A Sketch of a Traditionalist Platform

The end of the Reagan era and the "Fusionist" iteration of conservatism -the fusion of traditionalism and libertarianism- has sent the "Right" into disarray. There are many competing visions of what a new "Rightism" would look like -libertarian, neoconservative, traditionalist, localist, distributist, agrarian, natural-law republican, communitarian, moderate, and so on. I cannot pretend to have the answer to what the New Right would look like in all its details, but there are several salient features that I believe it should incorporate.

The great difficulty of genuine American conservatism has always been that it has been placed in the position of conserving a fundamentally liberal order, even if that liberalism is the old liberalism of Mill and Locke as opposed to the New Liberalism of the sixties or the Progressivism of the twenties. Nevertheless, what American conservatives have failed to see is that the logical conclusion of the path charted by Mill and Locke is the New Liberalism of the 60s. Economic liberalism, that is, a defense of an all-embracing laissez-faire market, leads to social liberalism and an undoing of all that conservatives cherish. The laissez-faire market creates a consumer society, and a consumer society creates a consumer reality which upsets all the mores, customs, and folkways of the Western tradition that conservatives are so enamored of. This moment of reinvention, however, after the age of Reagan, presents conservatives the rare opportunity to abandon their defense of Big Business on the grounds that Big Business and Big Government are really two sides of the same coin -and embrace an alternate vision, a vision of small, local markets, more sustainable growth, and a restoration of civil society.

These are the things I believe any platform for the New Right should include:

1. A commitment to community and the organic bonds of community and a recognition that the bonds of community have been undone by excessive industrialism.

2. A defense of religion and public virtue as means of restraining the vices and ambitions of individuals.

3. The decentralization of the political mechanism in the form of renewed state sovereignty, unde the Constitution, and local sovereignty.

4. A recognition that the individual is not absolute but functions within society, and that government is only a facet of society; that between the government and the individual there lies a complex network of bonds that hold society together.

5. A deference to tradition and the "democracy of the dead."

6. A system of regulation that favors small businesses instead of big businesses, that encourages local production and industry, and local employment.

7. An abandonment of schemes of levelling by which men are made "equal" and a recognition that hierarchy is a natural state within society.

8. A resistance to both Big Government and Big Business, on the grounds that centralization is the enemy of liberty.

9. An understanding of liberty as a state achieved through a conscious effort, not the natural state of man.

10. A defense of the family as the "little platoon" that holds society together.

This is just a sketch. I shall elaborate later.

Yours, &c,
Maro