On Glenn Ellmers’ Call for “Revolutionary” Conservatism
When Conservatism Is for Radical Change
Last week Glenn Ellmers had an excellent little op-ed for The American Mind, “Monster Slayers (Still) Needed.”
It’s related to another he did back in January, “Monster Slayers Needed,” a piece more focused on weighing the need for politicians like Trump (Ellmers seems to prefer Trump over DeSantis) and featuring Trump’s must-see December video on the massive censorship scandal.
Here’s some excerpts from the second of these pieces, and I’m going to boldface the evidence of his adjusted attitude towards constitutional reverence as it has been understood by typical conservatives:
Today, I would contend, we honor our founding fathers best not so much by following their rules for constitutional government, but by appropriately imitating their revolutionary boldness. Do any Republican politicians today agree with that idea, or even understand it?
…Do we not betray that trust when we assume that the framers, having invoked their deliberative freedom, forever eliminated the need for us to exercise our reflection and choice?
I argued in January that we “need to be unconventional in thinking about what’s necessary in this post-normal, post-constitutional regime. We can’t judge either Trump or DeSantis…according to the old standards.” We are in desperate need of a statesman who combines the determination and practical effectiveness of DeSantis with Trump’s weird political genius…”
America is now so dominated by what Charles Kesler calls our “second Constitution” that a simplistic adherence to the older institutions and practices simply isn’t sufficient anymore.
Thus,
Republican strategists and office-holders, as well as intellectuals on the Right, need to do a much better job of letting go of conservatism as a mindset, and focusing more on our aims, which must include overturning much of the status quo…
Largely because working-class voters are experiencing the hard times firsthand, while the Beltway elites remain comparatively secure and comfortable, the Republican base understands better than most of the party leadership that America is no longer great.
Indeed. I have working-class neighbors who prominently display this symbol on their vehicles, and it is one which speaks volumes:
The Complacent Conservatives aren’t much alarmed by that persistent grinding noise coming from the engine room, because on the upper decks the sun is shining and the drinks are flowing. They can’t really understand why anyone would question the continuing efficacy of the founders’ framework. They see the ship of state running, if not perfectly, then at least adequately. They definitely can’t understand the demand for revolutionary change, and some are even appalled at the idea. There is a certain irony in this blindness.
…some conservative intellectuals risk becoming the caricature Wilson derides. They simply can’t get their minds around the idea that the founders’ mechanisms could ever stop working.
I’ve given you maybe a third of the piece, but RTWT.
Three points, and the first one is long, because it involves a sketch of a whole program.
First, Ellmers is right on the main point. We need a rethinking of our constitutional order.
The first element of rethinking it is to stop idolizing it and the Founders in the manner of so many law-school-connected “conservatives,” who keep pretending, against all evidence, that if the Constitution remains intact, and if people just love the Founders enough, there cannot be collapse of civilized democracy in America.
As I put it in my essay on Van Morrison’s important 2021 song “Western Man,” one of the lessons it imparts is that
…our defeat is so total that we have to conclude, not only that “going back to the way it was, now just seems near impossible,” but that we need to adopt a vision of Western freedom that is in some respects a “new path.” …[for] if “Western freedom” could be so decisively and quickly undone from within, then there was something flawed in our previous understanding and practice of it. That means…our goal cannot be to rewind…the proper goal for populist-conservatives, and for all their allies [I’d put Morrison in this category], must be a vision of democratic and nation-grounded freedom that while true to the core principles that undergirded its Western flourishing circa 1945-2015, must in other ways be new.
I believe that new vision will first of all have to learn much from those who, like James Allan and Pierre Manent, long noticed a decline in democratic say circa 1992-2023, such that it will have to be a more democratic vision of constitutional democracy. See my mediations on why “Democracy is Our Word,” my commentary on what Allan and Manent noticed in a chapter of this volume, and a proposal I have long made which would be a beginning-step for national-level reforms, an easing of the requirements for amending the Constitution.
