[In the last part, we looked at a number of abuses of power that have characterized the Biden administrative state. We have, perhaps, already begun to suggest how and why the administrative state operates in a way that is inherently antithetical to the principles of our founding, such as separation of powers and checks and balances. In the next two parts we shall look at five of those original principles and try to discern why and how their recovery will necessarily require a large scale reconfiguration of the administrative state itself.]

The Anglo-American Conservative Tradition

I am borrowing the title for this section from Yorum Hazony’s recent and very important book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery. In this book, Hazony explores the history, philosophy, and the ongoing struggle for what he calls the “Anglo-American Conservative Tradition” (AACT). The AACT reaches back, according to Hazony, at least to the sixteenth century in England, to writers such as John Fortesque, John Selden, and Edmund Burke. It was later deployed (along with its clear precedents for our Bill of Rights, our three branches of government, and our checks and balances) as a model for the US Constitution by our founding leaders such as George Washington and John Adams. This is the tradition of political order that Woodrow Wilson disavowed, and that the Biden state with its manifold “crises” has consistently found ways to violate. What would it mean to recover this tradition today? How might such a recovery redefine the issues of our time, over against the chaotic and destructive results of the Biden state? Hazony describes five basic principles that define the AACT in its long historical development. Let us look at each of these in turn and consider just a few examples of the benefits such a recovery might produce.[i] 

1.  Historical Empiricism

2.  Nationalism

3.  Religion

4.  Limited Executive Power

5.  Freedom

1. Historical Empiricism. The AACT is historical and empirical because its conception of political order is grounded in the most basic and concrete relationships of human life—in families, clans, tribes, congregations, and larger groups that overcome conflicts, clarify justice, and ban together to work for common interests and to defend themselves against common enemies. From this empirical foundation (hard won through the ancient and early medieval history of warring clans and petty kings in Britain) arose the English historical tradition of common law (e.g., the Magna Carta) which led eventually to a national system of parliamentary checks and balances, limited monarchy, petition of rights, and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1685. This is the tradition that our American founders (such as Washington, Adams, and Madison) embraced as the archetype for our US Constitution. This is the tradition conserved by the AACT.

Over against this, and consciously opposed by the framers in 1787, was the very different model of the French Revolution based on the rationalistic ideals of natural equality, universal reason, and individual freedom as these were defined by John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau.[ii] These ideals are exalted today in the liberal tradition of the administrative state, including the Biden state, where political order is attributed to the role of reason (“experts”), equity, and individual consent, not to the traditional values and obligations of family, congregation, community, and nation. We see this model at work in the contempt of the Biden state for our national borders, for parental authority, for principles of traditional moral conscience and religious freedom, not to mention the other basic First Amendment rights that his agencies have trampled. The eventual blood bath of the French Revolution, like the riotous breakdown today of our national borders and of our large crime-ridden urban centers, all demonstrate the terrible disconnection that separates the rationalism of the liberal model from the empirical realities of concrete human life and experience. 

To recover the historical and empirical character of the AACT today will involve embracing again the foundations of our national identity in the family, the congregation, the religious and moral tradition, the rule of law, and the separation of powers, all of which have been trampled by the actions of the Biden state. It will also require recovering again the voice of the people in representative government to debate and decide in Congress important social questions of race, gender, and public health policy, rather than cancelling or censoring that voice by an overreaching and imperial executive branch with its attending administrative state, media, and other institutions.   

2. Nationalism. What does it mean to be a nation state in the AACT—that is, to practice the virtue of nationalism? The answer to this question is not at all self-evident today since the concept of nationalism itself is regularly skewered and condemned by the advocates of the Biden state.[iii] According to them, nationalism leads to racism and xenophobia (hatred of strangers or other nations). Moreover, Hitler’s “National” Socialist (NAZI) Party is offered as a prototype for the racism and aggression that nationalism is supposed to produce. But the meaning and practice of nationalism in the AACT runs in direct opposition to all of this. Indeed, for anyone acquainted with the AACT, Hitler could never represent the political order of nationalism, despite his use of a cognate term. Rather, he embodied the imperial order of the German state, the political desire to absorb and dominate other nations (not to live in peaceful coexistence with them).[iv] This was in keeping with the long and aggressive history of the German Empire dating back to Roman times. In this regard, ironically, the Biden administrative state, with its dictatorial style at home and its globalist aspirations abroad, has much more in common with Hitler’s mentality (and with the imperial objectives of cultural Marxism and the CCP today) than with the political order of the independent nation state as envisioned by our founders.[v]  

