venal politicians and undercut our productive sector with slave labor and late 19th-century industrial practices.

What we learned, to our great lament, is the old truism — if you have no industrial policy, and you seek to trade with a partner who does have an industrial policy, then shortly his industrial policy will become yours. And so we are slowly becoming China’s economic colony — so much so that NBA executives aren’t free to voice opposition to the Chicoms crushing Hong Kong without LeBron James scolding them for scaring the fish away.

Meanwhile, “free markets” have become a euphemism for runaway illegal immigration as a means of depressing the wages of many ordinary Americans our national deindustrialization already relegated to work in lower-paying service industries. Shortly before Trump arrived on the scene calling out these failures of the Bush Republicans, National Review columnist Kevin Williamson crystallized how out of touch the “conservative” movement was by castigating the citizens of the economically-moribund town of Garbutt in western New York for refusing to pack a U-Haul and leave rather than seek a path to economic relevance for their own community.

Garbutt likes Trump a lot better than Williamson. Nobody ought to be surprised.

I’ll give Grogan this much. He said something unquestionably true when he wrote: “Resisting today’s ‘woke’ leftism while accepting yesterday’s progressive liberalism — and repeating this process as the Overton window shifts — demonstrates that American conservatism is feeble and lacks a coherent, compelling and unified vision.”

The problem is he’s defending the feeble and incoherent “conservative” movement against its populist, muscular, and offense-oriented successor.

We need something better than “conservatism” at this stage of the game. Whether it’s MAGA, the Nat Cons, or revivalism, there are people out there cobbling it together. And whether he’s one of them or not, Grogan is signaling the complaint that the people who destroyed conservatism aren’t getting a seat at the new table.

I doubt that very many of us are too sympathetic to that position.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Five Quick Things: The Shift Is On

Kamala Harris: Obama’s ‘Ding-Dong’

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