The Daily Signal - What Is National Conservatism?

Episode Date: February 19, 2022

A new group of thinkers and activists calling themselves national conservatives believe American politics and policy questions increasingly invite a national approach. They seek to combat the left's attempt to bury our constitutional order and replace it with a matrix of identity politics, vast social spending, and other objectives. Chris DeMuth, a leader of the national conservatism movement and former president of the American Enterprise Institute, joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to explore the main trends of American conservatism and what national conservatism brings to the discussion. Conservatism must move beyond, DeMuth argues, a fusionism that makes individual freedom the only end sought by policy and understand that culture, patriotism, community, and faith are equally important for policymaking. On today's episode, we discuss the thinkers, ideas, and books that national conservatism offers amid current political challenges and debates: Should conservatism embrace a worker first set of policies—industrial policy, labor-union revival, and wage subsides? How would national conservatism navigate foreign policy? Is realism and restraint the best approach for American defense strategy in the 21st Century? What does national conservatism bring regarding health care, environmental, and education policies? Our lively discussion also considers the post-liberal conservatives and how they fit or do not fit into national conservatism. Listen to the interview or read a lightly edited transcript at DailySignal.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Get the yes you've been waiting for at Capital One.ca.ca. slash yes. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome to this special bonus edition of the Daily Signal podcast. I'm Richard Reinch, and today we'll be talking with Chris DeMuth of the Hudson Institute about the National Conservative Movement that he is helping to lead. Today I'm joined by Chris DeMuth, a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, longtime president of the American Enterprise Institute, veteran of Republican presidential administrations, and who has had a very distinguished career in Washington. And we're going to be talking about all things national conservatism today. Chris, I'm glad to have you on. Richard, it's great to be here with you, and congratulations are in store.

Congratulations are due to you for your distinguished career at Liberty Fund and Law and Liberty. And congratulations to the Heritage Foundation for snaring you. This is a great move on their part, and I know it's going to be a wonderful new association for both of you. Well, Chris, thank you so much for that. And of course, recently in your career, you have become involved with a movement known as national conservatism. And I look forward to discussing that with you today. You've obviously had a long career in Washington working within the conservative movement and all of its interesting elements and facets.

What got you interested in national conservatism? You've been involved in their major conferences. and the last conference you were chairman of the conference. So maybe talk about that. I think as the 20 teens were beginning, I was seeing that there were new problems in American society that the conservative movement was not addressing sufficiently. In my long career within the movement,

I had seen developments along the way that had seemed to me to be, adverse that I'd argued against. For example, the centralization of the conservative movement in Washington. There was a time, Richard as a Hoosier, you may remember the old American Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, and the neo-conservative public interest in New York City. And with the Reagan administration, everybody sort of moved to Washington. And I thought that we were losing. a certain amount of diversity in the movement, a little bit of attachment to localism. So there were always things that I'd been alert to, and I thought the problems of having a big conservative establishment in Washington, breathing the air of Washington,

joining in a large Washington consensus was problematic for a movement that I'm I think always has to be a little bit contrarian, skeptical, alert to new problems. And in the 2000s and especially the 2000s, I was starting to worry about these things actively. And I started reading widely. I was also noticing the new wave of nationalist sentiment. this was not entirely new. I can remember one of the things that first intrigued me about Ronald Reagan back in 79 and 1980 is that he spoke in the language of patriotism, which had not been something that I had seen during my adult life. You would have had to go back to Roosevelt Coolidge, you know, much earlier to. see such strong patriotism. But I was seeing more and more of it. And I, in my reading, I came upon a book, a man who is now one of my national conservatism colleagues, Yoram Hizoni, a distinguished

