Jack Kerwick
According to the conventional wisdom, America is home to a great partisan divide, a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between conservatives on the right and liberals or progressives on the left. The Republican Party is the party of conservatism, or the Right, while the Democratic Party is the party of progressivism. We may safely assume that most Americans, irrespective of their political sympathies, subscribe to this understanding of their country’s political universe. Its popularity notwithstanding, however, the conventional wisdom on this matter is mistaken—and profoundly so.
In what follows, I show that “Big Conservatism,” or “the Big Con”—that is, the contemporary conservative movement with which nationally recognized media personalities in talk radio, cable news, and especially well-established and generously funded print publications are associated—is not really of the Right. This movement is neoconservative. Neoconservatism, far from being a variant of conservatism, is in fact a species of the ideological politics against which conservatism has traditionally defined itself. Its cardinal doctrine of “American Exceptionalism,” the creed that America is unique among the nations of the earth as the bodying forth of an “Idea” and may be the only country in all of history to have been founded on a proposition, is a patently Rationalist construct. It is precisely because “conservatism” is not merely a misnomer for this movement but a form of patently dishonest advertising that I refer to it here as “Big Conservatism,” or simply, “the Big Con.”
Some preliminary remarks regarding the structure and strategy of my argument are in order. I first identify the epistemological presuppositions that have distinguished conservatism as a political-philosophical tradition for the past two centuries. To this end, I allude to the thought of four thinkers—Edmund Burke and David Hume in the eighteenth century, and Russell Kirk and Michael Oakeshott in the twentieth—who are widely recognized representatives of classical or traditional conservatism. These references serve two purposes: they establish that conservative thought does indeed have an enduring identity and, at least as relevant, that the conservative conception of the nature of knowledge consistently leads its proponents to resist the abstract, ideological, and utopian political designs of their opponents. Next, I turn attention to Big Conservatism to show that it too depends on its own set of assumptions concerning the character of knowledge. These assumptions are identical to the philosophy of those radicals and revolutionaries against whom conservatives have railed in the past. And just as the epistemology of the conservative is inseparable from his politics, the politics of the Big Con also features an understanding of political knowledge that illustrates what Oakeshott characterized as “Rationalism.”
It is impossible to come to terms with conservatism unless one understands it primarily as a response to Rationalism, a theory of knowledge distinguished on account of its neglect of—and not infrequently, disdain for—the constellation of culturally and historically specific contingencies that we call “tradition.” Rationalists usually dismiss or relegate to insignificance experienced tradition as a source of knowledge. Genuine knowledge, from the perspective of the Rationalist, is essentially propositional in that it is believed to consist of principles and rules that can be learned or discovered by anyone, irrespective of one’s circumstances. The twentieth- century philosopher Michael Oakeshott characterizes the Rationalist’s view of knowledge as “a knowledge of technique” or “technical knowledge.”1 The latter can be learned from a book or picked up at a correspondence school. It can be memorized and mechanically applied. Because of its features, technical knowledge conveys the appearance of certainty. It is a self-contained technique, depending on nothing beyond itself.
Nearly two hundred years earlier, Edmund Burke called attention to this conception of knowledge among the apologists for the French Revolution. Burke remarked that Rationalists deny the individuating details of each situation by divesting them “of every relation” in favor of “all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.” Although circumstances endow “every political principle [with] its distinguishing color and discriminating effect” and “render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind,” for Rationalists they “pass for nothing.”2 Burke characterized Rationalists as “political-theologians” and “theological-politicians,”3 “new doctors of the rights of men,”4 “moral politicians,”5 “men of theory,”6 “levelers,”7 peddlers of a “mechanic philosophy,”8 of an “empire of light and reason.”9
Oakeshott observes that the Rationalist’s faith in a universal, transhistorical rationality renders him vulnerable to regarding the past as an “encumbrance,”10 which in turn disposes him more toward “destruction and creation.”11 Burke compares Rationalists to “fools” who “rush in where angels fear to tread”12 and says that “it is vain to talk to them of the practice of their ancestors, the fundamental laws of their country, the fixed form of a Constitution whose merits are confirmed by the solid test of long experience,” for “they despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men” and “have wrought a ground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of Parliament.”13 Hume too noted the destructive penchant of Rationalists for imposing “violent innovations” that produce more “ill than good.”14
Rationalists also identify their political models as universal and conceive of politics in terms of ideals and principles—Freedom, Equality, the Rights of Man, Democracy, the Original Contract, the Will of the People, and so on. Their political principles are both abstract and seemingly universal in application. These political-philosophical fictions, which Burke colorfully described as “delusive plausibilities”15 and “mazes of metaphysic sophistry,”16 have been anathema to genuine conservatives.
