Russell Kirk wrote in his seminal work, The Conservative Mind, that the last of the truly great statesmen, those being the champions of traditionalist, hierarchical, and organic society rooted in a transcendent morality, order, and class-based system, all got swept away in the early nineteenth century as the ideals of the French Revolution spread globally like wildfire. As liberalism evolved into something increasingly technocratic and clinical, the political sphere slowly absorbed and compartmentalized its most depersonalized tenets.
This was actualized on the American political scene in the early 1960s, when President Kennedy appointed his cadre of “Whiz Kids,” led by Rob McNamara, Walt Rostow, Arthur Schlesinger, McGeorge Bundy, et al. – those disciples of the technocratic application of neo-liberal economic theory as a means to effect sweeping capital accumulation through rapid, self-sustained growth and free trade policies. Once advanced societies achieve a maximum threshold of efficiency, the societal evolution culminates in an age of mass consumerism, manifested in the outsourcing of traditional manufacturing industries in accord with the principle of comparative advantage. This happened to be the guiding thesis of Rostow’s magnum opus, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, and it seems to likewise perfectly encapsulate the modus vivendi of the power-brokers in Washington ever since.
Where President Trump figures into all of this is his propensity to cut past the conventional wisdom deeply seated in the historical attributes of the neo-liberal dogma that has for generations, and especially since the Cold War, subsumed the Washington political establishment. Our president’s willingness, if not outright eagerness, to flex the muscles of heterodoxy – expressed early on through his withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Paris climate accord – has been in keeping with his campaign promise to uproot the Washingtonian swamp.
But it could have been argued with some credence that Trumpism, insofar as that might qualify as an acceptable political ideology – contrasted with Reaganism, for instance – was heretofore logically vacuous and purely reactionary. Those doubts, however credible they were initially, ought now to be dispelled in reflecting on the administration’s actions to date. President Trump’s almost unilateral decision to implement steel and aluminum tariffs, for example, shows quite demonstrably a governing philosophy oriented away from the orthodoxy that has longed typified economic and foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.
For these reasons, our president has moved the fulcrum of American politics closer to his natural intuition, which makes traditional conservatism a viable alternative within a party that has long been entrenched in its neo-liberal orientation. As a governing principle, President Trump has, in his colorful way, so far demonstrated an uncanny devotion to a refashioned and purer conservatism that would behoove a Russell Kirk or a G.K. Chesterton, to say nothing of the avowed fusionist, William F. Buckley, if each could bear witness to what is presently happening.
Specifically, the reason the tariffs were paramount to rendering this value judgment is that they signify a policy measure radically divergent from mainstream “Republicanism.” As an extension of the president’s “ideology” – namely, the abstract reasoning that informs particular policy measures – the tariffs are wholly consistent with this global outlook. This is an ideology averse to the neo-liberal global order in its prioritization of a revamped nationalism – even though it should be noted that traditional conservatism was never considered “ideological” or “nationalistic,” as those terms connote a materialistic perversion of classical political theory.
Nonetheless, these broader ideas, supplemented with the actions touched on above, can be discerned as constituent elements ordered toward a grander, but predictively methodical vision that threatens seismic change to the neo-liberal status quo. In this sense, Trump’s acting ideology represents more a paradigm shift vis-à-vis existing policy norms, at least in consideration of the mainstream policies since the Cold War, than anything else.
Moreover, the matter and means by which the tariffs were effectuated as public policy bespeak a greater, palpable worldview or ideology to which our president systematically adheres. Indeed, he had several of his advisers, including his top economic adviser, who helped spearhead his tax cuts – outwardly criticize this decision. Despite such opposition, our president nevertheless prevailed all the same in his original vision, supported largely by his own gut instinct in addition to a small cadre of renegade advisers.
Trump’s going through with the tariffs may have been an act largely intuitive on principle, but it was an intuition backed by a concrete philosophical reality – one that had previously been articulated by a long line of political philosophers, who, while espousing the virtues of the free market, never believed that unchecked capitalism is the be-all, end-all “of political economy and morals.”
There is, in addition to the above, another element to the president’s ideology, suggesting that it is not something newly unearthed, amorphous, or novel, but actually a worldview long cultivated and indicative of a greater ordered understanding of man and society, which had prior to now been only vaguely known.