Bible scholar. I had had him give talks at AEI back when I was leading that institution in the 90s, early 2000s, some of his work on biblical scholarship. He wrote a big book on Israel. So I had known Yoram, and he had published a new book on the virtue of nationalism. And I was struck that many people thought that that was an audacious idea, that there should actually be virtues in nationalism. And I read the book, and I was very impressed. I wrote a review essay. on it, and it was a positive review. And so Yoram and I rekindled our old friendship, and we started working together. He was putting together these initial conferences in Europe and in the United States of the National Conservatism Movement. And he and his colleagues were highly practiced

intellectuals and very, very accomplished as thinkers, but they'd never put on a big conference before. Well, I'd spent 25 years putting on conferences. And so I worked with them on some of the backstage logistics and organizational aspects of these conferences. But at the same time, I was falling more and more into their views of the problems we were facing. and the virtues of national conservatism as a new movement that was intending to refresh the conservatisms that I had grown up with, libertarianism, old-fashioned National Review conservatism, the law and economics movement, all of these older movements that I had been part of, I came to believe very strongly in the potential to refresh and bring these conservatisms

up to date for a new set of problems, and also to interpret and apply this new sense of nationalist spirit that was sweeping the United States and Europe, and that came abruptly to the forefront in 2016. with the Brexit vote in the UK and the Trump election in the United States. I think, you know, that there's a lot of questions I want to get to coming out of your response there. In preparing for this interview, Chris, I took the opportunity to reread some chapters from George Nash's great book, the conservative intellectual movement in America since 1945. And the groupings that he discusses coming out of the 1940s and 1990s.

1950s, the traditionalists, by which he includes thinkers like Robert Nisbitt, Russell Kirk, Eric Vogel and Leo Strauss, isn't that a group? The Libertarians, Frank Chauterov, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, the anti-communist writers, James Burnham, Whitaker Chambers. Oh, and then the 1960s come. And, you know, the way Nash writes about it, within conservatism, there's a quest for philosophical order. They've broken through. They're no longer giving off irritable mental gestures, as one person characterized it. But there's something substantial here. The 1960s happen. And, you know, the major push is fusionism that seems to largely work. I don't know if it theoretically works, but it seems to work practically, politically, with Frank Myers' vision in his in 1964 book in

defensive freedom. And then we have sort of the reaction to the 60s and the neoconservatives, to my mind, really emerge, particularly the failure of progressive policies in the great society and the failure of those policies in the urban city. And then the religious right is another group that emerges in the 1980s as a part of, you know, the fallout, the cultural fallout from what had happened in the 1960s. You know, I say all that. I mention all those. groupings because American conservatism is obviously contested. It's a raucous conversation at times, has been, still is, you know, there is no single unifying thing that is American conservatism. Where does national conservatism fit in? And can you give us something we can latch on to to think

about its argument? Let me give you two. There may be more aspects that I think are, that are, that are departures among, I should say, national conservatives, there's a tendency to emphasize our differences from the past. My own view is that the continuities from these earlier movements are stronger than many national conservatives recognize. We are drawing from, you know, different strands from the past. But there certainly are differences, one in the international sphere, the emphasis on the nation-state and the opposition to international organizations and to the emergence of global corporations that often have their headquarters. In fact, most of the great ones have their headquarters in the United States,

but obviously don't really regard themselves as American. They regard themselves as citizens of the world. They are, in some respects, much more willing to work closely with the government of China than with the government of the United States, which actually defends the territory on which they live. Certainly there were isolationist strands in the old conservatism, the Robert Taft conservatism of the early 1950s. but it became increasingly internationalist. So I think that there is a turn away from internationalism.

That can be overstated. There are many respects in which national conservatives understand the importance of international norms and institutions. But I think that that is a pretty sharp change. The sharper change is the opposition to what I would call the extremes of individual liberalism. Liberalism conceived as placing the liberty of the individual first, something that trumps all other considerations. For example, the Frank Meyer fusionism actually placed the liberty of the individual above all other things. I believe it's a

matter of a fair dispute. You can find it in the text. You can find ways that he acknowledged some qualifications. But whether or not this was part of one or the other earlier strand of conservatism, it is certainly something that national conservatives today recognize as extreme and dire threats to social well-being, that the exaltation of the individual, not necessarily, I should say, attached to community, to religion, family, to any norms, other than the norms that each individual can dream up for himself or herself in their own, self-created conception of the universe, we national conservatives believe that these extremes are behind an enormous amount of the mischief in modern politics, which has actually gone

far beyond mischief to be really sources of enormous social upheaval and threats to the fabric of society. thinking about your answer and in particular the questions you raise about Frank Myers fusionism. What work is the term national doing a national conservatism? And when I ask you that, I'm thinking about, you know, sort of the full extent of American constitutionalism, that it also encompasses federalism and local rule and is concerned about the centralization of power. Or do national conservatives view federalism as an integral part of policy, or is that something that's largely pushed to the side? No, I would say that the nationalism of the national conservatives is certainly in the American context, a vast continental nation, highly heterogeneous, huge amounts of variation from region to region,