With respect to the supposed Rights of Man declared during the French Revolution, Burke maintained that this dogma was no real alternative to historically based rights and that what it declared “admit[s] [of] no temperament and no compromise.” Unfortunately no human government can hope to pass muster if it is to be assessed according to the abstract standard of the Rights of Man. “Against these rights of men let no government look for security in the length of its continuance, or in the justice and lenity of its administration.”17
Against the idea that all just governments come into existence historically through the consent of citizens with equal rights, Hume famously responds that if Rationalists would “look abroad into the world, they would meet with nothing that, in the least, corresponds to their ideas, or can warrant so refined and philosophical a system.” The truth is the contrary. Irrespective of time or place, “obedience or subjection becomes so familiar, that most men never make any enquiry about its origin or cause, more than about the principle of gravity, resistance, or the most universal laws of nature.”18
From the conservative standpoint, society is not grounded in a contract. It is rooted in tradition, or habit. According to the Scottish Tory Hume, it is habit that “consolidates what other principles of human nature had imperfectly founded.” He explains that human beings “never think of departing from that path, in which they and their ancestors have constantly trod, and to which they are confined by so many urgent and visible motives.”19
Burke makes this same point. It is not a priori principles of which knowledge, particularly political knowledge, consists but rather tradition: “general prejudices” constituting “the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.”20 The English, according to Burke, view their rights and liberties not as timeless, self-evident endowments. They are instead understood as “an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity—as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right.”21
In Russell Kirk’s treatment of Burke as the quintessential representative of “the conservative mind”22 that Kirk sets out to defend, conservatism stands as the polar opposite of Rationalist, egalitarian politics. The conservative abjures abstract, universalist theorizing in favor of prejudice, “the half-intuitive knowledge that enables men to meet the problems of life without logic-chopping”; prescription, “the customary right which grows out of the conventions and compacts of many successive generations”; and presumption, the “inference” that is “in accordance with the common experience of mankind.” The conservative, comments Kirk, regards as utopian folly “a priori designs for perfecting human nature and society,”23 the “fanatical ideological dogmata”24 of “metaphysical enthusiasts”25 who are either unwilling to grasp or incapable of grasping that principles are “arrived at by convention and compromise” and “tested by long experience.”26 Kirk contrasts the conservative’s “affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence” with the “uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarianism of most radical systems,”27 and his “faith in prescription” with the certitude of those rationalists “who would reconstruct society along abstract designs.”28 Prejudice, precedent, presumption—these are the ingredients of a tradition-centered conception of knowledge. Without them, man “is thrown back upon his own private stock of reason, with the consequences that attend shipwreck.”29
Traditional knowledge is what Oakeshott refers to as “practical knowledge.” Practical knowledge is not propositional. In fact, it “cannot be formulated in rules” and “exists only in use.”30 Propositional knowledge is actually the distillation of a tradition. As such, it necessarily omits the complex of nuances from which it is abstracted. Rationalists, however, do not appear to be aware of this and choose, instead, to believe that the knowledge of morality is “the same to every rational intelligent being,” attained “by a chain of argument and induction,” “metaphysical reasonings, and by deductions from the most abstract principles of the understanding.”31
Conservatism, it should now be obvious, is ultimately as much an epistemological perspective as a political-philosophical one. As such, its tradition-centered conception of knowledge has made it the enemy of Rationalist or ideological politics. The latter inevitably presuppose an impoverished epistemology, one based exclusively on an abstract conception of rationality according to which universal propositions are the sole contents of the understanding. Although conservatives in different times and places have disagreed with one another over specific policy prescriptions, their shared epistemology has disposed them toward favoring institutional arrangements that accommodate and encourage social cohesion and continuity with their nation’s past. They have also focused on preserving their own traditions rather than on saving the human race with what Burke contemptuously described as an “armed doctrine” in the form of human rights.
