Jan
26
A Controlled Burn to a Better Future
“If we thoughtfully and tenaciously combine populist energy with conservative principles, it is a fight we can win.” — Kevin D. Roberts
Kevin D. Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation and former CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, gave a talk at Hillsdale College last October. As usual, the folks at Hillsdale have adapted it into an article for their Imprimis publication. I recommend reading the full article, but here I wanted to highlight material from the latter half, in which Roberts points out much of the bad policy and other damage Leftists have done to our (U.S.) government that needs to be — and can be — removed or undermined by/with the Trump 2.0 administration.
If you’re like me, you have probably read similar content. But, Roberts covers so much and lays it out so simply and matter-of-factly that I felt it worth sharing. There is a lot to do, but — as the above quote declares — it is doable.
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None of our problems are beyond our constitutional order’s power to solve. What is it we need, after all? We need a Congress that acts like a legislature rather than a company of moralizing performance artists. We need a president who acts like a responsible chief executive rather than a drunken king. We need a judiciary that acts impartially in accordance with the Constitution and the laws of the land rather than in a partisan manner. And we need to disperse the political power that is now concentrated in the hands of the Washington establishment.
In short, the solution to our problems is not to scrap or transcend the Constitution, but to start obeying and applying it again. Under that document, “We the People” already possess every power we need to reestablish majority rule, minority rights, democratic accountability, equal justice under law, and national sovereignty.
Writing my recent book on this topic, I kept coming back to a quotation from composer Gustav Mahler: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” The preservation of fire strikes me as a good metaphor for conservatism. It’s not rose-tinted nostalgia of an idealized past. It preserves the best of the past and applies its lessons to the present — maintaining a controlled burn as a way to a better future….
Step back from the Left’s Oz-like faux-authority and think for a moment about its legal fragility. Almost everything organizations of the Left do is either funded by taxpayers or ignored by prosecutors. A principled, populist conservative government could undo huge swaths of it with — in the immortal words of President Barack Obama — “a phone and a pen.” The supposedly un-fireable bureaucrats of the federal Deep State are nothing of the sort. The president could reclassify, reassign, or simply dismiss thousands of them. Moreover, agencies that have gone all-in on woke claptrap in the last decade have advertised their own irrelevance to budget-conscious congressional appropriators.
The U.S. Border Patrol could secure the border today if the president ordered them to. Energy companies already know where to drill — they just need permission. We already know which treaty loopholes China exploits to steal our jobs and trade secrets. The loopholes could be closed, or we could withdraw from the treaties altogether.
Cities and states that refuse to prosecute crimes or protect girls’ privacy can be disqualified from federal aid. Corporations that practice ideological discrimination can be prohibited from federal contracting. The Justice Department now harassing Christians and conservatives could start exploring Big Tech’s deliberate attempts to addict children to harmful online content. We could reform the tax code to prioritize families and workers instead of globalist corporations. We could do the same with education, labor, housing, and transportation policy.
Instead of funneling more money into DEI offices on campus, we could invest in trade apprenticeships. Instead of wasting money on global green energy boondoggles, we could build nuclear power plants. We could reclaim our sovereignty by withdrawing from the World Trade Organization and the United Nations and by clarifying our strategic alliances. And the institutions we need to revive — marriage and family, church and community, private enterprise and public spirit — already exist. Like flowers in a garden choked by weeds, they just need room, light, and water to grow again.
Returning to my metaphor of a controlled burn, we will need to ignite several of those to fix institutions like the Department of Homeland Security, the EPA, the Federal Reserve, the FBI, the Department of Education, the military-industrial complex, and apparently now FEMA. Today these institutions function as anti-American, anti-constitutional predators, serving their own interests at the expense of the national interest. Their institutional status quo is inconsistent with freedom and self-government. America must break and reform them before they break and destroy us….
American conservatism exists to serve the people and the nation through the Constitution. This includes defending them against enemies foreign and domestic. And the fact is, elite institutions have become the people’s and the nation’s enemies. They are openly waging cultural war on those they ostensibly serve. They cannot be negotiated with or accommodated. They must be defunded, disbanded, and disempowered. The rewards for doing so — for putting American families first again — will be greater than we can know.
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I have been impressed with Roberts in the past, and I think he does a masterful job communicating the above message, along with the background, how-did-we-get-in-this-situation information in the first half of the talk/article. As I write this, we are only a few days into the new administration, but I think Trump et al. would largely be in agreement with Roberts’ presentation. Let’s pray that they proceed with wisdom, boldness, and integrity to return this nation onto sure footing economically, militarily, and culturally. It won’t happen without God’s merciful blessing.