330 million inhabitants. Our nationalism in the American context is a layered nationalism. It is built of many subordinate loyalties, most of which will be stronger loyalties to family, to faith for religious people, to local community, to occupation, to avocation. And I believe that federalism, localism is an intrinsic part of the nationalism that we subscribe to. Localism would take a different form in nations such as, say, France or the UK or Hungary, much smaller nations, which have different structures. And in smaller nations, the nature of localism will be very, very, different, probably the closest to the United States, would be Germany, which has a huge

tradition of localism, which the new nationalists in Germany very much subscribe to and regard it as a strong component, as I would in the United States, of what makes up our successful nation. I wanted to ask you a question as well, thinking deeply about fusionism here, and then maybe we can talk about national conservatives, maybe more policy level as well. Meyer, from my read, he says the end of, you know, the end of the political realm is freedom. It can't be virtue. He also says, though, he's trying to conjugate the American founding in the 20th century. And that would, of course, mean a lot of state and local decisions being made at the level of

you, but the federal government in that regard is not necessarily where it's where it should be focusing. But he also is very clear Jewish-Christian biblical anthropology should be the standard of our freedom, of our responsibility, and it's the way we should think about why government should be limited. Is that out of or out of step with how you would see a national conservatism or is something, because I think a lot of times when I hear fusionism being criticized, what I really hear is libertarian ideology of the last 20 years, which I would criticize that as well, and it's sort of exaltation of the autonomous individual and freedom not really being rooted in anything larger than the individual. I would accept those criticisms, but I don't think that's what

Frank Meyer was trying to articulate. I think that there's, at a minimum, national conservatives, and there are a lot of disagreements within national conservatism. And as I have often said, that's a strength, not a weakness, because we're dealing with some new and very, very dire threats and problems and a lot of confusion. And there's going to be a lot of argument. We're going to be looking to the past both for help and looking at the past for mistakes, wrong turns that were made. I actually think that you can argue Frank Meyer either way. There's no question that he put individual liberty at the pinnacle. On the other hand, he often, well, first of all,

like everybody back in those days, he was operating in a world where whether one was religious or irreligious, whether one was a strong family man or not. They all were working in a world where marriage was the norm. Divorce, illegitimacy was frowned upon. A large majority of the population in the United States was religious, believing, practicing. And they all recognized at one level or another, even those who were strong individualists, atheists, and so forth, they recognized that there was this enormous social capital, that to some extent they benefited from living into this world. Now, you can find Frank referring to the decline of religion, the decline of so forth somewhat. So you can say, well, he recognized that and he still wanted

to make individual liberty tops, as far as government was concerned, certainly at the national level, and on questions of ethics and morality, wanted to duke it out in private society. On the other hand, many, many times over and over, when he refers to the individual, he refers to the dignity of the individual. This does not sound to me like somebody who would embrace at the levels of organized devotion to pornography that we have today. It doesn't sound to me like somebody whose idea of the individual is the individual who gets to choose his, her, or its sex at will. and that because the individual is supreme, everybody else in society is obliged to recognize and cooperate with that gender choice as it may admit itself today.

I think if we asked Frank those things, I mean, he wouldn't even know, he wouldn't even know how to discuss those matters. Now, you're going to give me some quote where maybe he begins to. But I do think it was a different world, but I will grant this to those who say, Meyer, that fusionism was a wrong turn. There's no question that he wanted to put individual liberty first, that he was worried about the infusion of issues of morality into the public square, and that as it is often the case that an intellectual will come up with a powerful proposition, that is introduced into one context, and to some extent that he doesn't even recognize, assumes the existence of that context, and then the idea ends up destroying the context.