The doctrine of American Exceptionalism (AE)—that America is an Idea with universal applicability—figures prominently within Big Conservatism. Indeed, AE is the center around which every other belief championed by the Big Con finds its place. Yet before proceeding to examine the contents of this particular idea, it is imperative that we consider the nature of an idea.
Ideas are abstract. They are mental and immaterial. An idea as such is universal in that a nonphysical or intangible entity cannot be limited to a specific time or place. Ideas are therefore borderless. They transcend particularities like race and ethnicity, which differentiate us as groups, since they belong to no one person or group of people. As to whether ideas ontologically precede the culturally and historically specific traditions to which they are related, or whether they are nothing more or less than the distillation of those traditions, it seems that Rationalists have always tended to assign ontological primacy to ideas in the context of their ideologies.
For the Big Con and advocates of AE, America is the paramount Idea. The reason for being of their country consists of its adherence to a Rationalist design that requires the constant striving toward making the entire world subject to an abstract plan. Through these conceptual lenses, it would appear that America is either the only country or the model for every other country “founded” on the Idea. This vision is based on certain unmistakable assumptions.
First, the epistemology of the Big Conservative is unambiguously Rationalist. Knowledge is, as Oakeshott characterized it, “technical.” Political knowledge in particular is available with little difficulty, for it is simply a matter of committing to memory a small number of basic propositions (i.e., self-evident propositions, to which all human minds have equal and immediate access). Therefore, historically specific, religious, and other considerations are of secondary importance, if they have any relevance at all, for the acquisition of political knowledge or the study of the Supreme Idea. Tradition may help facilitate the realization of political knowledge, but it is not necessary for its attainment. The Rationalist epistemology underwriting AE, like all such epistemologies, is intrinsically equalitarian—as will soon be apparent.
Second, insofar as these propositions embody principles of “natural rights,” they affirm egalitarian beliefs. Unlike Burke’s opponents, the French revolutionaries, Big Conservatives point to the Declaration of Independence as proof that America is an Idea. They argue that their country was founded on the basis of natural right theory, which means it has now become sanctified by tradition. Nevertheless, if we insist that the cornerstone of American identity is a universal egalitarian ideal and that is the Idea that America embodies—then we are also saying that America is the Idea of Equality par excellence. That may be the case whether or not Thomas Jefferson had that concept in mind when he wrote about inalienable universal rights in the Declaration. It is also clear that what we are speaking about is not what Jefferson and those members of the Continental Congress who signed his document in 1776 had in mind about universal individual rights but rather how the Idea is now interpreted by those who claim to be American conservatives.
This second point leads us to a third: if equal natural rights, the proposition that “all men are created equal,” is the proposition to which America is “dedicated,” as Lincoln put it, then it would follow that only democratically constituted governments are morally justifiable. Note, democracy, from this perspective, is not merely a procedural basis for establishing authority. It “is the principle of equality which provides the moral justification for democratic rule,”32 rendering democracy “uniquely valuable” inasmuch as “it embodies more fully than any alternative system the principle of fundamental moral equality of citizens.”33 To be clear, democracy is not morally neutral but, rather, a moral idea that precludes “the denial of equality” even when the majority votes to implement values in any given situation that conflict with the value of equality.34 AE, which is the doctrine that America is ultimately an Idea or a Proposition, entails more than what is often explicitly stated. Not only does AE belong to the family of the same Rationalist constructions against which conservatives have always fought. It also combines them in what we are told is the only morally acceptable statement of American patriotism, even nationalism.
