What Does Fidelity to Our Founding Principles Require Today?

The best way to restore America’s principles in 2022 is not to overthrow the government, but to have a nonviolent, bottom-up revolution, starting in the schools.

This essay is adapted from a speech delivered at the September 2022 meeting of the Philadelphia Society, and is a response to Michael Anton.

I ’d like to begin by reminding you of the animating themes of this conference and this panel. The general theme is, “Can American institutions still be conserved?” and the particular theme is, “What does fidelity to our Founding principles require today?”

If I am being honest, my answer to the first question is “maybe — perhaps — hopefully,” but it is hard to be much more positive than that. To paraphrase that famous line from Hungarian anti-communists in the 1950s: “situation hopeless, not yet bad.”

It is the job of conservatives, classical liberals, and even libertarians to conserve that which represents the best of our intellectual, cultural, and political traditions. To that end, conservatives are sometimes prone to invoke the jeremiad, which is a literary form that is most often presented as a lament, an exhortation, and a calling — a lament for things lost, an exhortation to recover what is true, good, and beautiful about our society’s manners and mores, and a calling to come home.

The American tradition of the jeremiad began with first-generation Puritans in the 1650s as they assessed the vices of their children and grandchildren. The jeremiad tells the story of declension, decay, and disintegration. Broadly understood, though, the jeremiad is not a uniquely American tradition. Instead, it seems to be a timeless and universal tradition for cranky old men. From John Winthrop and Cotton Mather to Russell Kirk and Junior Soprano, old men like to lament the manners and mores of their progeny.

For all the hand-wringing associated with the jeremiad, it does perform a useful function in society. It serves as a remembrance of things past, certainly of the good and sometimes even of the bad and the ugly as cautionary tales. The one obvious problem with the jeremiad is that it can become predictable, stale, and boring — certainly to the young, which is the cause of their perpetual eye-rolling.

My talk today is a kind of jeremiad but with a twist. By any objective measurement, we now live in a country that can be described as one of the most immoral in world history. This might strike you as an outrageous claim, but let me support it with a few examples chosen from all-too-many.

We now live in a country whose ruling class openly embraces and rejoices in the mental and physical mutilation of its children. This is a demonstrable fact (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

We live in a country where it is now “okay” for the government-school system to host Drag Queen events for eight-year-old boys, to arrange for them to be put on body-changing and life-altering drugs, to prepare them for surgeries to remove their sex organs, and to deny the rights of fathers to object to this evil. We live in a country where it is now “okay” for the government-school system to arrange for nine-year-old girls to be put on puberty blockers, for 15-year-old girls to begin testosterone treatments, and for 17-year-old girls to receive double mastectomies. We live in a country where it’s now “okay” for the government-school system to require young children to read pedophilic books such as Gender Queer, which depicts a young boy performing fellatio on an older man.

The polymorphous perversity sanctioned by America’s government schools has no precedent in world history. No other society has ever done anything like this to its children, not even the butchers in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Let us therefore heed the words of Victor Hugo in The Man Who Laughs: “He who sins against a child, sins against God.”

How, then, do we escape the progressive hellscape we find ourselves in today? How do we conserve what is good and lovely about our civilization?

Of two things I am certain: first, the past tactics of Conservatism and Libertarianism, Inc. have failed entirely; and second, the proposed “revenge” tactics of the new-new Right mimicking the violence of the Left is a cure indistinguishable from the disease. We must reject both.

I am therefore calling on all proponents of a free society to rethink radically how we prevent this country’s continued descent into nihilism and socialism, but also how we recover and restore those true and salutary principles and institutions established by the Founders of this country.

So, returning to our animating question: What does fidelity to our Founding principles require today?

My answer to the question is twofold: first, fidelity means that we must be true to the Founding principles; and second, “we fight” — we must fight to preserve those principles. Obviously, these answers are too simple if not simple-minded. Something more is needed.

What does it mean to be true to the principles of the American Founding?

First and foremost, it means that we must understand the Founders’ principles. This requires that we demonstrate historically and philosophically that the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence are in fact true and salutary. If they are not true, we should abandon them, but of course they are true and therefore worthy of our loyalty.

Second, we must defend those principles from all enemies, foreign and domestic. As I am sure all of you know, the Founders’ principles have been under attack from the progressive Left for 130 years or so. More recently, some on what we might call the reactionary Right have also judged and condemned America’s Founding principles as either irrelevant to the needs of the 21st century or as the source of the maladies that afflict us.

What, then, does it mean to fight? It means that we need to know why we should fight, what we are fighting for, and how we should fight.

Let us start with the “why” question, which is the simplest to answer.

We must fight as an act of devotion to those we love — to our parents, spouses, children, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens — and we must fight to save the country we love. We must also accept as a moral obligation the responsibility to fight for the same things our forebears fought for, namely, freedom — the freedom that was institutionalized during our Revolutionary–Founding period. Men without chests do not deserve their freedom.