It ends up being actually insidious against things that the intellectual had not thought of. Richard, if I can borrow from another conversation you and I have had, John Maynard Keynes was a budget balancer. He introduced the idea of deficit spending in recessions as somebody who simply will assume, well then of course when the recession's over, we'll pay back the borrowing, will retire the borrowing. He just, that was part of the world that he lived in. Everybody assumed that that was true. But his idea, once it got out there and once people with their own designs began to make use of it, completely destroyed the balanced budget principle that he had assumed as a basis for his arguments. And I think that one can argue, and I'm trying to be,

I always want to take the work of a great intellectual and try to understand it as opposed to simply condemn it. Somebody made a horrible mistake. It certainly seems to me that Frank gave liberty a very large, dominant role that came to have practical consequences that I believe he could not have foreseen, but whether or not he could have, we are where we are today. And I think we have to say that one thing he was right about is that introducing questions of morality as central matters in the public square has turned out to be very problematic. for our politics. Now, national conservatives do not want to say, well, therefore, let's take moral issues out of the public square. We recognize that they are there, that the secular, woke

progressivism is of today is, at its base, a moral movement, a terribly wrong, diluted, and destructive one, but these issues are out there. And so simply saying, let's just, let's hold seminars, let's argue about these things. And even in many cases, let's argue about them at the local level and keep them out of national politics. It's just not realistic, given the problems that we are dealing with today. Well, so many of these problems that we're dealing with, you know, it's interesting and I don't want to keep going on about fusionism. I think Meyer, I think the idea being, what do you do if our intellectual class or cleracy

in many respects abolishes reason or abolishes the idea that there is a nature and there's just sort of will? I mean, that's really what's at the heart of the transgender movement. We are just will. And we are even separated from our bodies. We can act upon those as we choose without any regard to logic or deep.

foundation for thinking about what we should do. And I think Myers-Fusionism would struggle to understand that. But I think also what remains true is the difficulties of power and the limits of power and what you can in fact do. And of course, the fact that many of these issues we could deal with on a local level, they are national level issues, as you say, but that's also a result of the deformation of our politics, of our constitutional order, how to set things right. The next National conservatives have had two national level conferences. I've been involved in both. I spoke at the recent one on virtue in the market. I appealed to Roger Scruton on the nation and Wilhelm Rupka on virtue in the market in my talk. David Brooks was there. He wrote a piece in the Atlantic.

A lot of people have discussed. And which, you know, he didn't, I don't think he said he heard irritable mental gestures. He said he heard anger. And he heard people, you know, express. on America that he doesn't recognize. I was at the conference. I didn't necessarily experience that, and he said he heard no notes of grace. He should have been at our panel. We had your Hudson colleague, Diana Fergot Roth, my heritage colleague, Jay Richards. I thought there were notes of grace in that panel, so maybe he went to the wrong panels. What did you think of his criticism of that conference? I had a poor opinion of that essay, and my strongest reactions were the two that you have made. It's somewhat different. I didn't hear a lot of anger,

but I heard some anger. And I would say to that, as Aristotle said, failure to anger when anger is called for justified is foolish, is a defect of character. And I believe that there is a lot to be angry about in America today. I am angry. And one of my heroes that I try not to let the national conservatives know about from my youth was Albert J. K. Knock. And Knock once wrote, I am a little bit angry all the time. And as somebody who's lived in Washington for 50 years,

I would say that I have been a little bit angry all the time. But I think that if you look at the misery at our essentially open southern border, if you look at 1,000 murders in Chicago last year, 800 of them, black on black with black victims, if you look at what is happening to storekeepers in cities where, shopkeeping has been legalized. There's a lot, there's a lot to be angry about today. And so I think that that's fine. I did not think that the anger was, was overwrought, was vicious. I found it to be justified anger. And there was a lot that was, I think it's understandable at this point in our

movement and at a conference held in the fall of 2021, that there was a lot of despair. at what is going on around us. But there was also, first of all, there was a lot of grace, there was a lot of compassion. There was a lot of understanding of the variety of views within our movement and trying to come to grips with the larger political developments. I would say that in the talk that I gave, in the talk that you gave, in many, many others that I heard, there was a great deal of grace. Now, one always hesitates to claim grace for oneself, but I thought that the idea that this was an angry, a scary, a frightening bunch of people

who had no grace or gracefulness and should raise fear in the hearts of any moderate, balanced person, I thought that that was a false characterization. And I was frankly, surprised because I have several friends, including some people that I brought down there, who are not particularly, who are skeptical or more than skeptical of many aspects of national conservatism who found it to be an intellectually bracing, invigorating time. Disagreements that they found very well ventilated, original art. arguments that had not occurred to them before. So I've said what I've said maybe twice over in answering your question. Thinking about, you know, that I will say this, being involved

