Donald Trump’s rise put on display an identity crisis within the conservative movement. That crisis predated the friction between #NeverTrump and die-hard loyalists. For decades “conservatism” has been a conglomeration of different, conflicting factions. Religionists stood alongside secularists, traditionalists alongside classical liberals, protectionists alongside free-marketeers — and still many other elements. With Trump leaving office, the question is which factions will exert the greatest influence on the movement’s future and, by extension, our politics.

Even if — and perhaps especially if — you are unsympathetic to “conservatism,” it’s crucial to understand one emergent faction seeking control: the crusaders for “national conservatism.”

One way to understand this crusade is to see it as an attempt to purge the broader “conservative” movement of elements it deems harmful. Advocates of “national conservatism” claim to march under a banner that will unite a fractured country, secure our freedoms. But what do they stand for? If they gain influence and power, what will their political success mean?

A Time to Purge

Listen to the crusaders for “national conservatism,” and you hear familiar themes about decadence, decline, debauchery. We’re sliding toward Gomorrah not only because of the hated “progressives,” but also, they say, because “something went terribly wrong with American conservatism” after the Cold War. In the view of Yoram Hazony, a scholar rallying the “national conservative” faction, his brethren lost sight of what matters: God, tradition, and the nation. Instead, “all that interested them was economic liberalism and the rights of the free and equal individual.” 

In Hazony’s telling, this led to almost every problem he sees in our society: decadence, endless wars, uncontrolled immigration, economic decline. Whatever the actual sources of these issues, for Hazony the solution is to reverse course. It means purging from the movement any vestigial concern with individual liberty. “We declare independence,” he announced, “from neoliberalism, from libertarianism, from what they call classical liberalism — you can give it any name you want — but that set of ideas that sees the atomic individual, the free and equal individual” as central to political thought. And it means embracing, rather than throwing out, the Bible and the Torah.

Pause for just a moment on this account, and you can see that it is at best tendentious. Notice, for instance, that religion has only grown more salient in American culture, particularly within conservatism, in the last few decades. If our present society is what it looks like to abandon faith, try to picture what Hazony means by making it a focal point. And contrary to Hazony’s cultural diagnosis, we have seen not a flowering of respect for the individual in our society, but precisely the opposite. The pull of tribalism is virulent, including within many “conservative” circles. Everywhere people are seen, not as unique individuals, but as “representatives” of racial, ethnic, gender, national, religious, and still other tribal groups.

From such unconvincing starting assumptions, what’s the direction that Hazony and his colleagues are heading in?

An Alternate-Reality Version of “America”

The advocates of this new species of “conservatism” claim to love this country, but it’s impossible to believe that the Founders would recognize their conception of America.

The United States was a child of the Age of Enlightenment. What typified Enlightenment thinking was a questioning, often an outright repudiation, of hidebound tradition and the intrusion of Church upon life and the state. America embodied a revolutionary new idea. It was predicated on the Enlightenment perspective that the value of an individual’s life is sacrosanct; that his rational mind is competent to deal with the world, and that therefore he should be left free politically.

That perspective reverberates loudly in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but that’s far from what you’d learn from Rich Lowry, the longtime editor of National Review and author of The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free. In his book, Lowry insists that the view that America was built on an “idea” is one of our “most honored national clichés.” No one “lives in an abstraction. You don’t ask someone where are you from and get a response, ‘Well, I live in Chapter 5 of Locke’s Second Treatise,”he said, provoking laughter from the audience at a “national conservatism” conference.

Having inflicted grievous bodily harm on a strawman, Lowry describes an America that exists only in some alternate reality. In his book, he piles one anecdote upon another to assure the reader that what’s special about America, what deserves our loyalty, is emphatically not a set of universal, founding principles. It’s not the tradition-flouting independence of the Founders, who created a secular system of government. The Enlightenment is conspicuous by its understated role in Lowry’s account; the word hardly comes up. In the Declaration of Independence he sees the American “people” asserting nationhood — but, oddly, not the document’s most distinctive, profound emphasis on the moral sovereignty of the individual in the pursuit of his life, liberty, and happiness.

