Depressed? We feel your pain. It’s not great to be living through the worst presidential matchup ever. And it’s not a cheerful thought that one of these two horrendous candidates is very likely to be our next president.
“Sad!” as Donald Trump would say. “Unworthy of a nation that is on the one hand already great, and that has had really wonderful leadership for the last eight years, but that on the other hand needs to finally address all the very bad problems that somehow haven’t been solved over these last eight years,” as “change agent” Hillary Clinton would put it.
“Ugh” is how we would put it. It is dispiriting to think of either of these septuagenarians spending the next four years in the White House. Trump has shown he has nary a clue as to how to make America great. Clinton has produced not a whit of evidence that she has ever brought about significant beneficial change.
It is likely to be a rough four years. But we can and will survive.
We can survive Hillary Clinton. She embodies the senescence of baby boomer progressivism. It has done most of its damage, and that damage is considerable. But the movement is intellectually and morally exhausted. She can merely preside over a few more years of continued erosion and decay before it departs the scene, unlamented and unmourned,
But after the death of “progressivism,” surely there will come an opportunity for a healthy and revitalized liberalism—a liberalism that believes in liberty, and liberality, and even liberal education. We could once again have a liberalism that is, to quote Harvey Mansfield, “the aggressive doctrine of vigorous, spirited men” who show “strength and confidence in defense of liberty.”
But it will have to be conservatives who revive and renew what is (or was) best in liberalism. It will have to be conservatives who rescue and liberate liberalism from the fatal temptation of progressivism. For it is conservatives who understand, as G. K. Chesterton remarked, that if our society “proceeds at its present rate of progress and improvement, no trace or memory of it will be left at all.”
We can also survive Donald Trump. His demagogic populism provides no basis for successful governance. But we must also acknowledge that his hostile takeover of the Republican party shows that conservatism too needs reform and renewal. This is a major task that we at The Weekly Standard look forward to contributing to, along with our friends at National Review and Commentary and National Affairs, among others. It is an endeavor that should also aim to revitalize the Republican party, if that is possible. We look forward to the task. We especially look forward to engaging the young—Americans who understand conservative principles, but who knew not Reagan; warriors not of the Cold War but of the 9/11 generation; constitutionalists who are students and law clerks rather than contemporaries of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito; entrepreneurs not of the 20th century but of the 21st.
We oldsters can provide some useful guidance and help. But we can only do that if we freely acknowledge the need for fresh thinking and acting. We can only do that if we are well aware that the task is now less to “conserve” than to rebuild and renew. We remember the words of one of our heroes, Whittaker Chambers, in his final letter to another of our guides, William F. Buckley: “Each age finds its own language for an eternal meaning.” But we know that our heroes and guides are but distant historical memories for the younger generations who will have to find the appropriate ways and means to convey that meaning in their time.
For the moment, though, we apparently have no choice but to endure depressing clashes over the next three months and the likely disappointments of the next four years. This will require some strength and resolve. But we can be heartened by the prospect that, at the end of this minor ordeal, there stretches before us a vista of hope and an era of opportunity.