in two of the National Conservatives and conferences. I don't consider myself a National Conservatives, but I've always noticed a really intense energy at those conferences. People very much want to be at the panels. They want to participate in Q&A. I've appreciated that. And, you know, there's, you can obviously tell that there's, there's something going on. And, um, I, I've enjoyed being involved and had my own sharping, my own thinking, uh, sharpened. So to me, that those who would criticize those conferences have at that level probably have their own agenda going on, much sharper criticisms, uh, made also by other people. And I, and I should say, I should say, Richard, this movement, it's not a union shop. It's not a closed shop. And it's not just that we tried to get some

really good liberals to be among us, but we're really trying to draw upon many of the different strands today, some of which I would say, Richard, your views, which you've brought out with enormous clarity and that wonderful piece you had in National Affairs a few years ago, in your contributions at our conferences, that's really, we're trying to learn. And we do have some very sharp arguments among ourselves. But I believe, and as we've been trying to organize these conferences, we're trying to have hard, we recognize that there are hard debates. And we think that they are manageable, and that is to say more than manageable, that they are productive debates. There are times when debates can be destructive. Every once in a while, I see, you know, some formulation kind of

veering off in that direction. But we have tried to keep the debates, even though they are sometimes high concept, intellectual debates, to try to keep them anchored in practicality and to thinking through what we as a movement might do to not only arrest current developments, but as I said in my talk, going beyond simply prudentially slowing down the rate of change to actually reversing several bad developments in American politics and culture of the past 20 years. But it is those actual changes as opposed to scoring sharp. and brilliant debaters points in internal fisticuffs that we are aiming for. Okay. I want to ask you about one group that many associate with national conservatism.

I'll call them the post-liberal thinkers. Patrick Dene, Gladden Pappen, Adrian Vermeel, brilliant thinker at Harvard Law School. I disagree with him, but I always try to engage everything he writes. And I, as I read them, they are sharp. critical of the American founding. They seem very critical of American institutions, even basic constitutional concepts in the case of Adrian Vermeule, separation of powers. He actually wants the administrative state to be enlarged and have more power. Are they a part of the national conservative movement or sort of a group that has some sort of contribution to make, but you guys just don't know what that is?

I would say that whether they're national conservatives, you'd have to ask them, And they could give you an answer. Just to take two names that you've mentioned, Patrick Deneen, has been a valuable part of our conferences. And Adrian Vermeel has not. And I also see a very sharp difference in their views. And I would say that Professor Vermeel's ideas about Catholic integralism and sort of weapon weaponizing the national American Washington-based executive state on behalf of moral and especially Catholic moral values. I've actually not heard any of that in any of the conversations we've had

either in private or in public at our national conservative conferences. I myself have argued against it in print. And so I would say that I certainly disagree with him. I take a very different view of Patrick. Again, he is saying that there were flaws at the beginning. This is a little like talking about 50s, 60s fusionism, that there were flaws at the beginning. I have learned a lot reading his work and reading criticisms of his work. I happen to know a lot about the founding. And in my view, part of the explanation for its success is that like national conservatism today, it had some very, very strong tensions within it. And I think that the aspects that Deneen has pulled out, And I think you're going to see some more of that in an upcoming book by Yoram Hizoni are very true and important.

I think that the view of the American founding is essentially both Lockean and traditionalist. It wasn't one or the other, given the use that Lockheanism had in subsequent history so that it's now part of our traditions, for example, in the Gettysburg Address. I see it there, but there was an enormous role for faith that many of the authors of the Declaration and Constitution, the most prominent ones, were deists of one variety or another, I think does not gainsay the importance of full-strength religion, including Catholic religion in Maryland as part of the formation of the Republic. So let me say that, When we turn to practical matters, I do not hear in any of our councils anybody arguing for the turning over the American nation to the Pope or anything like that.

