Notes

FOREWORD

· 1. Patrick Joseph Buchanan, “Culture War Speech: Address to the Republican Convention (17 August 1992),” Voices of Democracy: U. S. Oratory Project, University of Maryland, https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/buchanan-culture-war-speech-speech-text/.

INTRODUCTION

· 1. Angelo M. Codevilla, “The Cold Civil War: Statecraft in a Divided Country,” Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2017, https://claremountreviewofbooks.com/the-cold-civil-war/.

· 2. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 319.

· 3. Jonathan Haidt, Can’t We All Disagree More Constructively? (New York: Vintage Books, 2016), 1.

· 4. Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon, “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” More in Common, October 2018, 136, https://hiddentribes.us/media/qfpekz4g/hidden_tribes_report.pdf.

· 5. Bari Weiss, “Resignation Letter,” www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter.

· 6. Bari Weiss, “The Great Unraveling,” January 12, 2021, https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-great-unraveling.

· 7. Weiss, “The Great Unraveling.”

· 8. 2021 Joseph R. Biden Jr. Executive Orders, Federal Register, www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/executive-orders/joe-biden/2021.

· 9. The orders included, among other things, support for transgender biological males in women’s sports, making abortion on demand easier, reversing Trump’s border and immigration policies, terminating the construction of the border wall, ending the 1776 Commission in favor of the policies for “racial equity,” rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, terminating the Keystone XL pipeline, and moving toward the eventual elimination of all fracking. While I believe presidential politics are important, my goal, while difficult in our hyper-polarized environment is to transcend party politics as much as possible and focus on principles more than party. I will mention Biden and Trump occasionally but my loyalty lies with constitutional republicanism, over against the oligarchy of the ruling class, and this means I will be critical of both parties, particularly in our two houses of Congress.

· 10. Joseph R. Biden, Inaugural Address, January 20, 2021, www.whitehouse.gov/briefingroom/speeches-remarks/2021/01/20/.

· 11. But while anyone who acted violently that day should be prosecuted they should also get due process and be treated fairly. As I worked on the final edits of this manuscript in July 2021, many of those arrested were still languishing in a DC prison, awaiting trial, and not receiving due process. See Julie Kelley, “Man in Pelosi’s Office Discusses Jail Conditions for January 6 Detainees,” American Greatness, May 25, 2021, https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/25/man-in-pelosis-office-discusses-jail-conditions-for-january-6-detainees/.

· 12. I recognize that there is a place for violent revolution, as we experienced in our independence from Great Britain. Yet, while there is a need to have a philosophical discussion on revolution and violence, I will not take up this discussion in this book, other than to say that vigilante violence is wrong. However, saying that doesn’t mean that every principle held by a group that calls for violence is wrong. Sometimes they might be right on the diagnosis and wrong on the solution. We can have discussions about the beliefs, agreeing with some even when we reject solutions as misguided.

· 13. Jordan Davidson, “John Brennan: Biden Intelligence Agencies to Investigate Pro-Trump ‘Bigots’ and ‘Libertarians,’” The Federalist, January 21, 2021, https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/21/john-brennan-biden-intelligence-agencies-to-investigate-pro-trump-bigots-and-libertarians/.

· 14. Brennan was wrong. While this manuscript was being prepared for publication in August 2021, the FBI finally concluded that there was no proof of an organized plot of insurrection on January 6, 2021. See Jonathan Turley, “The FBI Comes Up Empty Handed in its Search for a January 6th Plot,” The Hill, August 11, 2021, https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/568842-the-fbi-comes-up-empty-handed-in-its-search-for-a-jan-6-plot.

· 15. To understand how those on the right interpret January 6, 2021, and what has transpired with the prisoners in the months following their arrests, see Lee Smith, “America’s New Political Prisoners: Insurrectionists, White Supremacists, and Domestic Muslim Terrorists Are All the Same People–Us,” Tablet, June 30, 2021, https://tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/lee-smith-insurrectionists-january-6.

· 16. Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson Tonight, January 20, 2021. To see the complicity of the bipartisan ruling elite in the aftermath of the Capitol riot, see Ryan J. Reilly, “After Hundreds of Arrests in Sprawling Capitol Hunt, The FBI Just Made A Pretty Big Mistake,” Huffington Post, May 7, 2021, www.huffpost.com/entry/60930634e4b0c15313fbe48f; also see Glenn Greenwald, “The US Intelligence Community, Flouting Laws, is Increasingly Involving Itself in Domestic Politics,” Glenn Greenwald, https://greenwald.substack.com/; and Victor Davis Hanson, “The Bleak Biden Way,” American Greatness, May 2, 2021, https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/02/the-bleak-biden-way/.

· 17. Tucker Carlson Tonight, January 20, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPU0axNkEK0.

· 18. Tucker Carlson Tonight, January 20, 2021.

· 19. Ben Stein, “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning,” New York Times, November 26, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html.

· 20. Angelo M. Codevilla, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It (New York: Beaufort Books, 2010).

· 21. Oligarchy is defined as a small group of people who control the main political, economic, and political institutions of the country, rigging the system for their own benefit. To see how it contrasts with constitutional republicanism, see Leslie G. Rubin, America, Aristotle, and the Politics of a Middle Class (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2018).

· 22. Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (New York: Encounter Books, 2020).

· 23. Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (New York: Portfolio, 2020).

· 24. Robert J. Bunker and Pamela Ligouri, eds, Plutocratic Insurgency Reader (Bloomington: Xlibris, 2019).

· 25. Emma Colton, “Rahm Emanuel Reprises ‘Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste’ Catchphrase Amid Coronavirus Pandemic,” Washington Examiner, March 24, 2020, www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/rahm-emanuel-reprises-never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste-catchphrase-amid-coronavirus-pandemic.

· 26. Sarah Cammarata, “Biden promises wealthy donors he would not ‘demonize’ the rich,” June 19, 2019, Politico, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/19/biden-wealthy-donors-1369957.

· 27. Eric Levitz, “Biden 2020: Change That Wall Street Liberals Can Believe In?” Intelligencer, September 8, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/biden-2020-agenda-wall-street-silicon-valley-progressives.html.

· 28. Levitz, “Biden 2020.”

· 29. See Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (NY: Penguin Books, 2013); Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011); Jeff Faux, The Servant Economy: Where America’s Elite is Sending the Middle Class (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012); Robert G. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corruption of American Government (New York: Knopf, 2009); Peter Schweizer, Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism that Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).

· 30. Nils Gilman, “The Twin Insurgency—Facing Plutocrats and Criminals,” chap. 3 in Plutocratic Insurgency Reader, ed. Robert J. Bunker and Pamela Ligouri Bunker (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2019).

· 31. For the ways that Trump’s anti-oligarchic rhetoric didn’t always match his actions, falling woefully short at times, and how Trump actually inadvertently empowered the ruling class (even as they attacked him), see Angelo Codevilla, “What Is Trump to Us?,” American Greatness, July 6, 2021, https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/06/what-is-trump-to-us/.

· 32. Joel Kotkin, “The Pandemic Road to Serfdom,” The American Mind, May 1, 2020, https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-pandemic-road-to-serfdom/.

· 33. Niall McCarthy, “US Billionaires Added 1 Trillion to Their Collective Wealth Since the Start of the Pandemic,” Forbes, November 27, 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/11/27/us-billionaires-added-1-trillion-to-their-collective-wealth-since-the-start-of-the-pandemic-infographic/?sh=54aa736d66ce; Peter Eaves and Steve Lohr, “Big Tech Domination of Business Reaches New Heights,” New York Times, August 19, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/technology/big-tech-business-domination.html.

· 34. Kotkin, “The Pandemic Road to Serfdom.”

· 35. Anne Spraders and Lance Lambert, “Nearly 100,000 Establishments That Temporarily Shut Down Due to the Pandemic Are Now out of Business,” Fortune, September 28, 2020, htttps://fortune.com/2020/09/28/covid-business-shut-down-closed/.

· 36. John Hayward, “7 Ways Governments Used the Coronavirus Pandemic to Crush Human Rights,” Breitbart, December 25, 2020, www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/12/25/hayward-7-ways-governments-used-the-coronavirus-pandemic-to-crush-human-rights/.

· 37. Joy Pullman, “Big Corporate Uses Capitol Riots to Push Communist-Style Social Credit System on Americans,” The Federalist, January 11, 2021, https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/11/big-corporate-uses-capitol-riots-to-push-communist-style-social-credit-system-on-americans/.

· 38. If we are ever going to avoid a civil war, political violence must be rejected at all times, regardless of whether you agree with the philosophy of the group doing the violence. We have to support protest and dissent of all kinds, on the left and the right, but reject riots, violence, and insurrection of any kind.

· 39. Angelo Codevilla, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It (New York: Beaufort Books, 2010), 69.

· 40. Codevilla, The Ruling Class, 73.

· 41. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

· 42. Hunter, Culture Wars, 50.

· 43. Hawkins et al., “Hidden Tribes,” 137.

· 44. Hawkins et al., “Hidden Tribes,” 137-38.

