[In the last part, we looked at the first three of five principles that, according to Yoram Hazony, characterize the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition. In this part, we will look at two more: Limited Executive and Freedom. All five of these principles together describe a pathway for creating a national political order that moves forward by trial and error as it is grounded in the common faith, the moral and legal tradition, and the familial formation of the people themselves. Historical Note: On July 13, four days before my last posting, Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump in Butler, PA. He narrowly failed. Since that time, Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race, and Kamala Harris is now the democrat candidate for 2024. In view of these as yet unresolved events, I will continue to refer in these comments to the “Biden Administrative State,” since he is still president; but I shall also begin to speak of the Biden-Harris state as well, because she has been his full partner in every policy at every step along their way.]
4. Limited Executive. The principle of a limited executive in the AACT came into its own with what is known in English history as the Glorious Revolution. After a long period of warfare and unrest between Protestant and Catholic forces, the British Parliament voted to return William of Orange to the throne as a limited monarch in 1689. This was, at the same time, a rejection of absolute monarchy as promoted by those in the Catholic (Stuart) tradition. The decision established a “constitutional monarchy,” limiting the authority of the king by leaving various powers (such as taxation and the raising of an army) in the hands of the Parliament, not the king. Parliament (French parle, to speak) was to be a place of representative governance where the members debate issues in an open forum to establish laws and make national decisions. This framework is, of course, reflected in our American heritage by several principles: the branches of government, the separation of powers, the demarcation between federal and state powers in the Tenth Amendment, and the principle of checks and balances by which each branch is held in check by the others against any attempt at absolute or dictatorial authority.
The executive activities of the Biden state that regularly defy the checks and balances of the other two branches are everywhere in evidence: From the Biden DHS’s open southern border that willfully ignores existing immigration laws, to the Biden DOE’s attempts to forgive unilaterally billions of dollars of student debt and to indoctrinate children in public school with DEI and radical gender ideology, to the Biden EPA’s attempts to dictate rules for major consumer products, to the Biden DOJ’s use of lawfare to prosecute January 6th protestors and Trump himself, using statutes that have been stretched beyond all recognition. The Biden state evidently sees no inconsistency between its dictatorial practices and the call of our Constitution for legislative and judicial checks and balances. So much for representative “democracy.”
To restore the kind of limited executive envisioned by the AACT will require, among other things, a significant reform and downsizing of the administrative state itself, as well as a return to regular order in the budgetary practices of the House of Representatives. The executive branch should not control its own budget, as Biden seeks to do. This means returning for the first time since the 1970s to the use of individual budgetary committees in the House, where each of the major budget areas can be debated in a bipartisan manner before any bill is brought to the floor of the House for general debate and voting. It will also mean getting rid of the current fiasco of omnibus bills, cobbled together by a partisan majority with lots of “pork barrel” spending run in, without open debate (and often without serious reading) and passed under premeditated pressure at the last minute “to avoid a government shutdown.” The latter procedure under the Biden administrative state promises to turn our current $35 trillion national debt into some $50 trillion over the next ten years. This is the path to economic ruin led by an absolute executive who does not know how to say “no” to himself or to his party. (Kamala Harris has shown that she will keep or even increase these levels of government spending if she becomes president.) The health of our country depends on a return to fiscal and monetary self-control and discipline, a return to a limited executive.
5. Individual Freedom. The fifth and final principle of the AACT, as outlined by Hazony, is one that nearly everyone will want to affirm, yet many will define in nearly opposite ways. This is the principle of individual freedom. Given what we have already seen about the AACT, and its wariness toward the idealistic rationalism of the French Revolution, it will perhaps come as no surprise that the meaning of the concept of “freedom” was itself under scrutiny from the earliest days of our national experiment. And this concern, still very much alive in our cultural and political conflicts today, has to do largely with the role of tradition in relation to the meaning and practice of freedom.