This part is realized whenever our president places himself caustically into the arena of culture wars, be it through the castigations of the media elite or his lambasting the NFL or Hollywood for its flagrantly unpatriotic displays or his tapping into what made America “great.” Trump is tactfully accentuating what part of the civic society, in both classical and Christological definitions, is most important: the culture. Markets, banking, and financial services are purely and simply outgrowths of a stable civic society. For these reasons, two of our greatest Founding Fathers – Thomas Jefferson and John Adams – knew next to zilch about these domains (though this was largely unnecessary, as the republic was a still a fledgling, agrarian society), considering them a defamation of the burgeoning American experiment.
Fast-forward to today. We are largely the benefactors of a society wrought by those establishment wonks. While the deleterious results of bureaucratic and technocratic governance are revealing themselves as not only a system ineffectual, but a system unsustainable, President Trump has proved that an overhaul to conventional politics is possible, though difficult to maneuver. Whether the void in modern politics will be filled by a rebirth of classicism – that being a renaissance of cultural renewal, anchored by a state that espouses natural law and a Judeo-Christian moral code – remains nothing more than a lofty ideal at this point.
But if there is any saving grace in the worldwide populist revolt, it is that liberal practitioners are for once and for all having to come to terms with the fact that their largely nihilistic worldview is unsustainable. The plague of modernity is likely not precipitated by the philosophical culmination of Aristotelianism through Nietzsche, as some have championed; rather, somewhere along the line, a seismic break from classical philosophy instigated the aimless orientation in which modern man now finds himself. So long as liberalism continues to show signs of fatigue, and so long as President Trump retains his clout within the American political sphere, the peripatetic condition modern man now finds himself in will eventually show its cosmological transience.
That does not necessitate that man’s resurrection through the movement away from de facto liberalism guarantee a cultural renewal. That remains but a dream in the current age, but there’s presently a gap to be filled in politics, and our society would do itself good to exploit that hole with classical tenets. It is a long shot, for sure, but conservatives should want to reorient man back to those ancient virtues that long grounded Western civilization for centuries before, and provided the spark for humanity’s intellectual and spiritual blossoming ever since.
Paul Ingrassia is a graduate of the Fordham University, a former White House intern for President Trump, and a contributor to National Review Online.
Russell Kirk wrote in his seminal work, The Conservative Mind, that the last of the truly great statesmen, those being the champions of traditionalist, hierarchical, and organic society rooted in a transcendent morality, order, and class-based system, all got swept away in the early nineteenth century as the ideals of the French Revolution spread globally like wildfire. As liberalism evolved into something increasingly technocratic and clinical, the political sphere slowly absorbed and compartmentalized its most depersonalized tenets.
This was actualized on the American political scene in the early 1960s, when President Kennedy appointed his cadre of “Whiz Kids,” led by Rob McNamara, Walt Rostow, Arthur Schlesinger, McGeorge Bundy, et al. – those disciples of the technocratic application of neo-liberal economic theory as a means to effect sweeping capital accumulation through rapid, self-sustained growth and free trade policies. Once advanced societies achieve a maximum threshold of efficiency, the societal evolution culminates in an age of mass consumerism, manifested in the outsourcing of traditional manufacturing industries in accord with the principle of comparative advantage. This happened to be the guiding thesis of Rostow’s magnum opus, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, and it seems to likewise perfectly encapsulate the modus vivendi of the power-brokers in Washington ever since.
Where President Trump figures into all of this is his propensity to cut past the conventional wisdom deeply seated in the historical attributes of the neo-liberal dogma that has for generations, and especially since the Cold War, subsumed the Washington political establishment. Our president’s willingness, if not outright eagerness, to flex the muscles of heterodoxy – expressed early on through his withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Paris climate accord – has been in keeping with his campaign promise to uproot the Washingtonian swamp.
But it could have been argued with some credence that Trumpism, insofar as that might qualify as an acceptable political ideology – contrasted with Reaganism, for instance – was heretofore logically vacuous and purely reactionary. Those doubts, however credible they were initially, ought now to be dispelled in reflecting on the administration’s actions to date. President Trump’s almost unilateral decision to implement steel and aluminum tariffs, for example, shows quite demonstrably a governing philosophy oriented away from the orthodoxy that has longed typified economic and foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.
