Conservatives in U.S. need to find their roots again
‘These visitors to that city on the Potomac do not come as white or black, red or yellow; they are not Jews or Christians; conservatives or liberals; or Democrats or Republicans. They are Americans awed by what has gone before, proud of what for them is still … a shining city on a hill.”
Those were the words of president Ronald Reagan, delivered on the eve of the 1980 American presidential election. Reagan referenced a vision first articulated in 1630 by Puritan settler John Winthrop: that America represented an ideal of freedom and equality that people would look to for spiritual guidance. America was exceptional — and should it fail to meet its own standards, it would let the world down as well.
How the city, and the nation, have fallen.
Last week’s siege of the Capitol — for it cannot be called anything less — confirmed America’s competing narrative. The United States is not a class- free meritocracy, a shining city on a hill. It is a caste system, stratified by race.
Caste is not the narrative Americans want to present to the world. It flies in the face of the popular myth of upward mobility, the soaring bombast of New York, New York, and every rags to riches story ever told. But it is reality. The Civil War may have been fought a century and a half ago, but its legacy remains.
In the past few decades, economic and social changes have combined to fuel racist sentiments that were never extinguished. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared, newcomers hail from all corners of the globe, and civil rights are afforded to all — at least in principle.
As American historian Isabel Wilkerson points out in her brilliant work, Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents, for the poor white man in modern America, the only thing left is thus self- appointed “superiority” over the Black man, by dint of skin colour. Take that away, and his world is undone. He thus turned to Trump, who appealed to this dispossessed white class to ascend to power. It is that power — not the republic — that the insurrectionists sought to preserve last Tuesday. It is not democracy they defended, but their place in the social hierarchy.
Many opine on where this leaves the United States. There is also the question of where it leaves conservatives. For it is their party Trump used as his vehicle; it is their party that genuflected to him; it is their party that now wears his brand like a scarlet T. While the trickle of deserters has become a flood, it is too little, too late. It shouldn’t take an assault on the seat of government to make you discover your principles.
And those principles were never Trump’s. Trump rarely spoke of freedom or liberty, or of America’s role as a standard bearer for the world. If Reagan was conservatism’s apex, Trump marks its nadir. Trump brought out the worst of the right: xenophobia, racism and a willingness to sacrifice liberty for law and order.
This is not in the tradition of American conservatism, particularly of the past cen
TRUMP BROUGHT OUT THE WORST OF THE RIGHT.
tury. From the end of the Second World War until the fall of the Berlin Wall, American conservatives stood for freedom against its greatest threat, the communist regime of the U.S.S.R. Together with other allies of conservative persuasion, most notably prime minister Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, as well as the leader of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II, Americans won the Cold War, liberating hundreds of millions of people from oppression.
If conservatives are to redeem themselves, they must rediscover their roots and rebuild in the image of the shining city. They must call for — and work for — an end to racism and the caste system that underpins their country. They must disavow Trumpism, without reserve.
This is not only an imperative for American conservatives, but for conservatives the world over. If they fail, they will not simply fail to rebuild their own house: they will fail all people who look to them for hope in rebuilding theirs.