· 45. Hawkins et al., “Hidden Tribes,” 138.

· 46. For a helpful book explaining why the middle class is so important in maintaining a constitutional democracy, see Leslie G. Rubin, America, Aristotle, and the Politics of a Middle Class (Waco, Baylor University Press, 2018).

· 47. For an example on the left, see Lee Drutman, “We Need Political Parties. But Their Rabid Partisanship Could Destroy American Democracy,” Vox, September 5, 2017, www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/9/5/16227700/; For pessimism on the right, see Angelo Codevilla, “Revolution 2020,” The American Mind, September 23, 2020, https://americanmind.org/salvo/revolution-2020/.

· 48. In fact, the American Mind website ran a series of articles after the 2020 Election, asking the question, “Should We Split?”; You can access the articles here: https://americanmind.org/feature/will-we-split/.

· 49. Charles Kesler, “America’s Cold Civil War,” Imprimis 47, no. 10 (October 2018): 8.

· 50. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated and edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 7.

· 51. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 7.

· 52. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 15.

1. THE EVANGELICAL DILEMMA AND THE SEARCH FOR PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY

· 1. Ryan Burge, “The Growing Divide Within American Evangelicals,” Religion Unplugged, December 15, 2020, https://religionunplugged.com/news/2020/12/15/the-growing-divide-within-american-evangelicalism; Joe Carter, “Why Evangelicals Are (Still) Divided over Trump,” The Gospel Coalition, October 29, 2020, www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/why-evangelicals-are-still-divided-over-trump/.

· 2. Kevyn Burger, “The Political Divide Is Threatening Relationships Among Family, Friends, and Co-Workers,” The Star Tribune, January 23, 2021, www.startribune.com/the-political-divide-is-threatening-relationships-among-family-friends-and-co-workers/600013687/.

· 3. Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008).

· 4. Matt Taibbi, Hate Inc.: How Today Media Makes Us Despise One Another (New York: OR Books, 2021).

· 5. Kevin Roose, “How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis,” New York Times, February 2, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-reality-crisis-misinformation.html.

· 6. “Roy Austin Joins Facebook as VP of Civil Rights,” https://about.fb.com/news/2021/01/roy-austin-facebook-vp-civil-rights/.

· 7. See the documentary the Creepy Line: Google and Facebook Censorship Manipulation Undermine Democracy, directed by M. A. Taylor (Seattle: Amazon Prime Videos, 2018).

· 8. Dana Kennedy, “CA Podcaster Gets Visit from Police After ‘Lightly’ Criticizing AOC on Twitter,” New York Post, April 10, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/04/10/ca-podcaster-gets-visit-from-police-after-aoc-tweet/.

· 9. Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali, “Pentagon, Stumped by Extremism in Ranks, Orders Stand-Down in Next 60 Days,” Reuters, February 3, 2021, www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2A335W.

· 10. Jesse T. Jackson, “Godspeak Calvary Chapel Fined $3,000 for Holding Indoor Worship,” Church Leaders, August 21, 2020, https://churchleaders.com/news/381075-godspeak-calvary-chapel-fined-3000-for-holding-indoor-gatherings.html.

· 11. J. Budziszewski, “Evangelicals in the Public Square,” Evangelicals in the Public Square: Four Formative Voices, ed. J. Budziszewski (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), 16, italics added.

· 12. Budziszewski, “Evangelicals in the Public Square,” 17.

· 13. Budziszewski, “Evangelicals in the Public Square,” 18.

· 14. Budziszewski, “Evangelicals in the Public Square,” 18.

· 15. Budziszewski, “Evangelicals in the Public Square,” 18-19, italics original.

· 16. Tremper Longman, The Bible and the Ballot: Using Scripture in Political Decisions (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020); Jonathan Leeman, How the Nations Rage: Rethinking Faith and Politics in a Divided Age (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2018).

· 17. Carl R. Trueman, “Evangelicals and Race Theory,” First Things, February 2021, www.firstthings.com/article/2021/02/evangelicals-and-race-theory; see Voddie T. Baucham Jr., Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe (Washington, DC: Salem Books, 2021).

· 18. John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016); Mark David Hall, Did America Have a Christian Founding? (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2019).

· 19. For the challenge to biblical authority in the late nineteenth century, see Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

· 20. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square, 21.

· 21. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square, 23, italics added.

· 22. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square, 23-27.

· 23. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square, 27.

· 24. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square, 28-29.

· 25. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square, 30.

· 26. Two examples of inflationary tactics from each side might include: Jerry Falwell, Listen, America! (New York: Doubleday, 1980) and Daniel Block, “Is Trump Our Cyrus? The Old Testament Case for Yes and No,” Christianity Today, October 29, 2018.

· 27. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square, 30.

· 28. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square, 31.

· 29. Also see J. Budziszewski, Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1997); For a discussion of natural law in Reformed Protestant circles see Stephen J. Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006).

· 30. J. Budziszewski, The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009), 10.

· 31. Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005).

· 32. Budziszewski, The Line Through the Heart, chap. 1.

· 33. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square, 31.

· 34. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square, 31.

· 35. Budziszewski, The Line Through the Heart, 23-40.

· 36. A good introduction to his thought is Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, James D. Bratt, ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), especially “Common Grace,” pages 165-210.

· 37. Richard Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002); Nicholas Wolterstorff, Understanding Liberal Democracy: Essays in Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Political Order and the Plural Structure of Society James W. Skillen, Rockne McCarthy, eds. (Scholars Press, 1991), George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990); H. Evan Runner, Scriptural Religion and Political Task (Toronto: Wedge Publishing Foundation, 1974). Overall, from the neo-Kuyperian tradition, I learned a great deal about the church’s responsibility to transform culture, how to critique the Enlightenment’s commitment to reason over revelation, how to diagnose the dangers of expressive individualism in our modern liberal tradition, and the proper role of the different spheres of society. But that tradition wasn’t without weakness, which I came to realize much later. Many in this camp were deeply ambivalent about America’s founding, often the result of being first generation immigrants from Holland. But some of the ambivalence came from their view that America was too rooted in Enlightenment thinking, particularly Thomas Jefferson, and missed the role that the Scottish Enlightenment played. Because neo-Kuyperians were often ambivalent about America’s founding and were critical of the influence of the Enlightenment on our founding, I too often took a critical stance toward the main currents of ancient and modern political thought, a stance where I stood outside our tradition as a critic. It took me a number of years after Fuller to correct my faulty thinking.

· 38. As it turned out, Georgetown in the 1990s proved to be a great place to study political philosophy and understand public philosophy. Along with George Carey, who taught me The Federalist Papers and had written extensively on issues in public philosophy, I was exposed to thoughtful thinkers on both sides of the political spectrum. From those on the left, I studied the history of classical liberalism under Gerald Mara and Marxism under Bruce Douglass. On the right, Walter Berns, the famous Constitutional scholar, who once voted for Adlai Stevenson, taught me about Tocqueville (and introduced me to the idea of civic republicanism) and Father James Schall taught me Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, deepening my appreciation for classical and medieval political thought. I also had professors who saw political science as purely secular, devoid of normative considerations, a topic that could be studied scientifically using social science tools, and in the end had more to do with postmodern power struggle than with justice.

· 39. George Carey, “On The Degeneration of Public Philosophy in America: Problems and Prospects” in E. Robert Stratham Jr., ed., Public Philosophy and Political Science (New York: Lexington Books, 2002), 44.

· 40. Carey, “On The Degeneration of Public Philosophy,” 45.

· 41. James Ceaser, “What Is the Public Philosophy?,” in Public Philosophy and Political Science: Crisis and Reflection, E. Robert Stratham Jr., ed. (New York: Lexington Books, 2002).

· 42. Ceaser, “What Is the Public Philosophy?” 17.

· 43. Ceaser, “What Is the Public Philosophy?,” 17.

· 44. Ceaser, “What Is the Public Philosophy?,” 17.

· 45. Ceaser, “What Is the Public Philosophy?,” 17.

· 46. Ceaser, “What Is the Public Philosophy?,” 18.

· 47. Within the church over the past twenty years, this theme of justification or grounding has been called “public theology”—often defined as the relationship of God’s people—the church—to the state. As James K. A. Smith contends, a Christian political theology asks the question “in what ways—and to what extent—can the ‘peculiar people’ that is the church live in common with citizens of the earthly city?,” James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), 6. Thus, in many ways public philosophy and political theology share similar terrain; they deal, in part, with questions of grounding. While public theology is mainly about how the church as a unique people of God relates to the secular world, drawing from God’s direction for politics in the Bible and natural revelation, with the stress usually on the Scriptures first, public philosophy looks more from the vantage point of public life and its relation to the moral and spiritual realm, dealing with issues of separation of church and state and the role of virtue in sustaining the political system. Yet both public philosophy and public theology examine how humans get along, form and maintain a common life together, and determine the ultimate authority in life, the grounding.

