We used to talk about politics as liberal & conservative. Liberals wanted things like more welfare, redistribution, & higher taxes when it comes to gov’t; when it comes to morality, they wanted gay marriage, abortion, & now trans-gender identity. Conservatives largely opposed these things. They lost every single battle—except tax cuts & deregulation. In 2020, with a record number of supposedly conservative Justices on the Supreme Court, transgender identity became a civil right in Bostock. Disagree & you’re not just a bigot, but the laws will be used against you. Talking about conservatism nowadays seems to be primarily driven by the fact that politics is mostly for old people, young people mostly don’t vote, & so the institutions, wealth, & rhetoric are all rather nostalgic.
But this is not all there is to politics—these are important political disagreements, but they don’t involve the foundations of conservatism, which are private rather than public. Conservatives, unlike liberals, hold that the basis of society is the family. The basis of family itself is in turn holy, since human beings are merely mortal. Conservatives, however, have also failed to conserve the family. The vast majority of young Americans are unmarried into their mid-30s. The catastrophe of divorce that came before this catastrophe of marriagelessness is too well-known to require restatement. Demographics are also not good, which every conservative should know by now—Americans simply can’t achieve stagnation anymore & nobody believes it will get better in the next decade or so. Worse, very many kids in the poorer half of America don’t have fathers, creating a class divide unheard of in American history. As for the collapse of the churches & the unprecedented weakness of America’s historic Protestant faith, the news is as depressive as conservatives frequently like their news to be. Catholicism isn’t doing great either. The more serious American Christians get, the more likely they’re to talk of America as post-Christian or of Christianity as a minority, vulnerable to the gov’t as much as to the majority.
So instead of conservative, let’s say there are Americans-who-actively-oppose-woke-politics. Who among them will be willing to turn to politics to help people make a living & raise their children to be proud? Mr. J.D. Vance seems willing. Let’s hope he runs for the Senate in Ohio & the nation finds out what he’s made of. He looks good on the stump.