Allan Bloom is a neoconservative academic whose book The Closing of the American Mind almost instantly became a classic within Big Conservatism. Bloom articulated what was in the 1980s a standard neoconservative conception of American identity. It belongs unmistakably to that Rationalist style of politics that conservatives had always vehemently opposed. Bloom’s vision of America thoroughly informs the present version of what is viewed as conservative thought. Republican politicians and media personalities pay constant tribute to Bloom’s picture of America as the embodiment of “the rational principles of natural right.”35 American patriots should be committed to this ideal in a way that disallows any consideration of race, class, gender, religion, or ethnicity.36 America is the “liberal democracy” par excellence, “the regime of equality and liberty, of the rights of man,” and indeed “the regime of reason.”37
Bloom’s account of America is the proverbial textbook illustration of Rationalist philosophy, an abstract metaphysic bound up with the imperative to universalize our practice of liberal democracy. America is seen as unique among the history of nations insofar as it is founded on, or expresses, a set of propositions. From this perspective, as Irving Kristol, a man widely regarded as the godfather of neoconservatism, puts it, America is “a creedal nation.”38 And because its creed affirms the principle of equal natural rights to which Jefferson gave expression in the Declaration of Independence, we should be steadily advancing our “universal” creed.39 Indeed America is blessed with “a civilizing mission”40 to promote its “values” around the planet.41 We should proudly embrace our identity as an “ideological” nation.42
Thus we have statements from Bloom and Kristol, both leading lights of the Big Con, about AE. But they are far from the only conservative dignitaries who have held forth on this subject. William J. Bennett, who served in the Reagan and Bush I administrations and who, up until his retirement, was employed as a nationally syndicated talk radio host for Salem Broadcasting and as a contributor for Fox News, commends America’s Founders for having done what, allegedly, no one else had ever achieved. They shaped “a new nation” on the basis of “a new self-evident truth that all men are created equal.” America is grounded in this principle and in “the ideals of freedom and equality.” America is unique among the nations of the world insofar as it is “a country tied together in loyalty to a principle.”43
Bennett’s Salem colleague, nationally syndicated talk radio host and Big Conservative columnist Dennis Prager, enthusiastically endorses AE. Belief in this concept, according to Prager, arises from the “Judeo-Christian” character of America’s “values.”44 These “values” have “universal applicability,” are “eminently exportable,” and should be “applicable to virtually every society in the world.”45
In the same vein, the late Charles Krauthammer, a Fox News celebrity and another nationally syndicated columnist, characterized America as “a nation uniquely built not on blood, race or consanguinity, but on a proposition” that all human beings are created equal and should possess equal rights.46 Glenn Beck47 and Dinesh D’Souza,48 two well-recognized names within the world of Big Conservatism, were among those who expressed their enthusiasm over the declaration of musician Bono that America, in his words, is not just an idea—the idea that “you and me are created equal”—but “one of the greatest ideas in human history.” America was the first to put this concept “on paper,” but since this redemptive idea has now begun to spread everywhere, “the world has a bit of America in it.” There is now no “copyright” on the idea of America.49
Jonah Goldberg, another National Review contributor and a Big Conservatism celebrity of the first order, argues against some of his NR colleagues who are not, by Goldberg’s lights, sufficiently committed to AE. He refers to “that great and glorious cause, the American Idea,” and elevates it above “the American nation.” Goldberg even imagines a hypothetical scenario—one in which Kim Kardashian is elected by Americans to become their queen—that would justify fighting against what he conceives as “the American nation” in defense of “the American Idea.” He castigates his colleagues for having failed to “defend the exceptional essence of American patriotism from the grubbiness of generic nationalism.”50 Also writing in National Review, David Adesnik, a fellow for the Big Conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, sets “liberals” straight as to what AE signifies. What makes America exceptional, he remarks, “is the justification of our country’s existence on the basis of universal rights, rather than religious creed, ethnic heritage, or some other narrow basis.”51
Matthew J. Franck, lavishing praise on National Review editor Rich Lowry’s book on Lincoln in the pages of The Public Discourse, writes that Americans routinely refer back to “their public figures of yesteryear—like Lincoln and the Founders (and Ronald Reagan and Franklin Delano Roosevelt).” After all, Americans “are ‘people of the text,’ formed into a nation and a people not by our having inhabited our land from time immemorial, not by having been all descended from the same ancestors, and not by all belonging to the same religious faith.” Rather, we are held together “by the power of a shared commitment to certain ideas captured in words scratched out on parchment with quill pens in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.” America is “constituted by its Constitution, which begins ‘We the People,’ and which in turn draws all its vitality from the Declaration of Independence, the credo or ‘I believe’ that states its principles with the words, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident.’ ”52
Francis Fukuyama, writing for the Big Conservative publication Commentary, expressly repudiates the position that America is a historically and culturally specific country in favor of AE: “In contrast to other Western European democracies, or Japan, the American national identity has never been directly linked to ethnicity or religion. Nationality has been based instead on universal concepts like freedom and equality that are in theory open to all people.”53
It is worth quoting from a broad sample of representatives of Big Conservatism, lest there be any doubt in the reader’s mind that the Big Con unequivocally affirms through AE that America is an Idea or Proposition. AE is every bit as Rationalist and planetary in its content as the alleged Rights of Man, against which conservatives in earlier times fought. Whatever other material considerations undoubtedly motivate the movers and shakers of the Big Con, it is critical for its friends and, especially, its enemies to recognize three things: (1) there is a philosophy lurking behind the policy prescriptions that the men and women of the Big Con embrace; (2) this philosophy is a variant of that Rationalism and its world-embracing claims against which conservatives have traditionally taken a stand; and (3) the metaphysical, epistemological, and political-moral postulates of the Big Con’s Rationalist philosophy are to be found lodged in its doctrine of AE.