· 48. Along with seeking answers to questions about the parts of political life and about human nature, God, the common good, the ends of society, and how we ground our life together, my quest for understanding the concept of public philosophy—how our crisis in America is over rival-first principles—my time at Georgetown wasn’t just an exercise in cultural and political anthropology, that is, understanding what goes into the concept. While this was important, I also wanted to come away with a public philosophy that could unify America again and be the social glue that bonds America together. So while the term public philosophy is a concept that can encompass many different versions of political philosophy, whether progressive or conservative, I follow Walter Lippmann (see chap. two) by putting the in front of public philosophy, as in the public philosophy of our nation’s founders, a public philosophy rooted in Western civilization, grounded in something deeper than pragmatic progressivism, a “civic faith,” a glue that binds Americans together and that has been in crisis since the 1960s. In other words, the quest to find a public philosophy, a general concept that guides people’s thinking about politics and the common life together, will take on a more peculiar meaning in the context of America. It will be defined as the common glue that holds America together and allows us to transfer power peacefully every four years. But this public philosophy, one more about recovering the past than reinventing the future, is also so disputed today. In fact, as we begin mapping the different versions of public philosophy, we will see that all of them are reacting either against or for the original founding. This becomes a certain litmus test for our study. What does each thinker believe about our founding? Is the founding part of our grounding, and can it be recovered? Or was the founding hopelessly compromised and the only way forward is to repudiate it and adopt something entirely new? As I look for a new vital center, I too will take a certain position toward the founding.

· 49. While not everyone on the far left thinks America is evil, I will demonstrate in chapters three through seven how many on the far left have become more and more radical over the past seventy years.

· 50. Jim Belcher, Deep Church: A Third Way Between Emerging and Traditional (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009).

· 51. While this doesn’t include everyone on the right, I will show in chapters nine and ten, that a group of thinkers have become more extreme and more illiberal over the last few decades.

2. THE END OF THE VITAL CENTER

· 1. Jeet Heer, “The Right is Giving Up on Democracy,” New Republic, October 24, 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/138019/. For two good representative books on the threat of this anti-democratic sentiment, and what became a cottage industry of articles and books for four years, see Timothy Synder, On Tyranny: Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2012) and Ann Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (New York: Doubleday, 2020).

· 2. Mike Allen, “Institutionalizing Trumpism,” Axios, May 7, 2021, www.axios.com/institutionalizing-trumpism-1289f127-ff6e-4edd-aa34-7a6982d1984b.html.

· 3. Michael Gerson, “Trumpism Is American Fascism,” Washington Post, February 1, 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/c410f662-64b2-11eb-8c64-9595888caa15_story.html.

· 4. Chris Hayes, “The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy,” the Atlantic, February 8, 2021, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/republican-party-radicalizing-against-democracy/617959/.

· 5. John Daniel Davidson, “Why the Left Still Can’t Understand Trump’s Appeal,” The Federalist, February 10, 2021, https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/10/why-the-left-still-cant-understand-trumps-appeal/.

· 6. Davidson, “Why the Left Still Can’t Understand Trump’s Appeal.”

· 7. Seth Barron, “What Is ‘Our’ Democracy?,” The American Mind, February 11, 2021, https://americanmind.org/salvo/what-is-our-democracy/.

· 8. Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism (New York: Basic Books, 2016) 3.

· 9. Levin, The Fractured Republic, 3.

· 10. Levin, The Fractured Republic, 156.

· 11. George M. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 20.

· 12. Marsden, Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 59.

· 13. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949).

· 14. Marsden, Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 57.

· 15. Marsden, Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 57. Quoted material is from Schlesinger’s The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949).

· 16. While we will see how the Right contributed to the loss of the vital center (see chaps. seven through ten) this chapter is about how the progressive Left successfully led an attack on the vital center. That they did so and were so successful is a story shared by historians on the left and the right. While the Left celebrates the destruction of the vital center and the Right bemoans it, nonetheless, they both agree that the Left was the most vocal, the most powerful, and the most successful. To make this clear, I rely mainly on voices on the left—like Hartman, Marsden and Schlesinger—to tell the story.

· 17. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949), 8.

· 18. In his second chapter, “the Failure of the Right” Schlesinger warned that the Right had become too aligned with the business community, “the property of the plutocracy.” The Vital Center, 25.

· 19. Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 2.

· 20. Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), 41.

· 21. Hartman, War for the Soul of America, 12.

· 22. Hartman, War for the Soul of America, 12.

· 23. Theodore Roszak, “Youth and the Great Refusal,” the Nation, 1968, quoted by Hartman, A War for the Soul of the Nation, 14.

· 24. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020).

· 25. Hartman, War for the Soul of America, 71.

· 26. Christopher Caldwell, “Can There Ever Be a Working-Class Republican Party? The Party of the Country Club Tries to Embrace a New Egalitarian Economic Agenda,” The New Republic, Feb. 8, 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/161113/.

· 27. While this chapter is mainly focusing on how the radical Left attacked the vital center, in chapters seven through ten I will tell the story of how some on the right, particularly libertarians, also helped radically transform America in the areas of economics, politics, and culture. To see how radical forces on the right and the left transformed America from a constitutional republic to an oligarchy, see Lee Smith, “The Thirty Tyrants: The Deal That the American Elite Chose to Make with China Has a Precedent in the History of Athens and Sparta,” Tablet, February 4, 2021; Thomas Freidman, “Our One-Party Democracy,” New York Times, September 8, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html.

· 28. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America: Making Sense of the Battles over the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 42.

· 29. Hunter, Culture Wars, 43.

· 30. Hunter, Culture Wars, 43. Italics original.

· 31. Hunter, Culture Wars, 44.

· 32. Hunter, Culture Wars, 43.

· 33. Chris Hayes, “The Republican Party Is Radicalizing Against Democracy,” the Atlantic, February 8, 2021, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/republican-party-radicalizing-against-democracy/617959/.

· 34. Barry Rubin, Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political and Cultural Dominance (New York: HarperCollins, 2014).

· 35. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, xvi.

· 36. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, xvi.

· 37. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, xxi.

· 38. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, xxi.

· 39. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 60.

· 40. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 60.

· 41. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 62.

· 42. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 130.

· 43. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 130.

· 44. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 130.

· 45. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 13.

· 46. Schlesinger, Disuniting of America, 20.

· 47. Schlesinger, Disuniting of America, 49.

· 48. Mark Lila, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (San Francisco: Harper Paperbacks, 2019).

· 49. Schlesinger, Disuniting of America, 23.

· 50. Schlesinger, Disuniting of America, 124.

· 51. Schlesinger, Disuniting of America, 118.

· 52. Schlesinger, Disuniting of America, 141.

· 53. Schlesinger, Disuniting of America, 142.

· 54. President Biden’s 2021 Fourth of July speech is a good example of reducing America’s uniqueness to an idea: “I’ve long said that America is unique, unlike every other nation on earth, we are founded on an idea,” Rev, www.rev.com/blog/transcript/joe-biden-july-4-2021-independence-day-speech-transcript.

· 55. Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), 142.

· 56. Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 143.

· 57. Bellah, The Broken Covenant, ix.

· 58. Bellah, The Broken Covenant, xvi.

· 59. Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 142.

· 60. Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 142.

· 61. Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 142.

· 62. Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism (New York: Basic Book, 2016), 46-66.

· 63. Matt Walsh, “It is Time to Face the Facts: We Cannot Be United,” The Daily Wire, June 12, 2020, www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-it-is-time-to-face-the-facts-we-cannot-be-united.

· 64. Kurt Schlichter, “Should We Just Let It Burn?” Townhall, April 29, 2021, https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/04/29/should-we-just-let-it-burn-n2588663.

· 65. See Victor Davis Hanson, “The World Goes on While America Sleeps,” American Greatness, February 10, 2021, https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/10/the-world-goes-on-while-america-sleeps/.

PART TWO: MAPPING OUR DIFFERENCES: THE QUADRANT FRAMEWORK SYSTEM

· 1. See chapter four, “Living Narratives,” in Christian Smith, Moral Believing Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

· 2. Jason Willick, “A Center That Can Hold,” National Affairs, summer 2018, www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/a-center-that-can-hold.

3. FREEDOM LEFT 2: THE THEORY OF THE GODLESS CONSTITUTION

· 1. Philip Wegmann, “Religious Litmus Tests Are Becoming All the Rage on the Left,” Washington Examiner, September 6, 2017, www.washingtonexaminer.com/religious-litmus-tests-are-becoming-all-the-rage-on-the-left; Aaron Blake, “Did Dianne Feinstein Accuse a Judicial Nominee of Being Too Christian?,” Washington Post, September 7, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/09/07/did-a-democratic-senator-just-accuse-a-judicial-nominee-of-being-too-christian/.

· 2. They had to retract this story. The inspiration was another Catholic group, not the People of Praise.

· 3. Julie Zauzmer, “The Story behind Amy Coney Barrett’s Little-Known Christian Group People of Praise,” Washington Post, September 28, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/09/28/people-of-praise-amy-coney-barrett/; Kristin Kobes Du Mez, “Trump Pick Amy Coney Barrett’s Christian ‘Handmaid’ History Matters,” Think, October 10, 2020, www.nbcnews.com/think/ncna1242770.

