The A Yeoman Farmer Series Part IV:

interest to say that things are bad but not so bad as to allow specific changes without

an revolution within the regime. In a neat rhetorical twist, truly Trumpian, the author

declares his fellow conservatives, who do not support him or Trump, are liars or on

the take.

11. Whatever the reason for the contradiction, there can be no doubt that there is

a contradiction. To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and

political beliefs—to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction

is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also

believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but

not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically

impossible.

The author, by looking at a potential contradiction, almost gets close to the problem

but seems to lose his way. He forgets what Strauss taught that all societies have

contradictions and those societies that try to remove them will destroy themselves for

that is what liberalism requires–the end of contradictions. If this is what the author is

trying to argue, that conservativism retains the same contradictions as Liberalism,

then that is a different argument to America is in terminal decline if it remains on its

current path, unless one thinks that America is not, nor ever was, a liberal country

and to pursue liberalism is the catastrophe that needs to be resisted. Yet, if that is

the argument, it fails, despite the author’s rhetorical flourishes, for two main reasons.

First, America is *the* liberal experiment since its founding. To argue that it was

never liberal, even assuming the argument that it was a deeply republican liberalism,

seems anachronistic. The second is that America’s pursuit of liberalism is its

experiment that unfolds with each generation where conservatives have offered the

necessary course corrections to keep that experiment from ending in failure since

that experiment by definition is whether human nature finds fulfilment through

liberalism and whether the experience of the past 230 years has provided evidence

in that argument. Yet, the crisis to which the author addresses, but does not identify,

is within liberalism, American liberalism, which he does not explore since he never

goes to the cause. Even though he gropes towards the source and sort of touches

on possible solutions, without understanding what he is doing, that is his heart is in

the right place, he never gets to the core of why America is in crisis and why Trump

has been able to emerge as a symptom of that crisis and his attempt to solve that

crisis is hampered by being its symptom. However, the author seems to believe it is

a crisis of liberalism as if there is a serious alternative within America to liberalism or

one that remains untried if not unimagined.

What some of his less restrained colleagues have accepted is a previous alternative

to liberalism, an outcome that is coeval with politics. However, their preferred

alternative only appeals because they have forgotten its previous failures elsewhere

in the belief that *this time* it will work in America which is a country founded in direct

opposition to that alternative.

12. Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no

fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that

conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong

on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first,

few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the

left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the

whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all

understand as conservatism.

What has become clear is that the author really likes to present everything as a

Manichean choice in which the choice is either/or and rarely, if ever, both/and. Either

you must embrace radical change or you admit conservatism has failed. What is

curious about the author’s argument is how ahistorical it is. To claim that he knows

or has divined or diagnosed conservativism’s failure, suggests he has an insight into

conservatism, liberalism, and the American experiment that is superior to any other

argument. In his own words, if he is right, then conservatism is wrong and wrong

simply about everything until he arrived. Yet, for his audacity, his argument lacks

substance. As someone once said, the more audacious your argument, the less

evidence you need, which is perhaps describes the Trump campaign. For a

politician, this is excusable, but for someone professing to be a public commentator it

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