A recovery of nationalism in America today, on the other hand, will require turning away from the racist and imperial policies of the Biden state. We shall need to recover, for example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s emphasis on individual character, merit, and equal opportunity as the foundation for our multi-ethnic national identity while, at the same time, boldly rejecting the racially divisive polices of the Biden administrative state such as DEI, which judge people as collectives and set them against each other as rival tribes and clans. Likewise, we will need to rebuild and restore our national borders while opposing the terrible effects on our nation’s life and character by the unvetted, open-border immigration policies of Joe Biden. Unlike Biden, we should care about the readiness of legal immigrants to speak our language, understand our history, respect our laws, and embrace our values. As a nation in the AACT we will continue to make room for different ethnic groups, clans, and tribes within our borders so long as they are loyal to the basic legal, religious, and moral values that bind us together. Moreover, we respect the same process at work in other nations as they work out the beliefs, values, and laws that embody their own history and traditions. Racial and international cooperation are both strengthened, not weakened, by the political order of the nation state in the AACT. 

3. Religion. When our founders had completed the framing of our Constitution in 1787, they made a point of emphasis to declare that this form of government would require “a religious and a moral people” to make it work.[vi] They had in mind, of course, the Christian religion of the Bible, for that was empirically the religion both of the American colonies and of their English predecessors in the AACT.[vii] They did not, however, try to establish a particular denomination as an official national church. Indeed, they forbade this in the First Amendment of the Constitution itself. This was due in part to the fact that most of the newly formed states already had officially recognized churches. But it was also due to the principle of government “of, by, and for the people.” The founders knew that the formation of strong religious and moral convictions depends above all on the living practice of individuals in families, clans, and congregations. The strength of religious and moral conscience arises not from a government office, nor from a declared statement, but from the living practices of faith, prayer, and a history of shared stories and experiences (working out the meaning of justice, correcting and improving faults, and defending the nation against its enemies) among the people themselves. This is the natural soil of “a religious and a moral people” from which alone can spring the moral reasoning, the informed voting, and the public service of good government.[viii]

To recover the religious dimension of the AACT in America today will require nothing short of a religious and moral re-awakening among the families, clans, tribes, congregations, and communities that make up our nation. This national fabric has been unwound and unwoven since at least the post World War II era by what Hazony calls “liberal democracy,” before which a former “Christian democracy” had still been at work in the nation and its institutions. As Hazony writes, “The Supreme Court’s decisions in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) . . . overturned centuries of common practice by abolishing organized prayer and Bible reading in public schools across the country.”[ix] This trend has now been aggressively expanded by the Biden administrative state with its policies that separate children from the moral and religious guidance of both their parents and their religious heritage. 

The resulting situation in our culture today finds those in power seeking to replace the moral foundations of the AACT with pseudo-scientific claims about gender fluidity, systemic racism, climate alarmism, and Bidenomics, based on the flimsy and unreliable notions of “pure reason” and “natural equality.” And those who resist this ideology stand to be accused of anti-democratic “extremism.” This is precisely the cultural situation described in C. S. Lewis’s prescient 1945 book, The Abolition of Man. Having turned away from the moral and religious foundations of our country (in faith, family, and congregation) our culture and its institutions (including a politicized “science”) now flounders in a moral morass of ideological and biological nonsense that is forced upon us by the coercive power and control of a liberal “elite” in the administrative state.

The solution will require what some may regard as an impossibility at this time in American history: a great repentance and reawakening to our need for God, his guidance, judgement, and deliverance in our lives as families, congregations, communities, and individuals.[x] Even for those who are not religious or who embrace another religious tradition, the moral foundations of this recovery should be recognized and embraced. We shall have to learn again to live as a people of faith and moral conviction if our national experiment in representative democracy is going to recover and thrive. So thought Washington and Adams. And history itself shows us that this kind of awakening can in fact occur.[xi]

Looking ahead to Part 4

In Part 4, we shall continue these brief reflections on the principles of the AACT, focusing on the last two: Limited Executive, and Freedom. As you think about today’s post, and look forward to the next, consider the following additional questions: 1) Why is it that the administrative state seems to run by default toward the dangers of authoritarian power? and 2) How is the concept of “freedom” related to or connected with the principles of moral order?