· 4. Adrian Vermeule, “Beyond Originalism,” the Atlantic, March 31, 2020, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-constitutionalism/609037/.

· 5. Peter Hammond Schwartz, “Originalism Is Dead. Long Live Catholic Natural Law,” New Republic, February 3, 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/161162/.

· 6. Schwartz, “Originalism Is Dead.”

· 7. Schwartz, “Originalism Is Dead,” 11.

· 8. Schwartz, “Originalism Is Dead,” 12.

· 9. Schwartz, “Originalism Is Dead,” 12.

· 10. Schwartz, “Originalism Is Dead,” 14.

· 11. Schwartz, “Originalism Is Dead,” 14.

· 12. Schwartz, “Originalism Is Dead,” 22.

· 13. While I think what he is doing is unfair, I agree with him that there exist post liberal thinkers in the Catholic Church, and I will focus on them when we get to order left 2 and 3. But I will make the case that there are NNL thinkers who are not post-liberal.

· 14. Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).

· 15. John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: Prometheus, 1999), 58.

· 16. Commencement Address at Howard University, June 4, 1965, http://constitutionreader.com/reader.engz?doc=constitution&chapter=OEBPS/Text/ch122.xhtml.

· 17. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 281.

· 18. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 279.

· 19. West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943) quoted in Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 279.

· 20. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 279.

· 21. Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township, 330 US 1 (1947); Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 US 38, 52-53 (1985).

· 22. For one of the best treatments of this view, see Andrew L. Seidel, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American (New York: Sterling Publishing, 2019).

· 23. Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005).

· 24. Kramnick and Moore, Godless Constitution, 75.

· 25. Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984).

· 26. Kramnick and Moore, Godless Constitution, 174.

· 27. Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical’s Lament (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

· 28. Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come, ix.

· 29. Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come, ix.

· 30. Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come, 35-69.

· 31. Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come, 64.

· 32. Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come, 66.

· 33. Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come, 64.

· 34. Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come, 65.

· 35. Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come, 185.

· 36. Ironically, points out New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, just before Balmer’s chapter on real Baptists, he “celebrates Victorian evangelicals for taking on ‘the task of reforming society according to the standards of godliness,’ and seeking ‘generally to make the world a better place.’” What this can only mean, says Douthat, is that a Christian is “allowed to mix religion and politics in support of sweeping social reforms—but only if those reforms are safely identified with the political Left, and with the interests of the Democratic party.” Ross Douthat, “Theocracy, Theocracy, Theocracy,” First Things, August-September 2006, www.firstthings.com/article/2006/08/.

· 37. George Yancey and David Williamson, What Motivates Cultural Progressives? Understanding Opposition to the Political and Christian Right (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012), 159. Yancey and Williamson set out to confirm that cultural progressives (what we call Freedom Left 2 position) do indeed share a distinct narrative. Through a major research project consisting of interviews, surveys, and review of the literature, they concluded that cultural progressives held a very well-thought-out narrative that consists of a beginning, a middle, and an end that tracks identically with what we have been laying out. But what surprised them was the clarity for which the progressive Left defined its enemy—calling the religious Right a new “Taliban,” and, to save America from theocracy, progressives must fight against Christianity in the public sphere, pointing out its backwardness and its resistance to progress, continuing to reaffirm a secular state, affirming the view of the founding that kept religion out of the public realm, maintaining a neutral public square, and warning people about the danger of a theocracy.

· 38. Yancey and Williamson, What Motivates Cultural Progressives?, 159.

· 39. Yancey and Williamson, What Motivates Cultural Progressives?, 159.

· 40. For more examples of this view, see Steven K. Green, Inventing Christian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? (Louisville, TN: Westminster John Knox, 2016): Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020); Ben How, The Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power Over Christian Values (New York: Broadside Books, 2019).

· 41. R. Bruce Douglass and Gerald M. Mara, “The Search for a Defensible Good: The Emerging Dilemma of Liberalism,” in Liberalism and the Good, ed. R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald M. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1990).

· 42. Douglass and Mara, “The Search for a Defensible Good,” 255.

· 43. Douglass and Mara, “The Search for a Defensible Good,” 265-66. Italics original.

· 44. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 274-315.

· 45. Michael J. Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2005), 157.

· 46. Sandel, Public Philosophy, 157.

· 47. Sandel, Public Philosophy, 162.

· 48. Sandel, Public Philosophy, 162.

· 49. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 4.

· 50. See Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 55-166.

· 51. Sandel, Public Philosophy, 172.

· 52. Sandel, Public Philosophy, 172.

· 53. See Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991), where she demonstrates how our society is now addicted to individual rights over any conception of the common good.

· 54. For an explanation on how this happened, see Sandel’s chapter eight, “Liberalism and the Keynesian Revolution in his Democracy’s Discontent, 250-73.

· 55. Randall Balmer, Solemn Reverence: The Separation of Church and State in American Life (Lebanon, NH: Truth to Power, 2021).

· 56. Balmer, Solemn Reverence, 35.

· 57. We will look at the radical Right and the theocratic temptation when we cover order right 3.

· 58. See Daniel L. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2002); and Thomas West, The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Philosophy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom (Cambridge , UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

· 59. For a good overview of Madison’s view on church and state, one that differs from Balmer’s interpretation, see Garrett Ward Sheldon, The Political Philosophy of James Madison (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

· 60. Charles Taylor, “Religion in a Free Society,” in Articles of Faith, Articles of Peace: The Religious Liberty Clauses and the American Public Philosophy, ed. James Davison Hunter and Os Guinness (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 1990), 103.

· 61. Taylor, “Religion in a Free Society,” 103.

· 62. Taylor, “Religion in a Free Society,” 104.

· 63. Taylor, “Religion in a Free Society,” 104.

· 64. Taylor, “Religion in a Free Society,” 104.

· 65. Randall Balmer, “The Pope Spoke Out. What About You, Amy Coney Barrett?” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 2020, www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-10-22/pope-francis-amy-coney-barrett-same-sex-unions.

· 66. While it came out after my manuscript went to the publisher, it appears his newest book, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2021) is just another example of Balmer lumping all religious conservatives in the same mythic theonomic camp, painting them all as illiberal, and ignoring the radicalism on the Left.

4. FREEDOM LEFT 3: FROM OPEN SOCIETY TO CLOSED SOCIETY

· 1. Christopher F. Rufo, “Gone Crazy: A New York Public School Principal Calls on White Parents to ‘Subvert White Authority,’” City Journal, February 18, 2021, www.city-journal.org/east-side-community-school-tells-parents-to-become-white-traitors/.

· 2. Rufo, “Gone Crazy.”

· 3. Christopher F. Rufo, “Failure Factory: Buffalo’s School District Tells Students That ‘All White People Play a Part in Perpetuating Systemic Racism’—While Presiding over Miserable Student Outcomes,” City Journal, February 23, 2021, www.city-journal.org/buffalo-public-schools-critical-race-theory-curriculum/.

· 4. Max Eden, “There Is No Apolitical Classroom,” City Journal, June 19, 2020, www.city-journal.org/rise-of-woke-schools/; Also, after month of denying CRT was officially taught in our nation’s schools, in July 2021, the National Education Association (NEA), declared that teaching critical race theory in K-12 schools is a major priority and that the NEA “Convey[s] its support” for teachers under attack by parents opposing CRT. Christopher R. Rufo, “Embracing Critical Theory, Teacher’s Union Says They—Not Parent—Control What Kids Learn,” New York Post, July 5, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/07/05/embracing-critical-theory-teachers-union-says-they-control-what-kids-learn/.

· 5. Max Eden, “There Is No Apolitical Classroom.”

· 6. Angela Davis, quoted in Eden, “There Is No Apolitical Classroom.”

· 7. Eden, “There Is No Apolitical Classroom.”

· 8. Eden, “There Is No Apolitical Classroom.”

· 9. “There Is No Apolitical Classroom: Resources for Teaching in These Times,” National Council of Teachers of English, August 15, 2017.

· 10. Max Eden, “Critical Race Theory in American Classrooms,” City Journal, September 18, 2020, www.city-journal.org/critical-race-theory-in-american-classrooms/.

· 11. Eden, “Critical Race Theory in American Classrooms.”

· 12. Tristan Justice, “Parents Vote to Stop Critical Race Insanity in Texas’s Top School District,” The Federalist, May 3, 2021, https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/03/parents-vote-to-stop-critical-race-insanity-in-texass-top-school-district/.

· 13. Jon Levine, “Half of New York Times Employees Feel They Can’t Speak Freely: Survey,” New York Post, February 13, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/02/13/new-york-times-employees-feel-they-cant-speak-freely-survey/.

· 14. Paul Bond, “‘Woke’ Christians Are Eroding Donald Trump’s Base and Dividing the Evangelical Church,” Newsweek, October 1, 2020, www.newsweek.com/1534720.

· 15. Aysha Khan, “Jim Wallis Replaced as Sojourners Editor After Controversy over Article on Catholic Racism,” Religion News, August 14, 2020, https://religionnews.com/2020/08/14/.