Within the framework of the AACT, freedom in its deepest sense has to do with achieving a good and virtuous way of life. One is truly free only when one is free for healthy, life-giving relationships, and free from what is harmful or destructive. To get one’s way, and yet to be destructive of one’s own life or the lives of others is not to be free, but a slave to one’s own appetites and passions. Thus, the AACT conception of freedom is the freedom of moral tradition and constraint. By contrast, for the point of view that descends from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, freedom is primarily understood as the freedom of the individual from all constraints except those to which one chooses to give consent (based on the individual’s alleged access to pure reason). In one case, freedom is discovered through the obligations of family, congregation, and community life as these have been shaped by a specific religious, moral, and legal tradition. In the other, freedom implies release from all such obligations unless the individual finds his own independent “reasons” to consent. The latter conception is the freedom of the liberal post-enlightenment worldview with its related fantasy notions of “natural equality” and “pure reason.”[i]
The liberal conception of individual freedom without parental, religious, or traditional moral constraint is clearly assumed in the Biden administration. The promotion of radical gender and sexual ideologies in our public schools in defiance of parental authority is a case in point. The scientific basis for such programs is, it should be noted, subject to serious doubt due to the denial of basic biology in defining sex and gender. Nonetheless, schools that do not comply by teaching and promoting the state’s ideology are threatened with loss of government funding. And schools that do comply are encouraged to teach and counsel children without parental involvement or approval, especially when teachers or counselors think the parents might not approve.[ii] With this ideology in place, cases of so-called “gender dysphoria” have risen by over 4,000 percent in recent years, especially among young teenage girls.[iii] This clearly confirms Sowell’s claim that the government’s programs often provoke and even promote the very problems they are supposed to address.
To recover the practice of freedom in the AACT will require, above all, rediscovering and reaffirming the role of religious faith and the family in the formation of individual character. This is crucial for all ethnic groups; but especially for the black community, where the welfare state has wrecked immense havoc on both the family and the traditions of faith.[iv] In very practical terms the recovery of the family will include a recovery of the role of prayer and Scripture in family life, and of the biblical injunction to honor one’s parents “that it may be well with you in the land.” In an age where young people have taken up the neo-Marxist cudgel against all traditions by tearing down monuments and cursing the heritage of leaders like Washington, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr., this will mean learning again a sense of humility toward our elders, despite their flaws and failings. Learning, that is, to ask questions again of our parents and grandparents about what they have experienced, why they think as they do, and why they have embraced the values that they hope to pass along to us.[v]
We have only touched the surface here of the five principles that shape the AACT. And we have only mentioned a few highlights of what it would mean in practical terms to recover these principles in 2024. A thorough reading of Hazony will suggest many more, especially with regard to the role and practice of the family and family life. Some readers may look at this forecast of recovery as a fool’s errand. Does anyone really believe that it is possible today for our society to experience a religious and cultural awakening where the role of the family and the rule of law are once again the testing ground for our best efforts and our highest aspirations? Perhaps the real question we should be asking, given the trajectory of the Biden state, is just the reverse: “What will it mean if we do not take up this task and recover our heritage?”
Looking ahead to Part 5
The contrast between the political order of the administrative state and that of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition should be clear by now, at least in basic terms, to anyone who has followed the argument thus far. The question must now be asked, however, if this contrast is nothing more than a continuation of the disagreements and diverging opinions that have always characterized the American two-party system. In other words, are the differences between radical gender ideology and the Christian moral tradition of the family, or that between legal immigration and an open border, or that between a command-and-control economy and a free market, only a matter of differing policy opinions? Or is something deeper, harsher, and more fracturing at stake? Are all of these “options” negotiable? Or are some of them beyond the pale of negotiation? These are the questions I would ask you to consider as you prepare for Part 5.
Endnotes
[i] Fantasies? If we simply assume the Enlightenment rhetoric of “pure reason” and “natural equality,” then we may question why these concepts should be regarded by anyone as rationalistic or idealistic fantasies. The hard truth, however, is that neither can be demonstrated in concrete human experience. No two naturally born people are ever equal to each other in every way, nor even in most ways, even among siblings in the same family. This can be empirically tested in a variety of ways, as Thomas Sowell has shown in Social Justice Fallacies, p.1-21. Likewise, as the structure of all academic and scientific debates amply demonstrates, not to mention ordinary human conversation, the use of reason leads inevitably to disagreements about what is reasonable. One can always seek a better and a more consistent explanation, but the notion of “pure reason” accessible to all people as individuals is a pure fantasy. See Hazony, Conservatism, p. 104-110, and Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
[ii] For up to date statistics and descriptions of public school systems across the country that are engaged in these activities of radical gender, sexual, and racial ideology see the online resources of Parents Defending Education.
[iii] Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Regnery, 2020; and Liz Wheeler, Hide Your Children: Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America’s Kids, Regnery, 2023.
[iv] Robert Woodson frequently points out the great irony that during the awful Jim Crow era, prior to the 1960s, when black families were by and large still intact, older people could walk without fear of crime in their own neighborhoods and teen pregnancies were below the national average.
[v] See Hazony, Conservatism, pp. 118-125.
Faith and the Arts 