Progressive Conservatism: How Republicans Will Become America's Natural Governing Party

ISBN-13: 9781641772532

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Encounter Books

Publication Date: 07-12-2022

Pages: 272

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Age Range: 18 Years

F. H. Buckley is a Foundation Professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law and has taught at McGill University, the Sorbonne, and Sciences Po in Paris. He is a senior editor at The American Spectator and a frequent media guest.His most recent books are Curiosity: And Its Twelve Rules for Life (Encounter Books, 2021), American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup (Encounter Books, 2020), and The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed (Encounter Books, 2018).He lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with his wife, Esther. His daughter, Sarah, and her husband, Nick Mark, are MDs who work for pharmaceutical companies.

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Chapter One: The Dream of Republican Virtue

As we age, we slip softly from one country to another, and what began in innocence led down a path littered with betrayals and smelly compromises. Charles Péguy understood how it happens. After defending Alfred Dreyfus, he found himself allied to unscrupulous and opportunistic politicians. “Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics,” he wrote. But the dreams of our youth never quite die, and without quite knowing it we continue to yearn for something we had lost along the way. And that is purity.

For Americans, purity is a dream of republican virtue, a shining city on a hill, free from baseness and corruption and peopled by secret romantics who are hard on the outside and soft on the inside. Our heroes aren’t kings or princes but common folk, the knights-errant of the dusty trail and mean streets in search of their private grail. When surrounded by cynics, they keep their integrity, like John Wayne in Stagecoach and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.

Like them, our country was touched by grace. We knew there was something special about America, that this was the country of the Declaration of Independence, of equality and liberty, where lingering injustices are in time corrected. We were the country of the American Dream, the idea that, whoever you were, wherever you came from, you can flourish and know that your children will have it better than you did. In any struggle, we’d always be on the right and winning side.

That was how we used to see America. In the 1930s, the US Communist Party spied on us for Russia, but party leader Earl Browder was constrained to say that “communism is 20^th century Americanism.” Protestors took to the streets but told us that that was how we began as a country and assured us that dissent was true patriotism. After struggling to rid ourselves of the legacy of racism, we came at last to understand that republican virtue calls for love of country and that love of country requires that our government advance the common good without discrimination.

More recently, however, the Left has made love of country seem indecent and republican virtue a fraud. Every patriotic instinct was scorned and every sacred institution mocked. Our pathways crumbled beneath our feet, and we peered dizzily down unfathomable depths—the ivresse des grandes profondeurs. Everything, everything you loved, is dirty, said the Left. On the Right, the madness was paid back with interest by the millions of Americans who even now think that Trump won the 2020 election and by reactionaries who blame the country’s ills on the founders’ liberalism. In a national apostacy, extremists on both Left and Right abandoned our liberal heritage.

We have come to a dead end, and we’ll not see a way back except through a recovery of the mystique of American purity in the republican virtue of the founders and the GOP’s great leaders—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower—and the content they gave to our idea of the common good. That is the party’s task, and in embracing it the Republicans will restore the American Dream and become the country’s natural governing party.

Table of Contents

1 The Dream of Republican Virtue 1

1 The Enormous Tragedy of the Dream

2 The Hegelian Hero

I Progressive and Conservative

2 After Trump 11

1 The Year of Living Dangerously

2 The Need to Move On

3 What Is Progressive Conservatism? 27

1 Conservative Progressives

2 Progressive Conservatives

4 The Four Turnings 35

1 The First Turning: Lincoln

2 The Second Turning: Theodore Roosevelt

3 The Third Turning: Eisenhower

4 The Fourth Turning: Trump

5 A Cause, Interrupted 55

1 The American Dream

2 Machiavellian Moments

3 The Unknown Country

II Restoring the American Dream

6 Inequality - And Why It Matters 67

1 The Evidence

2 Why Inequality Matters

7 Immobility - And Why It Matters 77

1 The Evidence

2 Accounting for Immobility

8 The Left's Betrayal 89

1 Bad Schools and Tailing Universities

2 How Our Immigration System Imports Immobility

3 The Regulatory Briar Patch

9 Why Aristocracies Never Really Go Away 109

1 The Bequest Motive

2 Relative Preferences

3 A Cyclical Theory of History

4 Genopolitics

III Draining the Swamp

10 American Corruption 121

1 The Republic of Virtue

2 How Did That Work Out?

3 The Cost of Corruption

11 Where Did We Go Wrong? 131

1 Bigness

2 Presidential Government

3 Campaign Finance Laws

IV Nationalism

12 Anti-Nationalism 143

13 Liberal Nationalism 151

14 Glory and Fraternity 157

1 Glory

2 Fraternity

V The Promise of Good Government

15 The Recovery of Republican Virtue 163

1 The Common Good Requires Republican Virtue

2 Uniting the Right around the Common Good

16 A Contract with America 185

Acknowledgments 209

Bibliography 211

Notes 225

Index 245