Keep the Change
Lent is here- and in Houston, so is RODEO season. It is a pretty cool festival that takes place in the shadow of the old Astrodome. From my perspective, all Houston Rodeos are divided into three parts: one part state fair, one part bull-riding event, one part concert. You pick which days to go to the rodeo based on what concerts are playing. It just so happens that two performers who have the same conservative country music bona fides that Toby Keith did are coming this year and I hope to attend: the folk singer Oliver Anthony (of Rich men north of Richmond fame) and the 1980s country singer Hank Williams Jr.
Hank Jr. is definitely not as great as great as Toby Keith or Merle Haggard, but he has done a few things over the years that were conservative and patriotic that I really appreciated. For one, there was the awesome live concert he was part of with the beach boys during Reagan’s Presidency. Then, during Obama’s administration, Bocephus had the audacity to criticize the President- comparing him at one point to Hitler. NBC attempted to cancel him in response, pulling his “Are you ready for some football” song from their Monday Night Football broadcast. Hank Jr. came back at NBC and Obama with a great response song- “Keep the Change,” in reference to Obama’s progressive “hope and change” slogan:
A country boy can survive- even in 2024.
It came up in one of my classes this week, what the full Conservative response to Progressivism ought to be. It’s more than what William F Buckley said- “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” A full answer would also call into question whether “Progress” and “History” would actually lead to a better result than staying where we are.
Similar to the song “Keep the Change,” Calvin Coolidge (the President born on the 4th of July) rejected the notion that Progressives had surpassed the Founders’ wisdom:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
Claims of “Progress” beyond the Declaration ideals are actually a backsliding into barbarism and tribalism, in other words.
Coolidge wrote that in 1926, and it is a well known passage. I wonder when this argument first was made, and why it is not made more. In 1916, Elihu Root made a similar argument about the Founders’ principles of republicanism versus the direct democracy of the Progressives:
[The Republican characteristics] of the government established by the Constitution [were] a distinct advance beyond the ancient attempts at popular government, and the elimination of any one of them would be a retrograde movement and a reversion to a former and discarded type of government. In each case it would be the abandonment of a distinctive feature of government which has succeeded, in order to go back and try again the methods of government which have failed. Of course we ought not to take such a backward step except under the pressure of inevitable necessity.
As Hank Jr, Root, and Coolidge, and all our rowdy friends would say: you can keep the “change.”