Over the weekend, we published a piece by C. Bradley Thompson, director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, asking, “What Does Fidelity to Our Founding Principles Require Today?” Thompson, who blogs at the Redneck Intellectual and is also the author of American’s Revolutionary Mind, adapted his piece from a speech he gave at the September meeting of the Philadelphia Society. In both, he attempts to answer the question: “What does it mean to be true to the principles of the American Founding?” Surveying our political landscape, he finds us in a bad way on that score:
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.
Against this progressive onslaught, he laments, “the past tactics of Conservatism and Libertarianism, Inc. have failed entirely.” So, then, what do we do? Thompson surveys the thought of Locke and the Founders and assesses whether the sort of revolution central to their thinking is called for in this moment. His ultimate conclusion, however, is that violence of the kind necessary to found this country is wrong in this instance. “The proposed ‘revenge’ tactics of the new-new Right mimicking the violence of the Left is a cure indistinguishable from the disease,” he writes. So even as “we must reject the politics of compromise and cowardice,” 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.” Those calling for armed revolution, moreover, either don’t fully understand the implications of what they are advocating, or they don’t care:
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.”
But do not confuse Thompson for some Conservatism Inc. defender of the status quo. Though he advises against imprudent and counterproductive acts, he nonetheless calls for a “nonviolent, bottom-up revolution” that will be “leaderless,” “quiet,” and come in the form of a “long march away from the institutions.” Its most important manifestation, in his view, will be a retreat from government schools, “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,” but also “the one that is most vulnerable to not only being altered but to being abolished.” Already, the parent revolt inspired by Covid lockdowns has begun a “Great Exodus” from government schools; Thompson argues that this should continue, and that we should not bother attempting to reform such institutions, because “to reform the government schools is to save them, and to save them is to perpetuate the single most immoral institution in America.”
Whether or not you agree, Thompson’s analysis is striking, and has more than earned a place in the conversation about where conservatives should go from here.