MWI Weekly 10.21.2022
This week: Truss us, it’s crazy; the Radical Right bares its teeth; and the wonders of the Universe unfold.
After a full 360-degree review of the Institute, it's become clear our membership, followers and supporters want us to concentrate on publishing the Whig viewpoint as our top priority. So, going forward we're going to reorient the way we go about our business to make the presentation of our views our central mission.
At the moment we're doing some computer systems maintenance to better support that mission. We're also revising the text on the website and our membership outreach materials to better reflect our shift in emphasis. That will all be done over this weekend, so starting Monday we'll be posting a lot more public-facing content.
Much of it will be courtesy of our members on our Members Blog. We've been blessed to have some very talented writers join us, and we're sure you'll find their viewpoints, stories and opinions worth checking out. We'll include them in this newsletter each week as well as post them to our social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, so please do follow us there.
I'll also be posting regularly to The Town Square, which is the director's blog on the website. The content there will range from tracts on general philosophy, opinions on specific issues and news about the Institute itself, among other things. It's not intended to be a missive from on high, so to speak, but rather the starting point for discussion and debate. I've launched a publication on Substack, Commentatio, as a platform for the independent expression of my personal views.
(After discussion with experts on ethics, we've concluded it's okay for me to mention my own work on the Institute's product since my role as executive director is strictly voluntary.)
We're also at the point where we can launch The National Gazette. Our original plan was to do it as a mailing in the broadsheet format, but the costs are prohibitive so that will have to wait. Instead, we're going to put it behind a paywall on Substack and include it as a member benefit as well. Subscribers will have their choice to either just subscribe to the Gazette alone or join the Institute as members; members will automatically be subscribed.
Once we're done with the website revisions we'll pivot to the Gazette and go from there.
These weekly newsletters will continue in the same format we've been using. The Gazette will be the outlet for our long-form work. The blogs on the site will be what you see now, shorter and more wide-ranging and personal (at least as far as the Members Blog is concerned). We'll also be posting all the content to threads on our Forums and Roundtables for discussion by our members.
Speaking of the Forums, our original intent was to use them as a vehicle for citizen-generated policy proposals. But it's become clear they're better suited to lighter chat, kind of a place where we can shoot the breeze without all the interference and trolling of social media. We'll continue to use the Roundtables to develop detailed policy though, and we hope to gain more traction in our Community Roundtables over time.
Our goal is to be a place where ordinary Americans can get involved in public issues without the noise of the media, whether it be social, broadcast or print. Civic life depends on well-intentioned civil discussion if we're to have a civilized social order. That doesn't mean shying away from controversial subjects. But it does mean tackling those subjects with goodwill, honesty, integrity and a healthy dose of humility.
And now, let's take a look at the world through Whig eyes.
Truss Me, It's Cray-Cray
In the "well, that didn't take long" department, Liz Truss has resigned as the head of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, which means she's out as prime minister. She lasted just 44 days in office. To say that leaves our British cousins in a spot of bother may be an understatement. It's chaos. And with her predecessor, Boris Johnson, apparently planning to mount a comeback, it could be about to get even wilder.
None of which could come at a worse time. Inflation is even higher in England than it is here, with some of the biggest increases coming in the most important sectors, and with winter looming: Food and fuel. The economic challenges they're facing are outright daunting.
Truss originally gained office by proposing some tried-and-true (well, "tried" at least) Reaganomics to guide the United Kingdom through: Tax cuts at the top, deregulation, the usual. Had her country still been fully integrated in the European Union, with all the market access membership provides, her program may have made some modicum of sense, at least in terms of internal logic rather than real-world economics.
But alas, Brexit. It's hard to see where the economic miracle she was promising would even be possible without the additional 446.8 million people of the EU as easy-to-reach customers and business partners. Yet on she went -- and promptly ran headfirst into some brutal market realities. Only an intervention by the Bank of England saved the pound, and the British economy, from a disastrous collapse.
And now she's out. Her program has been scrapped, and by one of her possible successors no less, and her brief leadership of her party, and country, is over. And to top it all off, she had to fire her best friend and closest political ally along the way in an effort to save her own skin.
The holidays may be a little tense this year.
Where things go from here is an open question, but for us Americans the surging radicalism on the political right, wedded to a weird blend of populism and religious fundamentalism, may be a far more important issue than any attempt to bring back the '80s [link to video]. While Truss may have failed in her effort to dust off some of the old conservative economics on the shelf, we may have an even bigger, and deeper, problem.
Conserva . . . Wait, WHAT?
