Worrying about these issues isn’t quite the old, staid Republican agenda. But then, that agenda had been shaped by some of the very players arrayed that day on the National Lawn. They aren’t monsters (mostly). But their interests have sharply diverged from those of the hundreds of millions of Americans they represent.
A course correction is urgently needed. An elite that ceases to think well of the people who grant it power deserves to be displaced. To conserve our way of life, we need to think radically about how to meet our obligations to our country. Every slogan of yesteryear, every program from once upon a time, ought to be retested to see if it still works. A new generation requires new thought from new leaders. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance—and careful, deliberate thought.
But from whom shall we get it? Our think tanks are running on empty. Our economic policy is stuck in the 1980s, our foreign policy in the 1950s, our social policy in the 1960s. Republican voters confronted with uninspiring agendas rejected low-energy “reform.” They elected not a cautious caretaker but a brash, outspoken Firebrand.
Indeed, there’s an obvious problem with the very idea of conservatism. For as long as conservatism has been a self-identified philosophy, about 250 years, its advocates have struggled with this conundrum: If your goal is to preserve a culture and a way of life, how do you ever make the case for changing it when radical reform is necessary?
There have been attempts to square this circle. Figures such as the late Sen. John McCain, very much the military man, have emphasized the get-tough “reform conservative” idea that when America recognizes problems, we just have to summon the will to solve them, usually without considering the economic costs and benefits or looking too closely at the leaders and institutions that got us into the mess in the first place. Reform, like the British ideal of the “stiff upper lip,” becomes an exercise in stoicism, or so we are told. We knew our duty, and we strayed a bit off course, but if we stick to our guns, we’ll see it through.
This philosophy isn’t very American. It is certainly not the philosophy of young Americans today. If something is broken, it is our duty to fix it. Preferably yesterday. What the hell is taking so long?!
Some rising voices in today’s Republican Party, such as Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw, call that kind of resolve “fortitude.” I don’t mean to dismiss this character trait. Who doesn’t want to be tougher? And where better to draw inspiration than from those who have shown themselves willing to risk all and sacrifice in battle? Yet the substitution of fortitude for imagination—our capacity for seeing, feeling, touching, tasting with the soul—all but guarantees failure.
If we emphasize the virtue of fortitude, failures of policy start being seen as failures of the will, not the mind. It’s not that we have wrong or outdated ideas, we just haven’t willed them to success. Don’t think too hard about the details, let alone challenge our own longstanding habits and assumptions. We just have to summon up that deep determination from inside us, don’t you know.
The problem with romanticizing grit as a cure for what ails us is that it all too easily becomes passive acceptance of a lackluster status quo. At its worst, this kind of conservatism devolves into an angry defense of the worst parts of how things are and the insistence that questioning any aspect of the way America currently functions is tantamount to treason. Fortitude too often asks people to stare into a mirror and pretend it is a window to the future.
Americans are a hurried, impatient people. We don’t have time to wait. Not at the DMV, and certainly not for the economy to rebound after a recession or a devastating pandemic. Manifest Destiny, dammit! We settle the West, we take Berlin, we jealously guard our rights. We even put people on the Moon because we can inspire through achievement. Justice delayed is justice denied, after all.
The best things about America didn’t happen because we resolved to sit quietly and accept with stoic fortitude whatever fate doled out to us. That was the peasant life the first Western settlers abandoned to stand up and become a nation of greatness through ambition. We’re the people of “Let’s roll,” “Give me liberty or give me death,” and the “shot heard round the world.” We don’t defer to our leaders; we lead, they follow. “Make America Great Again” means we have to do the making in the here and now. No time to waste!
We sure didn’t become the great nation we are by resolving to let Washington do whatever it likes to us so long as it makes the occasional feeble effort at “reform.” And neither Donald Trump nor I was elected in 2016 to wait politely for Washington to improve itself. A slow path to reform is a path to degeneracy. Didn’t we learn anything from Democratic politician Rahm Emanuel? A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, he said. And waste them we do, preferring to paper them over with more spending and more debt—more, more, more to get less, less, less done. We will always careen from crisis to crisis until we meet our challenges head-on, as President Trump does.
Stoicism is not statecraft. Calmness is not virtue. Millennials know that playing by the rules is a very quick way to lose the game. They saw their parents buy houses only to suffer foreclosures. They saw no-fault divorce shatter their families. They got college degrees only to be burdened by debt they can never pay off in a market that increasingly values cheap foreign labor and corporate bottom lines over jobs for hardworking Americans.
Indoor voices get indoor results. John McCain was beloved by the media that hates Donald Trump. There’s a reason. He was running political plays from a losing playbook. He treated politics as though it were a country