Once that amendment, which I dub the “responsibility amendment,” passed, I would like to see a set of amendments which, like the way many features of the national and state constitutions of the 1770s-90s were direct responses to specific British abuses engaged in the by the Parliament and Crown, will be direct responses to the specific kinds of abuses seen during the Covid/Vax Disaster, as well as during the teens and aughts, all of which “evince a design to establish” administrative oligarchy and despotism, dressed in the clothes of quasi-democracy. We definitely need amendments which a.) clarify the procedures for resolving election disputes and banning the most suspicion-generating election practices, such as mail-in ballots, and b.) ban or tightly regulate certain uses of emergency powers by the national and state governments (although the latter can be reformed by state action alone).
All the reforms listed by Aaron Kheriaty on pages 204-212 of his The New Abnormal should be adopted (many of them are here), especially the ones totally redoing the CDC and FDA and banning Pharma contributions, and while most of these could be done through ordinary legislative action, whatever amendments that might aide in their effectiveness should be considered. I would also like to see an amendment enshrining the Nuremberg principle of informed consent, and the freedom of physicians to give advice to and follow unorthodox protocols.
Again, and totally apart from the science about the vaccines, real political science knows that the embrace of mandate-policy by so many Americans constituted nothing less than apostasy from liberal democracy, and that apostasy must be renounced and made difficult to re-enact.
Amendments recommended by experts on the creep of the 4th branch, the administrative state, should also be adopted. I.e., whatever the likes of Chris Demuth and John Marini recommend should be seriously considered.
We also, and this can happen at the level of state constitutionalism, should try to beef-up state-power in relation to that of the federal government, but simultaneously, locality-power in relation to that of each state government. The states should be voluntarily ceding a good deal of their power implied by Dillon Rule doctrine, and seeking to revive some elements of the township governance celebrated by Tocqueville. We need to be heeding the more brass-tacks Porchers, and the better local politics scholars, such as David Berman, in this area. For a more democratic future, we must become more federalist, and more localist.
And many current institutions which operate on the national level, particularly within the federal government, in higher-ed, in banking, in tech-est monopoly, need to be attacked, and in many cases torn down. As Kheriaty says in The New Abnormal,
While we masked up, the pandemic itself was a kind of unmasking, in the sense that it revealed the degree to which many of our institutions had already decayed from within. These institutions will take a generation or more to rebuild. In many instances, it will be more productive to build entirely new institutions…
Whatever legislation aides in that should be adopted—I assume that likely means a revival of anti-trust to break-up Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, etc., and at a minimum, it means legislation, even at the amendment level, to make the current attacks on free speech via social media regulation directed behind the scenes by the government impossible. Again, view the must-see impressive December Trump video on the free speech aspect of this, which I am ashamed to say I would not have been aware of without Ellmer’s recommendation. It also means radical attacks on present patterns of MSM and university power, including reconsideration of licensing, of government funding, and perhaps even, the rules for corporate charters in those areas.
All-in-all, that will constitute a new regime. Just as we speak of the “Civil War amendments”, the proper conservative response to the disasters of the last several years, disasters which have brought the very continuance of republican government in America into doubt, ought to be decades of institution-purging firings, and more importantly, fundamental reforms. Sometime around 2060, historians should be able to look back and speak of the “Post-Disaster amendments” and the “Post-Disaster regime.”
Doing this requires a broad embrace of the now-revealed fact that our liberal democracies were deeply sick in the decades that led up to 2020-23. We should continue to celebrate America and the West, but our celebration of them circa the 1970s-2010s period, and especially the 1990s-2010s one, must become quite qualified. Great evil was afoot, and whole cohorts of those charged with leadership let us down in not alerting us nor opposing it.
And any “conservativism” or “constitutionalism” that refuses to face that fact, that tries to change the subject, must be repudiated.