· 16. Bond, “‘Woke’ Christians.”

· 17. Mark Wingfield, “Houston Pastor Quits Southwestern and SBC over Seminary Presidents’ Statement on Race,” Baptist News, December 17, 2020, https://baptistnews.com/article/houston-pastor-quits-southwestern-and-sbc-over-seminary-presidents-statement-on-race/.

· 18. Erick-Woods Erickson, “Warnings in the PCA: Conservative Christians Are Dabbling in Marxism,” ewerickson.substack, September 12, 2020, https://ewerickson.substack.com/p/warnings-in-the-pca; Anthony Bradley, “Critical Race Theory Isn’t a Threat for Presbyterians,” Mere Orthodoxy, February 3, 2021, https://mereorthodoxy.com/critical-race-theory-presbyterian-church-in-america/.

· 19. Rod Dreher, “Postmodernism Destroyed His Church,” The American Conservative, December 10, 2019, www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/how-postmodernism-destroyed-his-evangelical-church/.

· 20. J. D. Hall, quoted in Bond, “‘Woke’ Christians.”

· 21. James Lindsay, “Eight Big Reasons Critical Race Theory Is Terrible for Dealing with Racism,” New Discourses, June 12, 2020, https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/reasons-critical-race-theory-terrible-dealing-racism/.

· 22. See Valerie Hobbs, “Is Critical Race Theory a Religion?,” Christianity Today, January 18, 2021, www.christianitytoday.com/scot-mcknight/2021/january/is-critical-race-theory-religion-responding-to-carl-trueman.html; Jemar Tisby believes that Christian nation alism is creating the conflict and is way more dangerous to America than the Far Left.

· 23. Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018); Andrew L Whitehead, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020).

· 24. Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 13.

· 25. Butler, Postmodernism, 15.

· 26. Charles Taylor, Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1998).

· 27. Christopher Lash, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); and Phillip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2006).

· 28. Butler, Postmodernism, 11, 16.

· 29. Butler, Postmodernism, 60.

· 30. Butler, Postmodernism, 60.

· 31. Butler, Postmodernism, 60.

· 32. Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020). Another helpful overview is Stephen Eric Bronner, Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

· 33. Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 111.

· 34. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2017).

· 35. Jim Belcher, Deep Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 71-90.

· 36. D. A. Carson, Becoming Conversant in the Emerging Church: Understanding the Movement and Its Implications (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009).

· 37. Timothy Keller, Generous Justice (New York: Viking, 2010); Brian McLaren, The Justice Project (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2009); Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw, Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008).

· 38. Jemar Tisby, How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021).

· 39. For an alternative more balanced view of America’s history of slavery and racism, see Yale’s David Brion Davis, who has written over a half dozen of the best histories of international and American slavery. See The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); and Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Regarding current levels of discrimination and how far we have come as a society, see Eugene Robinson, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (New York: Anchor, 2011).

· 40. See Tisby, How to Fight Racism.

· 41. Jonathan Lehman, “Identity Politics and the Death of Christian Unity,” 9 Marks, April 15, 2020, www.9marks.org/article/identity-politics-and-the-death-of-christian-unity, and David French, “On the Use and Abuse of Critical Race Theory in American Christianity,” The Dispatch, September 13, 2020, https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/on-the-use-and-abuse-of-critical.

· 42. The most prominent are Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020); Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin, 2018); Sam Harris, Making Sense podcast, #217, “The New Religion of Anti-Racism.”

· 43. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequity in American Life (New York: Verso, 2014).

· 44. See Lindsay, “Eight Big Reasons,” 2-3.

· 45. Lukianoff and Haidt, Coddling of the American Mind, 70.

· 46. But at least they are being honest. Princeton professor Stanley Fish, a postmodernist, admits that while the defenders of the godless-constitution view of the First Amendment continue to trumpet liberalism as the best way to avoid theocracy, the best way to maintain neutrality in the public square, he claims their tactics are, in fact, a ruse. “It’s a great move in which liberalism, in the form of academic freedom, gets to display its generosity while at the same time cutting the heart out of the views to which that generosity is extended.” Progressive are not for neutrality, contends Fish, but “in actuality they are trying to impose one point of view—their own—on those who disagree with them.” Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 41.

Exposing the contradiction and hypocrisy at the heart of this liberal procedural view, Alan Wolfe contends that “an ideology ostensibly dedicated to fairness thus becomes inherently unfair, forcing its opponents” to appear unfair, partial, and unjust. The game is rigged against them from the start.” Alan Wolfe, The Future of Liberalism (New York: Knopf, 2009), 141. Moreover, Wolfe argues that what Fish is claiming is that you will “immediately discover that its presumed neutrality is at best a sham and at worst a clever ploy.” (Wolfe, 141). Fish says that liberals should drop the ploy, abandon the scam, and be honest and say, “the presence of Marxists on campus is beneficial to education and the presence of bigots and racists is not, and that’s all there is to it.” (Fish, 89).

· 47. Molly Ball, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” Time, February 3, 2021.

· 48. Lukianoff and Haidt, Coddling of the American Mind, 64-65. See also Stephen Eric Bonner, Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The Rise of Victimhood: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 224.

· 49. Lukianoff and Haidt, Coddling of the American Mind, 66. Marcuse, a member of the critical theory Frankfurt School, rejected tolerance and free speech, arguing that they favor the dominant class, and called for shutting down free speech as a way of wrestling power away from the dominant culture. He called for a “liberating tolerance,” says Haidt and Lukianoff, one that favors the disadvantaged and discriminates against the dominant class. What liberating tolerance meant in practice for Marcuse “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”

· 50. For a prophetic prediction on how our liberal democracy would move from an open society to a closed society, see Wilmore Kendall, “The Open Society and Its Fallacies,”

· 51. Lindsay, “Eight Big Reasons,” 8.

· 52. Dana Kennedy, “CA Podcaster Gets Visit from Police After ‘Lightly’ Criticizing AOC on Twitter,” New York Post, April, 10, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/04/10/ca-podcaster-gets-visit-from-police-after-aoc-tweet/.

· 53. Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz, Special Report 2020: Democracy Under Lockdown, Freedom House, https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-report/2020/democracy-under-lockdown.

· 54. “Woman Refuses to Wear Mask in Texas, Again, Gets Arrested,” Associated Press, March 17, 2021.

· 55. Bill Hutchinson, “New Jersey Gym Owners Arrested After Repeatedly Defying COVID Shutdown Orders,” ABC News, July 27, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/jersey-gym-owners-arrested-repeatedly-defying-covid-shutdown/story?id+72008020.

· 56. Ryan Lovelace, “Big Tech Companies Insist Spying on Users, Government Is Inadvertent,” Washington Times, August 2, 2020, www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/aug/2/big-tech-companies-insist-spying-on-users-governme/.

· 57. Andy Ngo, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy (Nashville, TN: Center Street, 2021).

· 58. Lindsay, “Eight Big Reasons,” 6.

· 59. Andrew Sullivan, “A Glimpse at the Intersectional Left’s Political Endgame,” Intelligencer, November 15, 2019, 8-9.

· 60. Tucker Carlson Tonight, February 22, 2021, www.foxnews.com/transcipt/naomi-wolf-sounds-alarm-at-growing-power-of-autocratic-tyrants; Naomi Wolf, a democrat, has been warning America about the growth of the national security state for over fifteen years. See her book The End of America: Letters of Warning to a Young Patriot (Hartford, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007).

· 61. Chip Walter, Immortality, Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions, and the Quest to Live Forever, (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2020); Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper Perennial, 2018); and Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (New York: Penguin, 2017).

5. ORDER LEFT 2: THE RISE OF THE WELFARE STATE AND THE GREAT SOCIETY

· 1. For a perspective on how this happened, see Andy Ngo, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy (New York: Center Street, 2021).

· 2. Travis Campbell, “Black Lives Matter’s Effect on Police Lethal Use-of-Force,” SSRN, January 15, 2021 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097; Jerusalem Demsas, “The Effects of Black Lives Matter Protests,” Vox, April 9, 2021, www.vox.com/22360290/black-lives-matter-protest-crime-ferguson-effects-murder; Jennifer A. Kingson, “Exclusive: $1 Billion-Plus Riot Damage is Most Expensive in Insurance History,” Axios, September 16, 2020, www.axios.com/276c9bcc-a455-4067-b06a-66f9db4cea9c.html.

· 3. Tim Harris, “CNN’s Chris Cuomo: Who Says Protests Are Supposed To Be Polite and Peaceful?,” Real Clear Politics, June 4, 2020, www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/06/04/cnns_chris_cuomo_who_says_protests_are_supposed.html.

· 4. Josh Kraushaar, https://twitter.com/hotlinejosh/status/1267498902544101376?lang=en.

· 5. Kamala Harris, on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, June 18, 2020.

· 6. Nathan Layne, “One City ‘Ready to Explode’ as US Murder Rates Surge in Pandemic,” Reuters, June 25, 2021, www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2021-06-25/one-city-ready-to-explode-as-us-murder-rates-surge-in-pandemic.