Endnotes

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[i] Yoram Hazony, Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery, 2022), pages 336-337. 

[ii] See Hazony’s discussion of John Locke and Edmund Burke in Conservatism: A Rediscovery, pp. 21-29. Among the founders, Thomas Jefferson alone was seduced for a short time by the idealistic claims of the French Revolution. But then he was also absent in France while the others were writing our Constitution, and he returned to America when the failure in France became undeniable. See endnote 23 for further discussion of the “fantasy” status of the Enlightenment principles of “pure reason,” “natural equality,” and “individual freedom.” 

[iii] The repeated attacks by Joe Biden himself on MAGA Republicans as “extremists” who threaten “democracy” are a case in point. With this encouragement from their figurehead, many others have followed suit, such as members of the “squad” who accuse Donald Trump of racism for opposing illegal immigration. And in the wider culture the mantra has been taken up by Hollywood celebrities such as Rob Reiner (known appropriately as “Meathead” on the Archie Bunker TV series) who has been particularly outspoken, though poorly informed, in his attacks on what he calls “Christian Nationalism.”

[iv] See Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (Basic Books, 2018) for a full discussion of the three major distinctions of political order that we see at work and at odds in the world and in our own country today: 1. Tribalism, 2. Imperialism, and 3. Nationalism. Tribalism is characterized by the constant warfare of independent tribes. Imperialism is characterized by the imposition of coercive power by one tribe or a strong man over all other tribes. And Nationalism is characterized by a coming together of tribes for mutual benefit and defense around shared principles of language, religion, morality, and law.

[v] We should note very strongly, in this regard, that the Biden state has shown a willingness to cede national sovereignty to a variety of global organizations and geo-political bodies including the WHO (on public health policy), the WEF (on economic policy), the UN (on climate and gender policy), and even the CCP (with Biden’s soft foreign policies in relation to China and Iran). Meanwhile, the “unrestricted warfare” ideology of the CCP has captured many of the elites who currently lead the agencies of the Biden state. This points to a whole second level of geo-political activity that hides within the political structure of the Biden state. See Frank Gaffney and Dede Laugesen, The Indictment: Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party and Friends for Crimes Against America, China, and the World (Skyhorse Publishing, 2023).  

[vi] In his “Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, 11 October 1798,” John Adams wrote that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Likewise, in his farewell address of September 1796, Washington spoke of “religion and morality” as the “indispensable supports of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity.”    

[vii] They could not have been thinking of other religious traditions such as Hinduism, Islam, or even Judaism, in this context, for that would have been to disengage from the actual people who made up the nation; but they were also aware, in keeping with the AACT itself, that there is a central core of moral order that is evident in all religions, and that each nation should be free to work out the meaning of this order in keeping with its own religious history and traditions. See Hazony, Conservatism, p. 18. See also, C. S. Lewis’s discussion of the Tao (his name for this shared moral order) in The Abolition of Man (Macmillan, 1947).  

[viii] In The Abolition of Man, Lewis writes at some length about this process of education in the family, a process that conveys to children, even prior to the age of reason, the habits of the heart, the values of human life that Lewis calls the Tao, and for which he finds evidence in all of the world’s great religions. Lewis also writes about how this sense of moral order and tradition has been undercut by modern educational notions of individual freedom, reason, and “applied” science which reject the traditional, familial, and religious foundations of the Tao. Over the course of three chapters, Lewis traces the modern educational process to its consequences in a society led by elites who are driven by their own individualistic impulses because they are no longer shaped by the honorable values of religious and literary tradition. This seems a rather precise description of our society in the Biden administrative state today. 

[ix] Hazony, Conservatism, p. 266-67.

[x] This does not mean that everyone must join a particular denomination, nor even that everyone must become full-fledged believers and practitioners of biblical faith. It does mean, however, that even unbelievers, and those of other religious traditions, should understand how the rule of law and our constitutional rights in America, as well as the practice of reliable scientific research, arise from and are strengthened by the religious worldview of the Bible. Even Richard Dawkins, the well-known atheist, has recently made confession of this creed.

[xi] I am thinking in this instance of the Wesleyan Awakening in eighteenth century England and the Great Awakening that took place in nineteenth century America. Both of these made significant contributions to the spiritual capital of American culture and political order that are still unfolding in the battle to recover the AACT today.