Instead, Lowry insists that to see America’s distinctive character we must look to the King James Bible and tradition. We must look not to the political ideals and principles that defined our system of government, but to language, land, the flag, traditions, and ties to England (notably, the area of East Anglia). It’s as if America’s fundamental character was set long before 1776, and the intellectual ferment of the Founding was non-essential.

Lowry pushes a brand of conservatism focused on the nation (“nationalism”), though he claims to repudiate the murderous “nationalism” that devastated the twentieth century. But his attempt to redeem the idea of “nationalism” is unsuccessful. What he advocates is not simply a warranted love of country, an appreciation of the country’s objective virtues (the idea of patriotism); rather, it’s a national loyalty emptied of intellectual substance.

Bowing to Authority

The elevation of the collective is a theme among thinkers aligned with “national conservatism.” David Brog is the executive director of the Edmund Burke Foundation, the organization spearheading “national conservatism.” In welcoming remarks at a conference, Brog called “individual liberty” a major achievement, before proceeding to repudiate its importance: “we just never saw our liberty as the singular objective of centuries of conservative political thought.” We’ve “aspired to something greater than being left alone . . . . We don’t want to be left alone. We want to be connected, connected to one another, to our ancestors, kin, to our descendants.” Christopher DeMuth, a Reagan official and former leader of the American Enterprise Institute, explains that “national conservatism” is set against the idea of “atomized free-floating individual autonomy.”

The frequent railing against the notion of “atomic” individualism is revealing. It relies on a deliberately misrepresented picture of individualism, one calling to mind an impoverished existence without meaningful human contact. By conjuring up this strawman, advocates of “national conservatism” make it seem as if our only choices are a life devoid of human connection, or else embracing the collective.

This campaign against a distorted notion of individualism has definite political significance. It means upending the relationship between the individual and society, according to Patrick Deneen, a professor at Notre Dame. The appropriate political unit, he believes, is not the individual, but the group, the family, the community.

In other words, “national conservatism” seeks to subjugate the “I” to the authority of the “we.”

And above such collectives there is an even higher authority before which we must kneel. Hazony and other advocates of “national conservatism” exhort us to turn not only to the nation but also to faith, if we hope to put America on a firm foundation. But, again, theirs is a conception of “America” the Founders would have struggled to recognize.

Religion was the subject of ridicule, even hostility, for leading figures of the Enlightenment. They recoiled from the command to accept truths on faith, rather than facts; to submit to an authority, rather than one’s own rational judgment. Thomas Jefferson gave voice to this orientation in an imperishable letter to Peter Carr in 1787: “fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”

Politically, it is religion’s power, which had led to so much bloodshed, that the Founders worked to fence off. A major thrust of the Enlightenment — reflected in the Founding of America — was the appreciation of the power of reason to guide life and gain knowledge. Flowing from that perspective was a rejection of the view that the individual was duty-bound to kneel before any authority.

A major thrust of Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, is the rejection of the idea that each of us, using reason, can attain truths about the world. No, Hazony believes: “no human being, and no group of human beings, possesses the necessary powers of reason and the necessary knowledge to dictate the political constitution that is appropriate for all mankind.” If individuals cannot use reason to identify universal political principles by which to live and prosper, how useful is it in a social-political context? And, if we take this view a step further, how much can the individual possibly matter, relative to the collective? For Hazony the tribe, the nation, is paramount.

For Enlightenment thinkers, the embrace of reason meant shrugging off authority. For Hazony, by contrast, the embrace of faith means bowing to authority. What do these contrasting views mean for political thought? It was Jefferson, immersed as he was in Enlightenment thinking, who penned the Declaration of Independence, a reasoned revolt against royal authority. We can glimpse where “national conservatism” leads: embracing authoritarianism.