· 7. David Bernstein, “Gaslighting Last Summer’s Riots and the Law Enforcement Response,” Reason, January 11, 2021, https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/11/gaslighting-last-summers-riots-and-the-law-enforcement-response/.

· 8. Heather MacDonald, The War on Cops (New York: Encounter Books, 2016).

· 9. “Liberal Cities, Radical Mayhem: Democratic Mayors and Governors Seem Unable to Stop the Destruction of Their Own Cities,” Editorial Board, June 2, 2020, Wall Street Journal, www.wsj.com/articles/liberal-cities-radical-mayhem-11591140986; Marc A. Thiessen, “Biden Can’t Blame Trump for the Anarchy in Democrat-Run Cities,” Washington Post, September 1, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/01/biden-cant-blame-trump-anarchy-democrat-run-cities/.

· 10. Marc Thiessen, “Maybe Trump Shouldn’t Save the Democrat-Run Cities Besieged by Violence,” Washington Post, July 16, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/16/maybe-trump-shouldnt-save-democrat-run-cities-besieged-by-violence/.

· 11. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “Baltimore After Freddie Gray: A Laboratory of Urban Violence,” Intelligencer, November 30, 2015, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/11/baltimore-after-freddie-gray.html, www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/magazine/baltimore-tragedy-crime.html.

· 12. See Crystal Wright, Con Job: How Democrats Gave Us Crime, Sanctuary Cities, Abortion Profiteering, and Racial Division (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2016), chap. 3.

· 13. Alec MacGillis, “The Tragedy of Baltimore,” New York Times, March 12, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/magazine/baltimore-tragedy-crime.html.

· 14. Tim Harris, “Bob Woodson: Democrats Blame Racism to Deflect Attention from Failures of Cities They’ve Run for 50 Years,” Real Clear Politics, June 3, 2020, www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/06/03/.

· 15. For video link to video interview with Bob Woodson, see Harris, “Bob Woodson: Democrats Blame Racism.”

· 16. Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 278.

· 17. See Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 280, where Sandel mentions the Court’s decision, Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township, 330 US 1 (1947) as a watershed moment.

· 18. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 280.

· 19. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 280.

· 20. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 280-82.

· 21. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 281.

· 22. Johnson, “Address at Swarthmore College,” June 8, 1964, in Public Papers, 1963-64, vol. 1, 757, quoted in Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 284.

· 23. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 284.

· 24. Johnson, “Remarks Before the National Convention,” August 27, 1964, Public Papers, 1963-1964, vol. 2, 1012-13, quoted in Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 284.

· 25. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 284.

· 26. Johnson, “Remarks Before the National Convention.”

· 27. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 285-89.

· 28. Sandel, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory, 12:1 (1984), 81-96.

· 29. Ron Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2015); Tony Campolo, Red Letter Christians: A Citizens Guide to Faith and Politics (Raleigh, NC: Regal, 2008); Jim Wallis, God’s Politics: A New Vision for Faith and Politics in America (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).

· 30. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Revolution of Values: Reclaiming Public Faith for the Common Good (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019); Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2018).

· 31. Wilson-Hartgrove, Revolution of Values, 163; 19; 156; 168-69; 53; 7; and 170 respectively.

· 32. Wilson-Hartgrove, Revolution of Values, 167. His narrative skips right over the Civil War, our national fight to end slavery, to end the oligarchy of the South, and take steps in Reconstruction to install a constitutional republic in the southern states. And like his jumping over the Civil War, he also has the tendency to jump from the Jim Crow era (a horrible chapter in American history) and over the seventy years of racial progress in our country (like electing our nation’s first Back president and the tremendous growth of the Black middle and super-rich classes), conflating the past with the present and contending that we are just as racist as we have ever been. This connecting of the Jim Crow past with present racism is a common tactic of the progressive Left, conflating the worst atrocities of the past—like chaining people to the cargo holds of slave ships—is equal to requiring I.D. for voting. Not only are these attempts at conflation not true but they devalue the suffering that took place under slavery and Jim Crow.

· 33. Wilson-Hartgrove, Revolution of Values, 160.

· 34. Wilson-Hartgrove, Revolution of Values, 171.

· 35. Wilson-Hartgrove, Revolution of Values, 160.

· 36. Wilson-Hartgrove, Revolution of Values, 112.

· 37. Wilson-Hartgrove, Revolution of Values, 26, 28.

· 38. Wilson-Hartgrove, Revolution of Values, 39-40.

· 39. Wilson-Hartgrove, Revolution of Values, 112, 42-43.

· 40. Wilson-Hartgrove, Revolution of Values, 153-73.

· 41. Wilson-Hartgrove, Revolution of Values, 7.

· 42. Louis Woodhill, “The War on Poverty Wasn’t a Failure—It was a Catastrophe,” Forbes, March 19, 2014, www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2014/03/19/the-war-on-poverty-wasnt-a-failure-it-was-a-catastrophe/?sh=527283006f49; Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

· 43. For those curious to explore the Black dissent (often called Uncle Toms, traitors, or not really Black) against the monolithic Black establishment, see Shelby Steel, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (New York: Harper Collins, 2009); Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (New York: Encounter Books, 2005); Jason Riley, Please Stop Helping Us (New York: Encounter Books, 2014); Candace Owens, Black Out: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation (New York: Threshold Editions, 2020) and Glenn Loury, One by One from the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (New York: Free Press, 1995).

· 44. John McWhorter, Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America (New York: Gotham, 2005). See also John McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (New York: Free Press, 2000).

· 45. See especially chapters two and three of McWhorter’s Winning the Race for his critique of these common excuses for Black poverty.

· 46. McWhorter, Winning the Race, 376.

· 47. McWhorter, Winning the Race, 377.

· 48. For the story of how Black welfare dependency increased dramatically, see McWhorter, Winning the Race, 114-51.

· 49. McWhorter, Winning the Race, 392.

· 50. McWhorter, Winning the Race, 75.

· 51. For a description of this tragedy, see McWhorter, Winning the Race, 376-92.

· 52. See chapter four, “Why Are You Talking About Blacks on Welfare?” in McWhorter, Winning the Race; for the impact of the 1960s on the white underclass, see Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2021).

· 53. “Feds Deny Minnesota Request for Aid to Rebuild After Unrest,” Associated Press, July 11, 2020, www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/12/george-floyd-feds-deny-minnesota-request-aid-rebuild/5423569002/.

· 54. Wilson-Hartgrove, Revolution of Values, 55.

· 55. For an account of how the Democrat party resisted Reconstruction, see Forrest A. Nabors, From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017;) For the story on how the Democrat Party continued to support racial segregation until the mid-1960’s, see Bruce Bartlett, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008).

· 56. For one of the most in-depth studies of the Republican Party during Reconstruction, see Forrest A. Nabors, From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017).

· 57. See Bruce Bartlett, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 166-68.

· 58. For the account on how the Democrat party enticed Blacks with welfare benefits (something they historically resisted), see McWhorter, Winning the Race, 376-92.

· 59. McWhorter, Winning the Race, 114-50.

· 60. This doesn’t mean the Republican Party is free of the ruling class or innocent when it comes to enslaving the Black, Brown, and White underclass; as we will see when we cover freedom right 2 and 3, this class war has infected the Republican Party as well. And over the years the Republican Party has been home to many enemies of constitutional republicanism, giving them cover for their oligarchic policies. So there is no pure party. I am just trying to correct Wilson-Hartgrove’s description of the two parties and his attribution of oligarchy to the Republican Party.

· 61. If any narrative is enslaving the poor along with the working and middle classes, it is not Christian nationalists (which for the most part want to return to our Constitution, the grounding of natural law, and the protection of minorities). We will look at Christian nationalism in chapters ten and eleven, trying to understand when it supports constitutional republicanism and when it slides into illiberalism.

· 62. Joel Kotkin, “What Do the Oligarchs Have in Mind for Us?” Quillette, June 19, 2019, https://quillette.com/2019/06/19/what-do-the-oligarchs-have-in-mind-for-us.

· 63. Astra Taylor, “Reclaiming the Future: On the Growing Appeal of Socialism in an Age of Inequality,” New Republic, May 17, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/153804.

6. ORDER LEFT 3: THE REIFIED POSTMODERNISM OF ANTIRACISM

· 1. Rebecca Sagar and Brie Loskota, “White Christian Nationalism and the Next Wave of Political Violence,” The Hill, February 2, 2021, https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/539530-white-christian-nationalism-and-the-next-wave-of-political-violence.

· 2. Brian Naylor and Ryan Lucas, “Wray Stresses Role of Right-Wing Extremism in Hearing About January 6 Riot,” NPR, March 2, 2021, www.npr.org/2021/03/02/972539274/.

· 3. “Remarks by President Biden Commemorating the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre,” the White House, June 1, 2021, https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/06/02/remarks-by-president-biden-commemorating-the-100th-anniversary-of-the-tulsa-race-massacre/.

· 4. Christopher F. Rufo, “State-Enforced Racial Segregation—by Progressives,” New York Post, October 18, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/10/18/state-enforced-racial-segregation-by-progressives/.

