National Review Online
Monday, January 25, 2021
High among the things American
conservatism seeks to conserve is our country’s political inheritance from our
founding, an inheritance that makes it possible for us to be a free,
prosperous, decent, and self-governing society.
That work is unending and sometimes
arduous — because the inheritance is complex and often misunderstood, because
the threats to it are many and varied, and because conservation is rarely
reducible to resisting change. Our claim is not that the Founders were perfect
but that they were wise, and that we need to fit the times to the Constitution
more than the other way around.
Constitutional government is betrayed when
the public is asked not to consult with experts but to submit to them. Or when
courts deny our system’s foundational premise that all men are created equal in
their basic rights. Or, as we have recently seen, when a mob seeks to
intimidate legislators into forgetting their duties.
Our political debates are often
necessarily contentious, but they must remain only metaphorically battles.
Different stripes of conservatives can have productive arguments with one
another about how to help families flourish, what the proper bounds of
government are, and who should lead the Republican Party. But that debate must
not partake of conspiratorial fantasies, and lawless violence must never be on
the table. We must strive, against all demagogues, to make our reason the
master and not the servant of our passions.
The spirit of republican deliberation is
already too frail in our times. Our fellow citizens doubt one another’s good
intent and capacity for self-government. Even conservatives are tempted to give
up the defense of the Constitution, which would leave it friendless and dying.
Nothing, at such a moment, can sound more naïve than a call for Americans to
rededicate ourselves to our patrimony. Nothing is more essential.
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