I sometimes see allegations of that by people who were trying to marginalize us. But when I listen to Patrick Deneen, I hear him say some good things about the American founding. And when I hear him talk about things that he would like to see happen in the United States, I find myself four square on almost all of it. And I wonder what you would say when we got down to particulars. Let's talk about a range of things. There is now a strong movement in New York state to say that Catholic, to essentially ban Catholic adoption. Charities. Catholic adoption charities will place a child of any religion or no religion into a household of any religion or no religion, but they have two requirements for the household. The first

is that it be headed by a married couple, and secondly, that the couple be male and female. And for those reasons, there is a movement to say that this is unjust discrimination. It has no part of the fabric of life in New York State, and that they should not be permitted to place any of their children into any of the households that meet their criteria. Another movement in New York State wants to require all private schools, including religious schools, to abide by the state-established curricular. requirements for public schools. So that would, uh, yeshivas would go away the next day. There would be no more yeshivas. So I am in favor of resisting those movements. I'm in favor of, I'm in favor of,

I'm in favor of the state of Maine being required not to discriminate against religious schools in, uh, the provision of, you know, Maine like Vermont, it's got a lot of rural areas and there are many, uh, counties, where there are no public schools. So there's actually this long tradition, as in many rural areas, of what today we would call, you know, vouchers or school choice. And it's just sort of building out the education establishment where the state cannot have schools everywhere. And Maine says that they cannot give money to Catholic schools, but only secular schools. I think that that's wrong. I've got a position on that. The Supreme Court's going to make a decision. and so on all of those matters, that is permitting a larger role for religion in the public squares.

Now, there are many national conservatives who want to bring prayer back into the public schools, or at least not to say that it is banned at the federal level. If I could remove the Supreme Court's ban, I would do that, but I would love. leave it to local sensibilities, very much as I would on the question of censorship. If I were a school board member, say, where I live in northern Virginia, I think I would be opposed to prayer in school because we're such a heterogeneous world here, that the prayer would just be mush, and I don't think it would add very much. There are many communities in America where if I were on the school board, I would be in favor of prayer in schools. So people

will take different positions on that. And finally, there are some national conservatives who are now pushing on the idea of restoring the Sabbath. And because we regard ourselves as the heralds of a new working class Republican Party, we can remind ourselves that Sunday closing laws were a cooperative enterprise of religious organizations, churches, and earlier embodiments of the union movement. So that is a push. How far that is going to go? I don't know. It does not offend my sensibilities that we would have Sunday closing laws. I think that we were not at risk of becoming a theocracy when we had Sunday closing laws for long portions of our history. So I think that's the span that we have of the actual practical debates, which is to move against the strong,

progressive initiative to further isolate and destroy religious practice and belief, which is evident are all around us. And then secondly, to make the public square more comfortable for people of religious faith. And I think in particular, when it comes to the education of children, but also there can be little things. I was struck here in Virginia. We had the inauguration of a new governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general last week. It was a surprising election. And at the end of the inauguration ceremonies, these three and their spouses joined hands, and the governor led them in prayer.

I think I can imagine that's happening 50 years ago. I don't remember seeing that, at least as far north as Virginia, any time recently. And I would say to somebody that's made uncomfortable by that, Well, you know, religious people have to learn to live in a society where there are lots and lots of people that do not share their faith. And you, too, Buster, on the other hand, have to learn to live in a society where there are a lot of people of serious religious faith. And that's what it means to be an effective society in a nation such as America. So as I listen to you, Chris, talk about these situations. One of the things that comes to mind is your backs against the wall.

Your backs against the wall, you've got no other choice than to come out and start reemphasizing certain moral norms. If they are going to make it impossible to have distinctive religious education in various blue states like New York or Vermont, Maine surprises me. But in those places, yeah, you have no choice but to come out with strong moral arguments in defense of religious education. And of course, I assume next would be trying to limit what happens in the homeschooling world. But of course, the arguments, those arguments go very deep in American constitutional history and have footing in the Supreme Court and some of its opinions as well. And also as I hear you talk, and I don't think, as I think about, say, that situation in New York, which has happened in various blue cities, various states, I think, you know, almost every element of conservatism for various reasons.