There is still another crucial point to be grasped: AE is a political religion, a set of political beliefs to which universal moral and spiritual significance has been assigned. The noblest ideals—Equality, Natural Rights, Democracy—supposedly became incarnate in this geographical region of the world within a specific people and during a specific time. The Logos, as it were, assumed flesh in this situation, but until now the world of time and space has precluded Americans from fully actualizing the Idea everywhere. Still, this sacred Idea is forever beckoning us to work more diligently on its behalf. Moreover, this vision of AE is quintessentially progressivist. It is a form of progressivism that presupposes a linear conception of time. In the end, if all goes well, we will see the full realization of the Idea that is America both here and everywhere else on the planet.
The more honest or more consistent members of the Big Con do not hide certain facts from us, that they are of the Left and in their approach to international relations explicitly expansionist, in the traditions of the French and Bolshevik Revolutions. Douglas Murray, an unqualified apologist for the Big Con, informs us that his friends are interested in “erasing tyrannies and spreading democracy.” This lofty goal requires “interventionism, nation-building, and many of the other difficulties that had long concerned traditional conservatives.”54 And the well-known sociologist Nathan Glazer, editor of the late Big Conservative journal Public Interest, goes so far as to suggest that neocons (Big Conservatives) are essentially socialists: “It’s very hard for us [neocons and socialists] to define what it is that divides us, in any centrally principled way.” While in some instances there may be disagreement over “the details or the scope of health insurance plans,” “the level of taxation that should be imposed upon corporations,” or “how much should be going into social security,” there does not appear to be any “principles that separate us.”55
Irving Kristol confirms his ideology’s progressivist orientation when he explicitly contrasts it with traditional conservatism by noting that it is “hopeful, not lugubrious,” and “forward-looking, not nostalgic.”56 Big Conservatives, after all, embrace “the welfare state”—that is, “social security, unemployment insurance, some form of national health insurance, some kind of family assistance plan, etc.”57 As far as foreign policy is concerned, because of the United States’ unique standing as “a creedal nation,”58 it has a “civilizing mission”59 to promote “American values”60 throughout the world, to see to it “that other governments respect our conception of individual rights as the foundation of a just regime and a good society,” in short, to “ ‘make the world safe for democracy.”61 Charles Krauthammer expressed much the same idea under the name of his “value-driven foreign policy.” He called for the implementation of “democratic globalism,” a means by which we could facilitate “the spread of democracy” around the planet.62 This kind of plan would entail providing those who are to be liberated with the necessary “technical knowledge” to follow our Idea. For example, those whom we would choose to instruct would have to be furnished with a constitutional document like ours, parties that are based on our system of government, and perhaps even directions on how to set up elections.
Ben Shapiro, who hosts among the most popular podcasts in the country, openly calls for an American empire. This policy, according to Shapiro, would serve America’s national security interest while energetically “forwarding freedom.” To be clear, Shapiro is not claiming that an American empire is merely a prudential step. He is not even claiming that it is the most virtuous course. Rather, he views it as a moral imperative, a “duty,” for America. “If America is to survive and flourish, Americans must realize that empire isn’t a choice.”63
As a representative of Big Conservatism, which is fundamentally at odds with the classical, old Right conservatism of Patrick Buchanan, Shapiro accuses the latter of being an “arch-isolationist” who chooses to “ignore” America’s need to become an empire. In pursuit of this geopolitical and ideological goal, America must be willing to act preemptively, as when it invaded Iraq. A similar step should be taken to spread democracy throughout the Islamic world. The United States should be ready to attack “Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, and others” without warning, since preemption “is the chief weapon of a global empire.” Empire may not be “easy,” Shapiro says, “but it is right and good, both for Americans and for the world.”64
The creed that America is an Idea implies that America, like any other idea, cannot be limited geographically. America, the “liberal democracy” par excellence, as Allan Bloom referred to it, should seek to bring democratic ideas to those benighted parts of the world that are still not blessed with this treasure. Moreover, since AE is based on an idea and technical knowledge about achieving its practice, anyone from anywhere should be able to become American with a bit of instruction.