Celebrating Authoritarianism

At a conference on “national conservatism” in Rome, the organizers hosted as guest of honor Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Part of his appeal to them can be seen in his stress on Christianity’s necessary role in society and on what American conservatives call “family values.” For example, the BBC reports that in 2019 Orbán announced a plan that would give any Hungarian woman with four or more children a lifetime exemption from paying income tax, while “young couples will be offered interest free loans, . . . to be cancelled once they have children.” But Orbán’s rule should alarm anyone who values freedom. He has pushed Hungary toward authoritarianism.

After his party came back to power in 2010, it changed the constitution to its advantage and “replaced key officials in every politically relevant institution,” observe two scholars, erasing checks and balances, and appointing loyalists to the constitutional court. More recently, the government oversaw the merger of some 400 media outlets — about 85 percent of all Hungarian media outlets — into one conglomerate, which has aligned itself with the ruling party’s agenda. The government directs spending on advertising toward friendly media outlets, thus incentivizing them to become organs of propaganda. “The upshot is a ‘government-organized media’ — some of it state-owned and some private, but all under the control of [Orbán’s Fidesz party] and its allied oligarchs.”

Hungary’s trend toward authoritarianism had been manifest for years when, in early 2020, Orbán took the stage at the “God, Honor, Country: President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and the Freedom of Nations—A National Conservatism Conference.” Throughout the hour-long interview, however, the topic was glossed over. The interviewer, DeMuth, fed Orbán one softball question after another. There was no pushback or challenging of Orbán’s stifling of freedom of speech, nor the broader authoritarian drift.

The interview squarely presents Orbán as embodying the ideas of “national conservatism.” The uncomfortable conclusion is that leaders of this faction endorse Orbán’s anti-freedom approach as a path for America to follow.

If they lionize Orbán, how do advocates of “national conservatism” view President Donald Trump, who relies on both conservative and nationalist slogans? Some, like Hazony, viewed his election in 2016 as creating an opportunity for advancing “national conservatism.” Lowry, whose National Review pointedly rejected Trump in 2016, has come to view him in a somewhat favorable light. Lowry’s book portrays him as right to emphasize the importance of the nation. Even if views on Trump may differ among proponents of “national conservatism,” a troubling fact remains. It’s that Trump’s own authoritarian impulses — the bullying of CEOs, the antitrust threats against media organizations, his threat to punish companies that move their operations overseas, his admiration of murderous dictators such as Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin — has been insufficient to put them off. Perhaps instead it is part of the appeal.  

Betraying America

The emergence of “national conservatism” is an ominous trend for American political life. Its advocates often stress the themes of patriotism and love of country and even political freedom. But the substance of their views is a betrayal of America’s founding ideals.

Three threads stand out. First, the life and judgment and freedom of the individual must be subordinated to some group: the family, tribe, community, and, ultimately, the nation. Second, reason is overrated. What should steer our own lives? Not our rational judgment, but tradition and faith. Third, despite the rhetoric about providing a foundation for American freedom, there’s an alarming comfort with, and even glamorization of, authoritarianism.

The “conservative” movement in America lacks a defined, coherent set of ideas. This was a pre-existing condition, vividly evident well before Trump’s ascent. The movement has been a collection of disparate factions, with significant inner contradictions. The aim of “national conservatism” is to steer the broader movement toward collectivism, faith, and force. Politically, the more “national conservatism” succeeds in reshaping our society, the more we’ll find ourselves moving further away from truly American ideals.

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Originally published on New Ideal

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_{Photo by Ed Hinchliffe on Unsplash}

The New Republic article about Rand, which we looked at in Part 1, stood out not primarily because of what it said about her, but in how it conveyed its message. The article put a tribal prejudice toward Rand above facts and logic. That same mindset is on display, even more starkly, in Amanda Marcotte’s Salon article, “Right-wingers finally got their Ayn Rand hero as president — and it’s this guy.”

Let me stress, again, that my goal is not to change your mind about Rand and her ideas, nor primarily to correct the many errors and misrepresentations in these articles (though I’ll point out some of them along the way). Instead, the point is to explain how the two articles are fundamentally uninterested in convincing any active-minded reader. Their aim, rather, is to affirm a preset narrative about Rand. These are worse than mere smears, because their tribal mindset represents the abandonment of rational persuasion as the goal of intellectual discussion.

