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THE SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL BATTLE OF OUR TIMES, PART 4: THE ANGLO-AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE TRADITION (cont.)

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Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 1960s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, I returned to my family in Texas and began to try to “re-member” what had been the deeper soil of my life, my upbringing, and my faltering faith. This painting was an attempt to remember and to honor the first fruits of that legacy from my grandparents little farm in West Texas. Remembering and honoring that legacy was a crucial step in my own recovery of our national heritage, and a preparation for the battle now at hand.

[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.

THE SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL BATTLE OF OUR TIMES, PART 3: THE ANGLO-AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE TRADITION

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Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 1960s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, I returned to my family in Texas and began to try to “re-member” what had been the deeper soil of my life, my upbringing, and my faltering faith. This painting was an attempt to remember and to honor the first fruits of that legacy from my grandparents little farm in West Texas. Remembering and honoring that legacy was a crucial step in my own recovery of our national heritage, and a preparation for the battle now at hand.

[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

[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. 

THE SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL BATTLE OF OUR TIMES: AN OVERVIEW IN SEVEN PARTS

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Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen-year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the late 1960s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, I returned to my family in Texas and began to try to “re-member” what had been the deeper soil of my life, my upbringing, and my faltering faith. This painting was an attempt to remember and to honor the first fruits of that legacy from my grandparents little farm in West Texas. Remembering and honoring that legacy was a crucial step in my own recovery of our national heritage, and a preparation for the battle now at hand.

What follows is an outline in seven parts for an overview of the battle mentioned in the title above. I plan to post the first part, “The Administrative State,” on July 4th, commemorating The Declaration of Independence, and thus ringing our founders’s own clarion call against all such states. And then I will post a new part about once a week into the month of August. My sense is that many of us are in need of clarification about the many issues that beset our country at this time in our history, particularly as we approach the presidential election in November. This is my attempt to contribute to such clarification. I know there are those on the opposite side of this battle who will regard my views as misguided (to put it mildly) as I already regard many of their views. Having the perspective set forth in one place, however, with many details included, may help both sides, and those in the middle (or on the outside) to see more clearly all that is at stake in the outcome. That is, at any rate, my hope.   

1. The Administrative State. A brief review of the history of the administrative state from Woodrow Wilson to Joe Biden, 1900-2024.

2. The Expansion of the Administrative State Under Joe Biden. An overview of how the Biden state has expanded its power, based on the analysis of Thomas Sowell in his book, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Public Policy.

3. The Anglo-American Conservative Tradition. What it would mean to recover our cultural and constitutional heritage based on the principles of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition (AACT) as shown in Yoram Hazony’s book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery.  

4. The Anglo-American Conservative Tradition (continued).

5. A Critical Time in Our Nation’s History. An assessment of the seriousness of our current cultural calamity based on a comparison with Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, as shown in Eric Metaxas’s Letter to the American Church.

6. The Way of Faith. Reflections on the recovery of the AACT by means of three biblical principles of faith that will help us: a) restore the religious foundations of our culture, b) correct course both in the church and in the state, and c) avoid the disaster of the authoritarian state into which we are presently careening.

7. The Way of Faith (continued).