· 5. Rufo, “State-Enforced Racial Segregation.”

· 6. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, “Social Justice Scholarship and Thought,” chap. 8 in Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everyone (Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2020).

· 7. Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 182, italics original.

· 8. Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 182.

· 9. Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 182.

· 10. Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 182.

· 11. Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 183, italics added.

· 12. Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 183.

· 13. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (London: Oneworld Publications, 2019). See also Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (London: Oneworld Publicans, 2015); Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It Is So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020); and Michael Eric Dyson, Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2020).

· 14. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, 13-23.

· 15. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, 13.

· 16. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, 19.

· 17. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, 24-34; Here Kendi argues a point very similar to the New York Times 1619 Project, which contends the Revolutionary War was fought to maintain slavery and that our country was founded on racism. For a good overview of the 1619 Project and some of the pushback from liberal historians, see Adam Serwer, “Historians Clash with the 1619 Project,” the Atlantic, December 23, 2019, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/.

· 18. Aja Romano, “The ‘Controversy’ over Journalist Sarah Jeong Joining the New York Times, explained,” Vox, August 3, 2018, www.vox.com/2018/8/3/17644704/sarah-jeong-new-york-times-tweets-backlash-racism.

· 19. Libby Watson, “The New York Times Really Fucked This One Up,” Splinter, August 2, 2018, https://splinternews.com/1828061129.

· 20. Watson, “The New York Times Really Fucked This One Up.”

· 21. Zach Beauchamp, “In Defense of Sarah Jeong,” Vox, August 3, 2018, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/3/17648566/.

· 22. For two recent examples, see Alex Morey, “FIRE Warns University of Illinois at Chicago Over Investigation into Law Professor’s Exam Question,” FIRE, January 22, 2021, www.thefire.org/fire-warns-university-of-illinois; Bari Weiss, “Whistleblower at Smith College Resigns Over Racism,” bariweiss.substack.com, February 19, 2021, https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/whistleblower-at-smith-college-resigns.

· 23. George Orwell, Nineteen Eight-Four (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1949), 10.

· 24. Denny Burke, “Can We Eat the Meat and Spit Out the Bones of CRT?” Denyburk.com, www.dennyburke.com/can-we-eat-the-meat-and-spit-out-the-bnes-with-crt/.

· 25. Neil Shenvi, Twitter, @neilshenvi, February 26, 2021, https://twitter.com/neilshenvi/status/1365308240691666951.

· 26. Eliza Griswold, “How Black Lives Matter Is Changing the Church,” New Yorker, August 30, 2020, www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/how-black-lives-matter-is-changing-the-church.

· 27. Jemar Tisby, quoted in Griswold, “How Black Lives Matter,” www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/how-black-lives-matter-is-changing-the-church.

· 28. A few examples of evangelicals who seem to have embraced antiracism are Latasha Morrison, Be the Bridge: Pursuing God’s Heart for Racial Reconciliation (Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook, 2019); Daniel Hill, White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2017); Jemar Tisby, How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021).

· 29. Daniel Hill, White Lies: Nine Ways to Expose and Resist the Racial Systems That Divide Us (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2020). I am aware that not everyone who calls themselves a progressive evangelical fits into order left 3. By focusing on one book, I am attempting to help readers spot the telltale signs of those who can fit more or less into this quadrant position. To this end I have chosen Hill’s book as an example, but not the only one, of an evangelical whom I place in this position.

· 30. Hill, White Lies.

· 31. See chapter four, “Attack the Narrative,” in White Lies, Daniel Hill, 77-104. Also see David Morgan, “Bryan Stevenson: ‘The North Won the Civil War, but the South Won the Narrative War’ on the History of Racism” CBS News, June 24, 2019, www.cbsnews.com/news/bryan-stevenson-we-are-all-complicit-in-our-countrys-history-of-racism/.

· 32. To understand the false narrative of the Confederate South and their rejection of a natural-right grounding found in the Constitution, no book has been more helpful to me than Harry Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming Civil War (Boston: Rowan & Littlefield, 2000).

· 33. See chapter four, “Attack the Narrative,” in White Lies, Daniel Hill, 77-104.

· 34. For one of the best examples of the historians on the left who reject the Confederate narrative as the true definition of the American founding, see Sean Wilentz, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2019).

· 35. Ironically, in attempting this wholesale exchange, that is, the antiracism narrative adopting the Lost Cause narrative, siding with John C. Calhoun over Abraham Lincoln—thus taking on Calhoun’s views that our nation was conceived in slavery, that the Constitution was a scam to support slavery, and that natural rights were nothing but a legal fiction on which to ground our political life together—they are at the very same time rejecting the philosophical and religious grounding of the founders and, unlike Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., have nothing to appeal back to. Moreover, while it is true that Calhoun uses his narrative to support slavery and the antiracism narrative uses it to oppose it, they both hold the same view of America’ founding and its rejection of natural rights.

· 36. See Joel Kotkin, “Woke Politics Are a Disaster for Minorities,” The American Mind, January 25, 2021, https://americanmind.org/memo/woke-politics-are-a-disaster-for-minorities/.

· 37. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991).

· 38. See Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 262-65.

· 39. John McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (New York: Free Press, 2000), see chapters one through four, 1-163.

· 40. John McWhorter, “Atonement as Activism,” American Interest, May 24, 2018, www.the-american-interest.com/2018/05/24/atonement-as-activism/.

· 41. Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020); Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); and Kristen Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020).

· 42. Robert P. Jones, “Racism Among White Christians Is Higher Than Among the Nonreligious. That’s No Coincidence,” Think, July 27, 2020, www.nbcnews.com/think/ncna1235045.

· 43. Jemar Tisby, “Is the White Church Inherently Racist?” New York Times, August 18, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/08-18/books/review/white-too-long-robert-p-jones.html; also see Carl Trueman, “Evangelicals and Race Theory,” First Things, February 2020, 7.

· 44. John McWhorter, “Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion,” Daily Beast, July 27, 2015, www.thedailybeast.com/antiracism-our-flawed-new-religion.

· 45. John McWhorter, The Elect, https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-the-threat-to-a-progressive. While not scheduled for publication until 2022, he is making the first few chapters available to subscribers on Substack.

· 46. McWhorter, The Elect.

· 47. For an interesting discussion on how the conflict between oligarchy and constitutional republicanism goes back to the first American settlers in Jamestown and Plymouth and how two distinct cultures, political philosophies, and religious outlooks could be found in the North and the South, see James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Ritchie Devon Watson Jr., Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); D. H. Fisher, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press USA, 1989).

· 48. Perhaps this is why Amazon.com banned Ryan T. Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment (New York: Encounter Books, 2018).

7. FREEDOM RIGHT 2: LIBERTARIANS AND THE QUEST FOR OPEN BORDERS

· 1. Stef W. Kight, “Biden Confronts Humanitarian Crisis at the Border,” Axios, March 5, 2021, www.axios.com/1948f056-15a1-4a63-bf4d-1f3f7e846b69.html.

· 2. Paul A. Reyes, “The Southern Border Is Biden’s Biggest Test Yet,” CNN, March 12, 2021, www.cnn.com/2021/03/12/opinions/unaccompanied-minors-biden-test-southern-border-reyes/index.html.

· 3. Reyes, “The Southern Border Is Biden’s Biggest Test Yet.”

· 4. Joe Concha, “Team Biden Offers Alternative Reality on Border Crisis with No Plan to Fix It,” The Hill, March 8, 2020, https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/542043-team-biden-offers-alternative-reality-on-border-crisis-with-no-plan-to.

· 5. Concha, “Team Biden Offers Alternative Reality.”

· 6. Concha, “Team Biden Offers Alternative Reality.”

· 7. According to Melissa Chinchilla’s report “Stemming the Rise of Latino Homeless: Lessons from Los Angeles County,” roughly half of the fifty-five thousand homeless in Los Angeles are Hispanic, many of them recent immigrants, who can’t find housing or jobs. Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, https://latino.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Stemming-the-rise-of-Latino-Homelessness-2-1.pdf; Todd Bensman, “New Influx of Covid-19 Patients Floods U.S. Border State Hospitals: But Who Are They? Reporters Don’t Want to Know,” Center for Immigration Studies, June 10, 2020, https://cis.org/Bensman/New-Influx-Covid19-Patients-Floods-US-Border-State-Hospitals.

· 8. Ashley Parker, Nick Miroff, Sean Sullivan and Tyler Pager, “‘No End in Sight:’ Inside the Biden Administration’s Failure to Contain the Border Surge,” Washington Post, March 20, 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/21824e94-8818-11eb-8a8b-5cf82c3dffe4_story.html.

· 9. Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (New York: Free Press, 2019).

· 10. Carlson, Ship of Fools, 65.

· 11. Carlson, Ship of Fools, 67.

· 12. Carlson, Ship of Fools, 67.

· 13. Bernie Sanders, quoted in Park MacDougald, “Why Do Libertarians and the Left Have Such Similar Views on Immigration?” New York, December 12, 2018, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/why-are-libertarians-and-the-left-both-for-open-immigration.html.