Marcotte’s point is captured in the subtitle: “Conservatives finally have a leader who lives by Ayn Rand’s selfish philosophy, and he’s an embarrassing clown,” the clown being Donald Trump. But whatever you might think of Rand or of Trump, this is a claim that’s far from self-evident. It requires a real argument. Marcotte’s article offers no argument. It’s written for an audience that already partly or fully shares Marcotte’s preconceptions.

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Inaccurate, misrepresented, and even willfully distorted reporting on Ayn Rand’s ideas has been common in the media since she first gained public prominence. That fact came up in a conversation she had with the editor of The Ayn Rand Lexicon, a kind of mini encyclopedia of her philosophy, Objectivism. The editor, Harry Binswanger, relates that Rand became increasingly enthusiastic about the Lexicon project, in part because it could serve as a corrective and eliminate any excuse for the continual misrepresentation of her philosophy. Rand quipped to him, “People will be able to look up BREAKFAST and see that I did not advocate eating babies for breakfast.”

But articles that misrepresent, or outright distort, Rand’s ideas continually find their way into print. Rarely are they worth a response. Two recent articles about Rand — one in Salon, the other in the New Republic — are different. It’s not because of what these articles say about her, but in how they say it.

Both articles raise worthwhile questions — at least, nominally. One asks about the appeal of Rand’s ideas among young people; the other is on the relation between Rand’s moral ideal of selfishness and President Trump. Both articles, moreover, cite sources, name facts, and even include some actual reporting — all in support of their highly unfavorable conclusions. Which is putting it mildly.

What’s remarkable about these essays is not that they’re sloppy, error-filled, slanted, or smears. They are. (And I’ll indicate a few, though by no means all, of their errors and misrepresentations.) Rather: what marks these essays out is that they exemplify a pernicious mindset, a mindset that’s wreaking havoc on our cultural-political life. It’s a phenomenon wider than how people engage with Ayn Rand — but when she’s the subject, that mindset is often starkly apparent.

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Which teams played in the last Super Bowl? Can you name one character from the Star Wars movies? Who is Kim Kardashian’s husband? Likely you answered at least one of those questions correctly. But the following may well stump you: Who developed the X-ray? Who performed the first organ transplant? Who developed the vaccine for smallpox? or whooping cough? or measles?

It’s a curious fact that most of us know way more about sports and pop culture, than about the pioneers of scientific research. But the benefits we’ve all reaped from their work is incalculable, and it’s clear that our way out of this global pandemic will depend crucially on scientists working to understand, track, and combat the novel coronavirus.

One inspiring story, from the pandemic’s early days, has stuck with me. The story of Dr. Helen Chu and her colleagues in Seattle is the stuff of a Hollywood thriller, except it actually happened. They are among the unsung heroes in our midst.

Chu and her colleagues were in the middle of a flu study in the Seattle area, when they learned about the first confirmed American case of coronavirus infection, in Washington state. They quickly realized that they could help assess the spread of the virus. For their flu research, they had been collecting nasal swabs from patients in the Puget Sound area. By running a new test on those samples, they could figure out how widely the novel coronavirus had spread.

With incredible speed, they managed to devise a new test. Because of government regulations, however, they were not approved to run it. So, they petitioned federal regulators to get approval. Days, weeks went by. When they did get an answer it was No.

But they decided to run the test anyway. Turns out the virus had established itself on American soil, undetected. In Dr. Chu’s words: “It’s just everywhere already.”

Chu and her colleagues were caught in a potentially career-ending dilemma: if they disclosed their findings, they would run afoul of regulators, but if they withheld their findings, people might well die. “What we were allowed to do was to keep it to ourselves,” Dr. Chu told the New York Times. “But what we felt like we needed to do was to tell public health.”

The morally right thing to do, they concluded, was to share their discovery with local authorities, and they did so. The next morning, public health officials were able to identify an infected teenager, with mild symptoms, just as he was walking in to school.