For these reasons, our president has moved the fulcrum of American politics closer to his natural intuition, which makes traditional conservatism a viable alternative within a party that has long been entrenched in its neo-liberal orientation. As a governing principle, President Trump has, in his colorful way, so far demonstrated an uncanny devotion to a refashioned and purer conservatism that would behoove a Russell Kirk or a G.K. Chesterton, to say nothing of the avowed fusionist, William F. Buckley, if each could bear witness to what is presently happening.
Specifically, the reason the tariffs were paramount to rendering this value judgment is that they signify a policy measure radically divergent from mainstream “Republicanism.” As an extension of the president’s “ideology” – namely, the abstract reasoning that informs particular policy measures – the tariffs are wholly consistent with this global outlook. This is an ideology averse to the neo-liberal global order in its prioritization of a revamped nationalism – even though it should be noted that traditional conservatism was never considered “ideological” or “nationalistic,” as those terms connote a materialistic perversion of classical political theory.
Nonetheless, these broader ideas, supplemented with the actions touched on above, can be discerned as constituent elements ordered toward a grander, but predictively methodical vision that threatens seismic change to the neo-liberal status quo. In this sense, Trump’s acting ideology represents more a paradigm shift vis-à-vis existing policy norms, at least in consideration of the mainstream policies since the Cold War, than anything else.
Moreover, the matter and means by which the tariffs were effectuated as public policy bespeak a greater, palpable worldview or ideology to which our president systematically adheres. Indeed, he had several of his advisers, including his top economic adviser, who helped spearhead his tax cuts – outwardly criticize this decision. Despite such opposition, our president nevertheless prevailed all the same in his original vision, supported largely by his own gut instinct in addition to a small cadre of renegade advisers.
Trump’s going through with the tariffs may have been an act largely intuitive on principle, but it was an intuition backed by a concrete philosophical reality – one that had previously been articulated by a long line of political philosophers, who, while espousing the virtues of the free market, never believed that unchecked capitalism is the be-all, end-all “of political economy and morals.”
There is, in addition to the above, another element to the president’s ideology, suggesting that it is not something newly unearthed, amorphous, or novel, but actually a worldview long cultivated and indicative of a greater ordered understanding of man and society, which had prior to now been only vaguely known.
This part is realized whenever our president places himself caustically into the arena of culture wars, be it through the castigations of the media elite or his lambasting the NFL or Hollywood for its flagrantly unpatriotic displays or his tapping into what made America “great.” Trump is tactfully accentuating what part of the civic society, in both classical and Christological definitions, is most important: the culture. Markets, banking, and financial services are purely and simply outgrowths of a stable civic society. For these reasons, two of our greatest Founding Fathers – Thomas Jefferson and John Adams – knew next to zilch about these domains (though this was largely unnecessary, as the republic was a still a fledgling, agrarian society), considering them a defamation of the burgeoning American experiment.
Fast-forward to today. We are largely the benefactors of a society wrought by those establishment wonks. While the deleterious results of bureaucratic and technocratic governance are revealing themselves as not only a system ineffectual, but a system unsustainable, President Trump has proved that an overhaul to conventional politics is possible, though difficult to maneuver. Whether the void in modern politics will be filled by a rebirth of classicism – that being a renaissance of cultural renewal, anchored by a state that espouses natural law and a Judeo-Christian moral code – remains nothing more than a lofty ideal at this point.
But if there is any saving grace in the worldwide populist revolt, it is that liberal practitioners are for once and for all having to come to terms with the fact that their largely nihilistic worldview is unsustainable. The plague of modernity is likely not precipitated by the philosophical culmination of Aristotelianism through Nietzsche, as some have championed; rather, somewhere along the line, a seismic break from classical philosophy instigated the aimless orientation in which modern man now finds himself. So long as liberalism continues to show signs of fatigue, and so long as President Trump retains his clout within the American political sphere, the peripatetic condition modern man now finds himself in will eventually show its cosmological transience.
That does not necessitate that man’s resurrection through the movement away from de facto liberalism guarantee a cultural renewal. That remains but a dream in the current age, but there’s presently a gap to be filled in politics, and our society would do itself good to exploit that hole with classical tenets. It is a long shot, for sure, but conservatives should want to reorient man back to those ancient virtues that long grounded Western civilization for centuries before, and provided the spark for humanity’s intellectual and spiritual blossoming ever since.
Paul Ingrassia is a graduate of the Fordham University, a former White House intern for President Trump, and a contributor to National Review Online.
via American Thinker
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