After this ghastly campaign, whose ghastliness reached new heights with the performance of the Republican nominee in the first presidential debate, conservatives will have no other way left but—upward. By November 8, the destruction, intellectual and perhaps political, will be too great for us simply to rebuild, renew, reconstitute, or restore. The time will have passed for re-doing anything. Emerging from the wreckage of Trump and Trumpism, it will be necessary to build anew. We will of course have to use materials already at hand, many of them fine materials. We will of course have to learn from the past—the American past and the conservative past. But we will not be able to go back. After 2016, we will need a fresh start.
It will not be the first time. William F. Buckley in 1955 drew, needless to say, on thinkers of the past and the lessons of history. But his conservative movement was not so much a rebirth of something old as a founding of something new. As Buckley wrote in the first issue of National Review,
So from the start, the American conservative movement prided itself on offering “a position that has not grown old.”
In 1993, Irving Kristol remarked on the corruption over recent decades of “sector after sector of American life” by “political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other.” Kristol continued: “We have, I do believe, reached a critical turning point in the history of the American democracy. . . . We are, I sometimes feel, starting from ground zero.” When you start from ground zero, you face a task of construction more than reconstruction.
Ground zero. The phrase was much in use in a different context after the attacks of 9/11. We thought then that those attacks, and the response to them—at times a magnificent response—might presage a resurgence of the American spirit. In March 2002, Tod Lindberg wrote in these pages:
But now the public square has returned to where it was before 9/11. In 2016, we are back in Tony Orlando’s America. This campaign is a veritable festival of yellow ribbons. Or worse. It’s a festival of grievance and complaint, of whining—and, to be fair, of a kind of yearning one sees among some Trump supporters, a yearning that isn’t ignoble but which is utterly disconnected from the reality of who their candidate is and what he proposes to do.
So much for American exceptionalism. We’re having a Third World presidential campaign this year. About 45 percent of the primary votes this year were cast either for a clueless socialist or an authoritarian demagogue. The likely next president is a dishonest insider who has turned the trust of public office into the sleaze of a shady business. It’s the United States of Argentina. And it manifests this key characteristic of a failed democracy: a sullen and resentful population, looking to politicians and the government to assuage their problems, manifesting very little of “that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.”
Self-government is nowhere to be seen in this election. It’s the grievance-mongering of the right vs. the identity-pandering of the left, with those in the center wringing their hands about what others have wrought. Just eight years ago, Barack Obama appealed to hope and change. That seems like another era. Just eight years ago, John McCain spoke of “country first.” That seems like another country.
And of course things will get worse if allowed simply to run their downhill course. There are many more steps down the moving staircase to true decadence. If a new conservatism does not emerge from the destruction around us, we will find ourselves riding the American experiment into the ground.