Despite having brought to light such critical information, Chu and her colleagues were told by regulators to stop testing. Keep in mind that all this unfolded even as the Federal government’s own tests were found to be defective and testing generally was severely constrained, greatly delaying the rollout of wide-scale testing necessary for tackling the virus.

What I admire about Dr. Chu and her colleagues is not only their ingenuity in creating their own test, but also their courageous willingness to defy irrational man-made obstacles. The ordeal they went through, simply to share essential information about the virus, is a damning indictment of regulators. It’s much to the credit of Chu and her colleagues that they put facts and truth above all else, in the name of protecting human life and advancing our knowledge of this virus. 

They’re not alone. Scientists around the world have pushed aside other projects to focus on this virus. On an unprecedented scale, they’re collaborating across borders and time zones to identify this virus’s characteristics, its behavior within the body, its spread within communities, its Achilles’ heel — so that it can be stopped.

The global race to develop a vaccine for this coronavirus is itself inspiring. Some projects are running multiple trials in parallel, rather than one after the other, to accelerate the process. From the one hundred or so vaccine projects underway, the one based at the Jenner Institute at Oxford University stands out for its size. That effort grew out of the research of Dr. Adrian Hill, who directs the Jenner Institute. Thanks in part to an emergency approval from the UK government, the project will begin scheduling a trial with more than six thousand people in May.

It remains to be seen whether this approach (or one of the many others in development) will prove effective, and if so, for what patient profile. Developing vaccines is a slow process, with a low success rate, at the best of times. But it’s heartening to see so many bright minds focusing with such vigor on tackling the coronavirus.

When it is finally overcome, how will we look upon the scientists who contributed to that victory?

In the last century, after developing a vaccine for polio, Dr. Jonas Salk became a household name. New York offered to hold a ticker tape parade in his honor. But in gaining that widespread recognition for his scientific accomplishment, Salk has been something of an outlier.

Let’s change that. It will be a sign of moral progress when — instead of overlooking or taking them for granted — we fully appreciate the many unsung scientific heroes of this pandemic.

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Emergency rooms are jammed with COVID-19 patients, fighting for their lives. Doctors, nurses, and front-line healthcare workers are receiving much-deserved praise and appreciation, even though (as I argued in earlier article) they’re still under-valued.

Reflecting on this crisis, I’ve come to have a deeper appreciation for another group of heroic individuals. We rely on their tireless work and achievements every day, but all the more so as millions of us are subjected to stay-at-home orders. But they are unsung.

Call them the builders of our digital age. Thanks to them, the lockdowns are more tolerable than they otherwise would have been.

Thanks to Gmail and Dropbox and Slack and Microsoft Teams, many people are able to keep their work moving forward. Thanks to Zoom, businesses can stay connected, students can attend classes, countless families and friends can socialize, and children can goof around with friends that they used to meet on the school playground. Thanks to Netflix and YouTube and Disney Plus and Hulu and Spotify and Apple Music, there’s an abundance of entertainment on hand. Thanks to Amazon and Instacart and the multitude of local app-based food delivery services, you can have household supplies and groceries and takeout left outside your door.

These apps and online services rely on a technological foundation built decades ago. Bill Gates envisioned a future with a desktop computer in every home. We’ve long surpassed that. In many homes, the computers, smartphones, and tablets outnumber the human occupants. Getting online used to mean connecting a computer to a phone line using a slow, screechy modem and dialing up an internet service provider; now broadband internet is pervasive and we stream movies to our iPhones.

Try to imagine being stuck at home during a pandemic like this one — in the pre-digital age, with none of the tools and apps and services we rely on. To contemplate that is to begin to appreciate the enormous value created by the builders of our digital age.

Who are they? Among them are industry-shaping leaders such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Serge Brin, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. Their startups, now globe-spanning corporations, were made possible by the foresight and risk-taking of investors and venture capital firms. Innumerable coders and computer scientists and network engineers go to work every day to grow these businesses and keep their systems running.

Keeping these apps and networks and platforms operational under ordinary circumstances is an achievement. Doing so amid the pandemic, with surging demand from millions more people self-isolating at home, is an even more impressive feat. Comcast, one of the nation’s largest broadband providers, reported that use of voice and video conferencing traffic on its network was up 212% in March. For Zoom, the number of daily active users has surged since December, up 340%.