This means that we must reject the politics of compromise and cowardice, but it also means that we must likewise reject the politics of despair and with it the politics of nihilism that some on the right have turned to in recent years. Simply put, we must resist the temptation to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I assume — or, at least, I hope — that the members of the Philadelphia Society can at least agree with me on that.

The more difficult questions to answer are the “what” and “how” questions.

So, what are we fighting for? What is it that we seek to preserve?

The mission of the Philadelphia Society is, in part, to preserve the principles and institutions on which this country was founded. We defend them not simply because they are ours and not simply as an exercise of fileopietism. Rather, we defend them because they are true, and there’s the rub.

How do we defend the truth of the Founders’ principles when it is said that we live in a post-truth world, a world in which we are now supposed to refer to men as “she,” “her,” and “hers” or as “zie,” “zim,” and “zir”?

When we speak of those principles and institutions to which we owe fidelity, the quickest and easiest way to sum them up is to defer to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. The writers and signers of the Declaration spoke not so much of principles but of truths — moral and political truths — truths they considered to be absolute, inalienable, universal, and permanent. Presumably, those truths are as true today as they were in 1776. And thus, they are still worth defending.

The Declaration lists four truths, each of which can each be summed up in a single word: equality, rights, consent, and revolution. The least discussed of the Declaration’s four truths is the fourth — the right to revolution. The Declaration’s “revolution” truth says:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Built into the heart and soul of a free society is the “revolution” truth, which says that the people have a right to “alter or abolish” their government if it repeatedly denies or destroys the individual rights of the people: i.e., their unalienable rights to life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, and a series of corollary civil rights. In other words, it is conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians who must conserve the revolution truth.

The Declaration’s “revolution” truth is borrowed from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. The English philosopher’s goal was to establish objective criteria for judging when subjects or citizens are justified in resisting or rebelling against the laws and actions of their rulers.

Locke’s first criterion concerns “when the legislative is altered,” which includes: one, when a ruler arbitrarily alters the “electors, or ways of election”; and, two, when a ruler delivers his subjects or citizens “into the subjection of a foreign power.”

Locke’s second criterion sanctioning revolution arises when rulers “act contrary to their trust.” Governments that repeatedly violate the fundamental rights of their citizens not only deserve no respect or allegiance, but they are in fact criminal institutions that must be overturned.

I will leave it to your imaginations to determine whether Locke’s criteria are relevant in the context of 2022.

But, for now, let us fast-forward from the time Locke wrote his Second Treatise to 1776.

The Declaration’s right to revolution likewise indicates the conditions under which revolution is justified. Whereas the rights to life or liberty are simply absolute, the right to revolution is contextually absolute, which means its application is context-dependent.

Interestingly, the first word that follows the fourth truth is “prudence,” which is the practical virtue determining when revolution is both justified and propitious. According to the Declaration, prudence dictates that revolution must be the last resort of the people against rights-violating governments. There are times when exercising the right to revolution would be imprudent or foolhardy, even though the people might be justified in doing so.

Determining why, when, and how a government should be altered or abolished is a complicated question, both in theory and practice. The Declaration identifies the challenge as twofold: First, governments with long and venerable histories “should not be changed for light and transient Causes”; and second, history teaches that men “are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.”

The question of timing is therefore critical to the Founders’ theory of revolution. The problem raised by the Declaration is: When exactly is revolution both justified and prudent?

The first thing to note is that one act of injustice or tyranny by the government does not justify revolution. There must be, according to the Declaration, a “long train of abuses and usurpations” and a settled “Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” Having reached that point, the people have both a “Right” and a “Duty” to “throw off such Government.”

Fast-forward now to 2022.

Ask yourself these two questions: First, do the criteria established by Locke and the Declaration apply to contemporary America? And second: Are the American people freer or less free today than the American colonists of 1776?

In thinking through the implications of these questions, the first thing to note is that the context of today is completely different from that of 1776, and it is also important to note that the criteria used by Locke and American revolutionaries are not the only criteria to determine whether revolution is justified or how to do it. Remember: The right to revolution is contextual and contexts change, and those facts are particularly relevant to the prudence question.

Consider two concrete examples. First, Locke and Jefferson claim that revolution is justified if the legislature is altered. Ask yourself this question: Has the administrative state changed the nature of our constitutional republic? Second, Locke and Jefferson claim that revolution is justified when rulers “act contrary to their trust,” which is to protect the rights of their citizens. Ask yourself this question: How many laws passed by the federal government since the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 have violated the rights of American citizens?

These are all interesting theoretical questions. But let us say — hypothetically speaking — that our government has become a soft despotism with a clear design to become a hard despotism. Again — hypothetically asking — how should the American people respond to this state of affairs? Quoting Comrade Lenin, “What is to be done?”

This takes me to my final question: How should we fight in 2022?