would come out in support of defending those schools, even, you know, say the libertarians for reasons of just plurality and choice. And I, you know, I would come at it from, I think, religious education is a positive good that must be defended in our law. It must be something that parents can choose because what it has to offer is actually good for the souls with those who go through it. Also, as I'm listening to you, I'm just this question in my mind what the national is doing because these are a lot of things happening at the state and level that require a vigorous moral response. But a moral response, conservatism in America has always been capable of. Perhaps it retreated from that in recent decades, but it's always been there and been a

part of conservatism. And so I think that re-ignition of it is good. And as I hear you, I'm thinking of another name, Wilmore Kendall, that comes to mind who would emphasize we are a republic of deliberation. And what we actually need is a much more engaged deliberation. And he taught, you know, the school board was key, was ground zero of this deliberation. Why? Because education is at the center of the republic and what type of a republic we're going to have. And deliberation at the school board level should be robust and is inherently going to be charged with moral norms because you're dealing with the souls of the next generation. All of that being said, and I don't really disagree with, a lot of the policies you put forward.

Sunday closing laws, I wouldn't want that to be nationally dictated, but at various states and localities, I can easily see that and would not be necessarily uncomfortable with that happening where I lived. But again, that, and that, but that, of course, is a recovery of the old American citizenship, which has retreated in the American citizenship of people actually knowing that their choices matter

and are not going to be sucked away from them by the judiciary, the administrative state or federal government power. So as I'm hearing you, what I'm hearing is what national conservatives are about is a really tough moral conservatism. To which I say, yes, we probably need that right now. I think that they all need defending. And I would hope that people who are not as attached to the traditional family, traditional religion. You know, I think that I think that society requires all sorts of people. And, you know, if you look at some of the greatest thinkers, scientists, poets, authors of one kind or another, a lot of them were rebels. And so, you know,

I'm for maintaining a lot of room for rebels. But effective statecraft calls for moving court and starboard to keep the ship on a steady course. And we've gone. far too far in one direction. And I think you've, in citing Wilmore Kendall, this matter of deliberation is to me key. And I think in a sense we're kind of creating a model within our own councils of national conservatism of what serious deliberation looks like. It's true that it's the more elevated kind of deliberation of ideas rather than that of interests. But it is certainly true that this elevation of the autonomous, self-defining individual, especially in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, has taken one after another matter out of deliberation. And that Congress's

handing over many, many great and momentous issues to specialized administrative agencies, where our laws are made by agencies that don't give a damn about anything but environmental quality or women's rights or automobile fuel economy. So that none of these laws really reflect the kind of deliberation that we require on, that we all require if we are going to respect the laws, which we will frequently find ourselves disagreeing with. If I could offer one quick example, the Obergefell decision of the Supreme Court holding that gay marriage was constitutionally guaranteed, I myself am pro-gay marriage. there was a important shift in political opinion as reflected in the views of the legislatures around

the country on the subject. As recently as the beginning of the Obama administration, there was very, very strong opposition to gay marriage, including by President Obama, many liberal Democrats. I think as people started to realize, and there were some writers, but, you know, there was a lot of examples that people saw in their own lives, that there were a lot of these gay couples that we kind of knew them. They really wanted to get married. And some of us thought, well, you know, the marriage institution could certainly use some new recruits, and these people seem really serious about it. But in the deliberations, and I think the state of Utah was key here in proving gay marriage, but also making it clear that that that.

That did not mean that a gay couple getting buried got to force a baker or a photographer to celebrate their wedding. Once the Supreme Court ousted local deliberation, there was no room for those kinds of perfectly practical, reasonable compromises. And now it comes down to whether when a baker is baking a cake, is that speech? Is it religion? What if what if he's a mute atheist? Does he still get to not make the cake and let the person across the street make the cake for a gay wedding? When we put these things into these very abstract categories that the courts work through, when we approve of delegation of large amounts of the lawmaking in our society to specialized agencies, we're removing. we're removing things from deliberation that involves not just fancy, global, smart, articulate, highly educated people that love to work the agencies and the courts and that almost unfailingly have left progressive values, but also involve lots and lots of other

people that actually constitutionally are there equals as citizens. and who have been cut out of things. And what I really hope for all of the people in the conservative world that are skeptical of the national conservatives and of the progressives that regard us as a threat to America, and as they would put it, a threat to democracy, I hope that at some point they would see some virtue in actually having a representative assembly

argue about some of these things and come to a decision that they would accept and not try to say, no, this is a matter of right. This is not a matter where we can tolerate any disagreements in society. If we don't arrive at a point, which is, I think, a central point for many, many national conservatives, that we get a large number of very smart, affluent, highly educated people on board with the concept that we are a government of representative law that takes into account a wide variety of views. As for myself, I've got strong views and I'm willing to live with laws that are less, less, maybe way less than 100% of mine. And I'm waiting for people on the other side to join me.