Second, I would caution Ellmers about his too-casual use of terms related to the word “revolution.” I assume he is for the kind of “revolutionary boldness” I am—legal firings, legal alterations of the law, including, I would hope, of the Constitution itself. Probably also for the kinds of mass civil disobedience I think conservative leaders should be trying to organize on certain topics. But as I detail in greater length in my piece on Morrison’s “Western Man,” and at much greater length in my “Rules for Democracy-Rescuers” piece, conservatives must take care to distinguish metaphorical talk of revolution, from talk of the thing itself. Becoming serious about the possibility of needing an emergency revolution requires greater precision of language, and greater reluctance to use the word “revolution” and its cognates.
Thus, “revolutionary conservatives” is not a phrasing we should adopt. Ellmers comes close to adopting it, but ultimately stops at recommending imitation of the Founders’ “revolutionary boldness.”
In contrast, I would say based populist-conservatives, or some version of the idea there, is the kind of self-labelling which better suits us at this moment.
Third, I accuse Ellmers, and all the leaders of the Claremont Institute, of being what Ellmers labels “Complacent Conservatives” on one key topic—that of the vax-harms. More to come on this from yours truly, and it is not going to be pretty. For “complacent” hardly captures the depth of the Claremont failure here. Ellmers, to his credit, is one of the few Claremont-affiliated scholars writing with necessary urgency about what Trump labelled in that vital video the “censorship cartel and the “depraved corporate media”—see this from the first “Monsters Slayers” essay:
…can [the USA] it handle the abandonment of free speech by one political party and a merely half-hearted defense by the other?
…Why does it fall to this (supposedly) has-been huckster [Trump] to be almost alone in aggressively combatting the new woke fascism of government-corporate censorship? His video is the clearest, most forceful, most articulate statement on this subject made by any politician this year.
And yet Ellmers remains silent, like most Claremont-affiliated writers and Trump himself, about the very topic/discussion that that Censorship Cartel and that Depraved Elite most want suppressed, and which has most elicited their “misinformation” excuses for censorship: the one about plausible claims, made by hundreds of experts, that the Covid-19 vax-harms are serious and widespread.
The small media platforms the Claremont leaders control, The American Mind and the Claremont Review of Books, remain as silent about this as the Depraved Corporate Media.
Ellmers himself provides merely one paragraph to list the kinds of abuses becoming regular for our elite regime, and since it’s so short one can’t accuse him of much, but I do feel obliged to point out that, once again, the issue of the Covid-19 vax-harms, as well as the issue which should shock one and all, the orchestrated suppression of all talk about them, both go missing from yet another “bold conservative’s” list:
Every month, more evidence piles up confirming that the juggernaut of left-wing fanaticism will never stop—whether it’s punishing homebuyers with good credit scores, allowing the border to disintegrate further with the expiration of Title 42, or blessing the growing anarcho-tyranny in our cities with lenient sentencing for disturbers of the peace and harsh penalties for those who undertake to restore it.
Nonetheless, despite this collective Claremont failure, and despite his having not thought enough about revolution-evoking terminology, Ellmers is on the right track overall.
More soon on what he can only hint at in a brief piece, why a correct understanding of political philosophy and history should have no problem accepting the possibility, and the necessity in our time, of a conservatism that is for radical change.
On Glenn Ellmers’ Call for “Revolutionary” Conservatism
The problems in America are based on choices that powerful people are making. They have accrued wealth and power that they will never willingly relinquish. They will never accept laws, reforms, or dissolution of institutions that support their power. The FBI is their personal Gestapo. The media is their personal propaganda arm. Congress is bought and paid for. The medical system controls and enslaves most of us. Electronic voting lends legitimacy to their representatives, and a compliant judiciary rubber stamps their crimes. The only thing that will fix America’s problems is to rid ourselves of the people that are causing them. But we have to consider the possibility that what replaces them may be yet worse. So we muddle through….hoping that our oligarchy will reform itself. Or at least leave us alone.
Thanks for the long and thoughtful analysis.
I appreciate all the areas in which are in agreement, and I wonder if the somewhat heated comments about me / Claremont regarding vaccines are a bit unjustified. We've hardly ignored the issue.
Ironically, I'm writing a long review/essay right now on a slew of COVID-related books, including Kheriaty's.