Let us begin with the obvious: 2022 is not 1776. The source of our despotism is not 3,000 miles away. It is here, it is now, and it is everywhere. It can be felt, but it is largely unseen. The Deep State is deeper today than any of us know. We see only a fraction of its size, power, and influence. This means that 1776, as a matter of prudence, cannot and should not be a model for today.

There are some on the reactionary right, however, who think that 1776 is the model for our time and that armed violence against the government and its surrogates — if not a coup d’état — is both justified and salutary. Such talk is disingenuous and irresponsible. It is disingenuous because one should never provoke other men to man the barricades while sitting idly by in an ivory tower, and it’s irresponsible because the security state will snuff it all out before you can say “Merrick Garland.”

It is important to remember that the 56 men who signed the Declaration did so only after pledging to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Unlike today’s keyboard revolutionaries, the generation of ’76 was not role-playing in some alternate-reality video game. They talked the talk and they walked the walk. And therein lies the difference.

That said, it is also important to note that revolutions come in many different forms. Armed rebellion, for instance, is not a necessary condition for revolution. Recall the Velvet, ‘quiet’ Revolution undertaken by Czech anti-communists during the 1980s. There can be invisible revolutions that transform a nation over the course of decades.

This much I know: The 21st-century revolution must be a nonviolent, bottom-up revolution. It will be largely a leaderless revolution. To borrow and flip a concept from the cultural Left, it will come in the form of a “long march away from the institutions.”

The revolution therefore will be mostly a quiet revolution, an underground revolution, a samizdat revolution. Twenty-first century revolutionaries must follow the path explained so brilliantly in Vaclav Havel’s indispensable essay on “the Power of the Powerless.” Millions of Havel’s green grocers must be willing to stand up and say, “NO! I will not tell a lie; I will no longer sanction evil. I must live in the truth.”

The time to act is now. There are things that can and must be done. We must first identify those institutions that are vulnerable to capture, to being altered, or, better yet, to being abolished.

It turns out that the single most immoral institution in the United States, the one that has done the most damage to America, the one that is the embodiment of despotism, is also the one that is most vulnerable to not only being altered but to being abolished — and that is America’s K–12 government-school system.

But how do we abolish an institution so deeply ingrained in American culture? The answer is simple: We must withdraw our sanction. That’s it! To that end, I have dedicated my public writings in recent years, both at my Substack “The Redneck Intellectual” and at my blog, EdWatchDaily.com, to encouraging what I call the #JustWalkAway movement.

And the good news is that the #JustWalkAway movement is happening without the Republican Party and without the D.C. think-tank establishment. In fact, it is happening, ironically enough, because of Covid and the utter stupidity of the Education Deep State.

The Covid lockdowns promoted by the Education Establishment sent tens of millions of children home for over a year-and-a-half to be mis-educated online, where parents could see and hear for the first time what their children were actually learning or not learning in the government schools — and they were shocked and horrified.

Parents learned that their kids were being indoctrinated in critical race and gender theory. They learned that the schools were grooming minor-aged children to “transition” to the opposite sex via life-altering puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and genital mutilation, which they tried to keep secret from parents.

And we all know the result. Over the course of the last two years, a large group of American mothers — now designated by the Justice Department and the FBI as “domestic terrorists” — were radicalized and began protesting at local school-board meetings around the United States. More importantly, millions of American families joined the #JustWalkAway movement and have pulled their kids from the government schools. Many of these families are now homeschooling, some are going to private and charter schools, and others are creating micro schools and education pods.

This is the Great Exodus. As a result, the government schools are imploding. Students and teachers are leaving in droves. The system cannot be sustained, and it cannot and must not be reformed. To reform the government schools is to save them, and to save them is to perpetuate the single most immoral institution in America.

It is imperative, therefore, that the proponents of a free society support the “Separation of School and State” principle, which means we must be abolitionists.

So, how do we get from here to there? Here is a back-of-the-envelope, five-step program for abolishing the government-school system. We must:

1. Delegitimize the government schools not only as failing in practice but as immoral;
2. Encourage ordinary Americans to JustWalkAway;
3. Rescind all laws regulating homeschooling and the creation of micro schools and education pods;
4. Require all Republican politicians to pledge they will support abolishing the federal Department of Education and its 50 state surrogates;
5. Take whatever steps necessary to “decertify” the so-called “ed” schools.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the revolution, and the leaders of the revolution are ordinary Americans. This movement will not be stopped, and the revolution will not be televised. We have achieved critical mass and there is no going back.

Dusk is approaching and the owl of Minerva will soon spread its wings.

And so, all you now have a choice: Either you join us, or you get the hell out of the way.

This is a warning: If you are a “conservative” who wants to “reform” the government-school system, know this: You are, at best, irrelevant. At worst, you are a loyalist — a loyalist to the regime — a loyalist to the government-school system — a loyalist to the single most immoral institution in America.

And you should be ashamed.