Because America is an idea and ideas are borderless, to insist that becoming or being an American should in any way be limited by geographical borders is to be guilty of imposing limitations on that which is potentially limitless. It was reported that during a debate on immigration policy, President Trump referred to certain Third World countries, such as Haiti, as “shitholes.”65 In response, Republican senator Lindsey Graham rejoined that America is an idea, “not defined by its people but by its ideals.”66 It does not therefore matter from what place or culture a person hails, as long as that person embraces the Idea of America. Republican Paul Ryan enthusiastically endorsed the radical immigration agenda of Far Left Democrat Luis Gutierrez while referring to America as “an idea that people from all over the world aspire to achieve.”67
Paul Greenberg, who has been regularly featured in Big Conservative publications for many decades, lavished praise on Barack Obama for paying “tribute to American Exceptionalism” by urging Congress to extend citizenship to illegal aliens. America is “exceptional,” according to Greenberg, because it “is a nation bound together not like others, by blood or class or party, but by shared belief and hope—united … by … ideals,” namely, the ideal that “all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”68
In the symposium “Immigration and American Exceptionalism,” hosted by the Claremont Review of Books, William Bennett noted that being an American is fundamentally about a commitment to “the nation and her ideals.” Linda Chavez enthusiastically agreed, explaining that anything less than unadulterated enthusiasm over the massive influx of largely Third World immigrants into America betrays “fear of immigrants.” Chavez admonished her fellow Big Conservatives to keep the “faith in the assimilative power of our exceptional nation” and do their “duty” to “help foster” the “assimilation” of immigrants.” Angelo Codevilla, a senior fellow of the Big Conservative Claremont Institute, echoed the sentiment of his colleagues when he quoted Lincoln to the effect that all immigrants to America possess equally that “father of all moral principle,” the Declaration of Independence. From this document we can learn the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.”69
David Brooks, the New York Times’s resident “conservative,” charges his fellow Republican and Big Conservative partisans with “destroying American exceptionalism” by way of what he depicts as their resistance to expansive immigration policies. In his column, Brooks contends that “the American Idea” precludes “look[ing] backward to an America that is being lost,” an attitude embodying, as Brooks would have us think, a “desire to exclude.” Rather, Big Conservatism (which Brooks calls “American conservatism”) differs from other conservatisms that invoke “blood and soil.” Big Conservatism is rooted in “a promise.” Further, this promise is “the American idea.” While all other nations have been defined “by their history,” their past, the settlers, founders, and builders of America saw their country as “defined by its future, by the people who weren’t yet here and by the greatness that hadn’t yet been achieved.”70 Note that this notion of the American Idea as a “promise” is intrinsically progressivist, visionary, and future oriented. It may require us, according to its exponents, to absorb as much of the world as we can into our expanding country or else seek to convert the rest of the planet to our revolutionary Idea.
In this chapter, I have tried to prove that what is known as the conservative movement in America is not conservative in any traditional or historical sense. The present conservative movement is largely a creation of neoconservatism, which gained effective control of establishment conservative media in the 1980s. The Big Conservatism that emerged from this takeover is a recognizable form of the Rationalist, progressivist, imperialist Left, against which classical conservatives and later the interwar American Right were once furiously opposed. The movers and shakers of Big Conservatism, true to their ideological pedigree, anchor their political vision in a metaphysical abstraction, AE. From the perspective of AE, America is an Idea and perhaps the only nation in all of human history that is imagined to transcend history. It is on the basis of this equation of America with a concept—a borderless, immaterial, universal concept—that those in the Big Con seek to justify their policy prescriptions, particularly their linkage of idealistic military intervention abroad with unrelenting immigration at home.
A “conservatism” of this kind is in fact no conservatism at all. Even those who are not of a rightist disposition should view this leftist imperialism together with its media cheering gallery with the skepticism that it richly deserves.