We’re leaning more heavily than ever before on the achievements of the creators of the digital age. Let’s take a moment to recognize the benefits we’ve reaped so far and express our appreciation.

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The pandemic is showing that, all around us, there are under-appreciated heroes.

Legions of them work in hospitals. What’s become clear in New York and elsewhere is that doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers are up against battlefield-like conditions. The lack of widespread testing, the desperate scarcity of ventilators and dwindling supplies of personal protective equipment, such as face masks, have made their work far more difficult and greatly increased their risk.

The horrifying stories multiply by the day: doctors having to re-use their masks; hospital staff using garbage bags to improvise gowns; doctors having to weigh whether to imperil their own lives to save patients. Here, from the vantage one E.R. physician, Dr. Colleen Smith, is a look inside hard-hit Elmhurst Hospital in New York.

A possible sign of what’s yet to come is evident in Spain, which also has an acute shortage of masks and protective gear. Nearly 14% of all COVID-19 cases in Spain are medical professionals, many apparently infected on the job. One E.R. nurse in Spain has decried the fact that, lacking adequate protective equipment, she and her colleagues have been turned into “health care kamikazes.” (Some doctors in the U.S. are writing and updating their wills.)

Many Americans have expressed their gratitude for the work of doctors and nurses. Take a look at Twitter or Facebook. In New York City, residents stood at their windows to applaud and cheer their tireless efforts. Elsewhere, individuals and companies have collected supplies of masks and donated them to local hospitals.

But if only such appreciation were universal. What’s been stomach-turning is the evident devaluing of doctors and nurses by some administrators of certain hospitals and by government authorities. It is the responsibility of government authorities to prepare for this kind of situation by ensuring adequate supplies and resources, but we’re seeing what happens when the calls for crisis-preparedness go unheeded.

There’s still another kind of devaluing of doctors and nurses. Consider the college students who flocked together on the beaches of Florida or Mexico on spring break, or the New Yorkers who reportedly arrange pandemic potluck dinners in crowded apartments. They choose not to voluntarily social-distance. They may decide to be fatalistic about their own health—“if I get corona, I get corona!”—but it’s reprehensible to do that and then when they get sick to expect that doctors and nurses, lacking adequate protection, treat them in the E.R. Imposing such a risk on healthcare workers is to disregard their lives.

The ugly premise behind such indifference is that doctors and nurses—individuals who spend years upon years mastering oceans of scientific knowledge and continually honing their life-saving skills—somehow owe us their lives and work. It’s as if they’re our servants, and we don’t have to care what happens to them. The expectation is that they’ll always show up to work, even at the cost of their own health and the well-being of their families. But this is an inverted kind of blackmail, a form of exploitation that counts not on vices, but on the virtues of doctors and nurses. It’s precisely because of their love for their work and dedication to patients that so many of them show up every day.

This same premise, evident in the UK’s National Health Service, long ago wormed its way into America’s government-controlled healthcare system. For decades, we saw the imposition of control after control, minutely regulating the judgment of doctors and nurses, making their jobs harder—with the expectation that they will endure anything to save lives. The pandemic, some people clamor, validates the case for moving to some form of state-run healthcare, like Medicare-for-All. But the opposite is true. Embedded in such systems is a basic disregard for the lives, judgment, and freedom of doctors and nurses.

That’s also what underlies the alarming suggestion by New York mayor Bill de Blasio for a national draft of doctors and other medical workers to serve in hospitals, beginning with New York.

Doctors and medical workers are the “forgotten man” of socialized medicine, with harmful repercussions for us all. Such callousness toward them is a moral travesty.

One lesson we can already draw from this crisis is that we need properly to recognize the tremendous value of doctors and nurses. Another is that rather imposing further controls or nationalizing healthcare, we need to move toward liberating them and their industry. Despite the outpouring of praise and gratitude so far, we’re only just beginning to appreciate them fully.

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