Well, you know, and maybe we can close on economics. I just want to make a point. I know you're noticing this. I think we all are that the shift in populations in America, this sort of continued movement away from blue states, states that have had a tremendous impact in American economic life in the 20th century, States like California, New York, Illinois, people leaving blue cities, young people, leaving

blue cities for places that are more affordable, perhaps have more job opportunities. This, to my mind, is sort of people trying to recover a competitive federalism, deliberative framework, and find places they want to live that are congenial to the lives they want to live. even as we have this incredibly powerful government that, you know, what does want, or federal government that wants to try and prohibit that, or not prohibit it, but limit that competitive framework from happening, I'll just say it is happening. And it's going to be the task of conservatism in those states to defend that, to defend their policy philosophical approach as people move in, but for strange reasons might bring in their blue state politics, things like that. And also to protect it at the national level, which is,

our mutual friend Michael Grava has noted the federal government in the 20th century was everywhere about abolishing the competitive federalist framework. So this is another challenge for conservatism going forward. On economics, one of your leading thinkers is Orrin Cass. He's very clear, large-scale industrial policy in favor of distributing economic opportunity back to manufacturing workers, reshoring jobs that were sent overseas. There's also talk of reviving private sector, labor unionism, Senator Marco Rubio even wanting to see Amazon warehouse distribution center in Atlanta unionized, and wage subsidies as well, things like that. Is that a distinctive contribution of national conservatism, sort of worker power, and even using governments to do it?

It certainly is. I'm a little bit, and if we look at the Orencast program, I agree with some of it. I disagree with some of it. I think that these are important arguments to make. Donald Trump came in and won the presidency by calling attention to very miseries. I might even say that it would be graceful. It would show some grace to acknowledge the fact that a lot of Americans in the heartland have been suffering without getting much attention out of why. So there's some attention there. I believe that his calling attention to the vast imbalance in tariffs and trade policies between America and other nations, especially China, was a great contribution. But I have to notice that for all of the changes that were made in his administration, a lot of these problems still persist. And Oren Kass and his group are, I would say, leading the effort to try to think through

exactly what we do about it. In the old days, I used to say I was a free trader, and if America is losing its manufacturing edge, what we need is some good job training programs. Well, that was pretty weak rhetoric on my thinking, because if somebody had followed up and said, well, what do you think about government job trading programs? I would have said, they're a joke. You know, I've looked at a lot of these programs, and the government has no idea how to train people for anything, and it doesn't even know what to train them for. So I was trying to find a way to make myself comfortable with my strong free trade sentiments. The idea of wage subsidies has a long tradition,

mostly on the left, but there are many people on the right that have said that they are greatly superior to the minimum wage. And I am for working on these matters. I believe that the time is coming when we're going to be in a position that I would call post-Trump national conservatism. And we've been talking a lot about having become a working class. party and about what we used to call the Reagan Democrats and now they're the Trump Republicans. We've made a substantial headway with Latino Americans and we're starting to make headway, which I think the critical race theory movement has actually accelerated of African Americans moving in our direction. Well, the time is going to come when we're going to have to make good on what

we've been saying in terms of rhetoric. I hope that we will come up with something that is better than the Great Society programs that is more economically informed and more effective. And one that recognizes the very profound changes that have been made in private markets and tries to harness markets. I think markets need confining and discipline and turning back in some cases, especially when it comes to cultural destruction, but the market is still very, very powerful. And I would say that one of the two or three huge and exciting challenges for national conservatism is to make good on the pledge that's sort of implicit in what we've done so far to actually come through with policies that make a difference to average folks that have not been

part of the conservative coalition until recently. Chris DeMuth, this has been a great conversation. Our conversations and debates on these matters will go forward. Thank you for joining us. We really appreciate it. Richard, thank you very much for having me. And congratulations on this new venue that you have created. All the best.

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