One of Ronald Reagan's great attributes was his sunny disposition. The Gipper sat tall in the saddle, projecting American strength, courage and optimism, a forward-looking, can-do attitude any fair-minded citizen could get behind regardless of their political leanings or any disagreements they may have had with his specific policies.
And there's no denying Reagan had a core set of principles, either. He was no opportunist. He stayed firmly in his lane, one which the great conservative thinker Russell Kirk distilled into Ten Conservative Principles, a kind of guiding philosophy into which all political and cultural questions could fold. Whigs largely share the same views, certainly at the most fundamental level.
There's a certain faith involved in holding these principles, a belief in each other and in the power of community which ultimately boils down to a certainty: We have much more in common than whatever divides us, even as we -- being Americans -- put civic questions to the test. For some, that very civic faith is even tied to their religious belief, as an expression of their fundamental view of humanity and how we must organize ourselves to live together.
But what we see emerging more and more forcefully on the Right is something far darker, and certainly far more malevolent, than what we have come to call conservatism. Many have remarked on how Trump is a symptom rather than a cause, and his election a result of something moving under the surface rather than a source of action above it. And they may be right. Witness this stunner:
We Need To Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives (thefederalist.com)
No one would deny FDRLST Media, LLC is a hard-right outfit, and one only needs to look at the front page of The Federalist to see the typical intellectual dishonesty and rabid partisanship so common on the Radical Right (the Radical Left is guilty of many of the same sins, of course). Were it merely a matter of pandering to the fringe Reagan -- and William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater and others -- tried to restrain on the conservative side of the ledger, they could safely be disregarded, even if it would be imprudent to entirely dismiss them.
The problem is the growing pervasiveness of their apocalyptic worldview. It's diametrically opposed to the views of our Founders and the classical liberalism which resulted from the Enlightenment they so highly prized. There's no room on the Radical Right for tolerance, and they explicitly reject the Age of Reason as a deviation from what should have been the natural state of human affairs. Instead, they propose an authoritarian state, one which enforces their own faith and beliefs and demands obedience by the rest of our society.
All the while, they claim to be trying to save the country. How they can manage to do that while destroying it -- our first freedom is from the imposition of a state religion by the government -- is an obvious logical conflict, but one which they seem to be untroubled by, and which they breeze past in their breathless rush to destroy and dismantle.
Which means, in some sense, it's good if they reject the conservative label. Better to be out with it and make it clear for all to see. It's certainly better for those of us who truly do want to conserve and preserve our Republic and our Constitution. For all the silliness and misguided sophistry on the Far Left, they pose a far less immediate danger than those on the Radical Right. They have no true vehicle for their program; not only did progressives lose almost all of their challenges in the most recent Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders, the standard bearer for the progressive movement, couldn't beat either Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden in his two presidential runs.
But if the Radical Right continues its creeping capture of the Republican Party, they'll have the opportunity to cause no end of trouble. It wouldn't happen right away; as these things go, they rarely do. And there are many reasons to believe they could never actually succeed in their ultimate goal. But they may not have to. If they can present enough of a threat and cause enough chaos, and cause enough damage to our existing political order, they may be able to unleash something no one, not even they themselves, can control.
Odds and Ends
Meanwhile, for those of us who don't live in a bubble -- when we go to the grocery store or church or school or some public entertainment event, it certainly doesn't look like the country is falling apart -- life goes on. And what a remarkable life it is. Most remarkable of all may be the wonders we're discovering every day as we peer out from our spinning rock (or from far above it). Here's an amazing new picture from NASA's wondrous James Webb Space Telescope:
NASA’s Webb Takes Star-Filled Portrait of Pillars of Creation | NASA
It's an amazing feat of human ingenuity, imagination and, given the number of countries involved in building and launching it, political organization. Plus it's really, really cool. And this is just the beginning. There's a lot more to see:
Spinning star slingshots plasma at 7 million miles per hour | Astronomy.com
Who knows what other mysteries we'll solve, or incredible discoveries we'll make? One thing is for certain: When we contemplate how vast the Universe is, and how infinitesimally small our experience of it has truly been, we can only wonder at what lies behind it all. That alone should give us the humility we need to be good to each other, respect each other and try to live together as peaceably as we can.
And with that, I wish you a safe and fun weekend. As always, it's a pleasure to be at your service. See you next week.
Kevin J. Rogers is the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute. He can be reached at director@modernwhig.org. When not engaged with the Institute he publishes independently to Commentatio on Substack.
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The Modern Whig Institute is a 501(c)(3) civic research and education foundation dedicated to the fundamental American principles of representative government, ordered liberty, capitalism, due process and the rule of law.