· 14. Tucker Carlson Tonight, June 19, 2019, http://youtu.be/8lgekVVqwkk. A quick Google search shows that Soros, who through his Open Society organization, a major funder of left-wing open-border groups, has also been a major funder for the Cato Institute, a major libertarian think tank in DC, founded by Charles Koch.

· 15. Lauri Bennett, “The Kochs Aren’t the Only Funders of Cato,” Forbes, March 13, 2012, www.forbes.com/sites/lauriebennett/2012/03/13/the-kochs-arent-the-only-funders-of-cato/.

· 16. Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 10.

· 17. For the best history of libertarianism and its different camps see Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2007).

· 18. While Brennan accepts the lofty goals of the progressive Left, particularly its social and moral agenda, he disagrees on the means to achieve these ends. He shares their ideal—that economic institutions should benefit the poor—but he disagrees with the way to achieve this.

· 19. Brennan, Libertarianism, 14.

· 20. The irony, however, is that the order left 3 progressive Democrats no longer want government to be neutral or to protect civil liberties but want it to be decidedly woke. We will look at “woke capitalism” more in chapter eight.

· 21. Brennan, Libertarianism, 23.

· 22. Brennan, Libertarianism, 3-4.

· 23. Peter Margulies, “The Libertarian Case for Immigration (and Against Trump),” Lawfare Book Review, July 16, 2020; Zoey Poll, “The Case for Open Borders,” New Yorker, February 20, 2020.

· 24. Brennan, Libertarianism, 38.

· 25. Jason Brennan, “In Praise of Open Borders,” Bleeding Heart Libertarians, March 17, 2014, https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/03/in-praise-of-open-borders.

· 26. Thomas Freidman, “Our One-Party Democracy,” New York Times, September 8, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html.

· 27. Lee Smith, “The Thirty Tyrants,” Tablet, February 3, 2021, 2.

· 28. Stuart Anderson, “A Biden Immigration Policy: New Hope for Immigrants and Business,” Forbes, November 8, 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/11/08/a-biden-immigration-policy-new-hope-for-immigrants-and-businesses/?sh=680b90637842.

· 29. Ross Douthat, “The Rise of Woke Capitalism,” New York Times, February 28, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/corporate-america-activism.html.

· 30. Brink Lindsey, “Right Is Wrong,” in Brink Lindsey, Jonah Goldberg, and Matt Kibbe, “Where Do Libertarians Belong? A Reason Debate,” Reason, August-September 2010, https://reason.com/2010/07/12/where-do-libertarians-belong-3. See also Brink Lindsey, “Why Libertarians and Conservatives Should Stop Opposing the Welfare State,” Niskanen Center, August 9, 2017, www.niskanencenter.org/libertarians-conservatives-stop-opposing-welfare-state.

· 31. Michael Borone, “Team Biden Knows Its Open-Borders Plan Is Unpopular—So Why Do It?” New York Post, March 12, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/03/12/team-biden-knows-its-open-borders-plan-is-unpopular-so-why-do-it/; Victor Joecks, “What If Open Borders Is Biden’s Plan?,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, June 12, 2021, www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-joecks/victor-joecks-what-if-open-borders-is-bidens-plan-2377133/.

· 32. Brink Lindsey, “Right Is Wrong,” 3.

· 33. Brennan, Libertarianism, 73.

· 34. Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, William F. Marina, “Did the Constitution Betray the Revolution?,” Independent Institute, January 1, 1981.

· 35. Nathan W. Schlueter and Nikolai G. Wenzel, Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives? The Foundations of the Libertarian-Conservative Debate (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 95.

· 36. Schlueter and Wenzel, Selfish Libertarians, 93.

· 37. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 319-21.

· 38. I am grateful to a phone conversation with C. J. Engel, an evangelical who runs the Reformed Libertarian website, for confirming that there are indeed Christian libertarians and also for explaining the often confusing genealogy of libertarianism and the myriad factions within it.

· 39. Since most of the writers at the Acton Institute are committed Catholics and believe in the existence of natural law, I don’t consider them philosophical libertarians. Most of them fit much better in the New Vital Center, which I will lay out in part three.

· 40. While we will look at Ayn Rand in chapter eight, readers might like to consult “Objectivism, Anarcho-Capitalism, and the Effects of the Psychedelics on Faith and Freedom,” ch. 5 in Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism for a good overview of her thought.

· 41. The blog is no longer active as of 2021.

· 42. Kevin Vallier, “Christian Pacifism but Not Christian Libertarianism,” Bleeding Heart Libertarians, April 30, 2014, https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/04/christian-pacifism.

· 43. Vallier, “Christian Pacifism.”

· 44. Elise Daniel, ed., Called to Freedom: Why You Can Be Christian and Libertarian (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017); and Norman Horn, Doug Stuart, Kerry Baldwin, and Dick Clark, Faith Seeking Freedom: Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions (St. Louis: Libertarian Christian Institute Press, 2020).

· 45. Horn, Stuart, Baldwin, and Clark, Faith Seeking Freedom, 5.

· 46. Horn, Stuart, Baldwin, and Clark, Faith Seeking Freedom, 14.

· 47. Horn, Stuart, Baldwin, and Clark, Faith Seeking Freedom, 15.

· 48. For a list of all the resources on Romans 13 produced by the Libertarian Institute, see Doug Stuart, “Romans 13 for Dummies,” June 16, 2018, https://libertarianchristians.com/2018/06/16/romans-13-for-dummies/.

· 49. See Horn, et al., Faith Seeking Freedom, 83, for their discussion on immigration. Also, the most well-known critique of immigration and open borders from a libertarian comes from Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Case for Free Trade and Restricted Immigration,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, July 30, 2014.

· 50. Horn, Stuart, Baldwin, and Clark, Faith Seeking Freedom, 21.

· 51. Horn, Stuart, Baldwin, and Clark, Faith Seeking Freedom, 83.

· 52. See Horn, Stuart, Baldwin, and Clark, “What About Immigration?” in Faith Seeking Freedom, 83-89.

· 53. For positive accounts of the early libertarian movement, see George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1996); Lee Edwards, Educating for Liberty: The First Half Century of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003); Justin Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008); and Murray N. Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right (Auburn, AL: Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 2007).

· 54. Russell Kirk, “Libertarians: Chirping Sectaries,” essay accessed at https://mikechurch.com/epic-paleocons-vs-libertarians-in-russell-kirks-chirping-sectaries/.

· 55. For a long, thought-out defense of atheism from the Ayn Rand Institute, see Onkar Ghate, “America Needs a Second Revolution to Save Its First,” New Ideal, September 17, 2018, https://newideal.aynrand.org/america-needs-a-second-revolution-to-save-its-first.

· 56. Brennan, Libertarianism, 51.

· 57. Walter Berns, “The Need for Public Authority,” in Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate, ed. George Carey (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004), 58-59.

· 58. Berns, “Need for Public Authority,” 59.

· 59. Berns, “Need for Public Authority,” 62.

· 60. Berns, “Need for Public Authority,” 63.

· 61. See Tucker Carlson’s speech at the National Conservatism conference in 2019, https://nationalconservatism.org/natcon-dc-2019/presenters/tucker-carlson/.

· 62. Joel Kotkin, “A New Way Forward on Immigration,” Orange County Register, August 22, 2017, www.ocregister.com/2017/08/20/a-new-way-forward-on-trade-and-immigration/.

· 63. Michelle Malkin, Open Borders Inc.: Who’s funding America’s Destruction? (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2019).

· 64. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Case for Free Trade and Restricted Immigration,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, July 30, 2014, https://mises.org/library/case-free-trade-and-restricted-immigration-0.

· 65. Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration (New York: First Second Books, 2019).

· 66. Matt Welch, “Libertarian Presidential Candidates Champion Open Borders,” Reason, February 26, 2020, https://reason.com/2020/02/26/libertarian-presidential-candidates-champion-open-borders/.

· 67. Welch, “Libertarian Presidential Candidates,” italics added.

· 68. Javier Hidalgo, “The Libertarian Case for Open Borders,” Washington Post, September 20, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/09/20/the-libertarian-case-for-open-borders.

· 69. Fareed Zakaria, “Biden’s Generous Immigration Policies Could Turn Out to Backfire,” Washington Post, March 11, 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/ded049ac-82a9-11eb-81db-b02f0398f49a_story.html.

· 70. Zakaria, “Biden’s Generous Immigration Policies.”

· 71. Carlson, Ship of Fools, 59-82.

· 72. Carlson, Ship of Fools, 59-82.

· 73. Dylan Scott, “Why Democrats Hopes Were Dashed in Texas,” Vox, November 4, 2020, www.vox.com/21549000/texas-election-results-trump-biden-hispanic-vote.

· 74. Maggie Fitzgerald, “Black and Hispanic Unemployment is at a Record Low,” CNBC, October 4, 2019, www.cnbc.com/2019/10/04/black-and-hispanic-unemployment-is-at-a-record-low.html; Sean Collins, “Trump Made Gains with Black Voters in Some States. Here’s Why,” Vox, November 4, 2020, www.vox.com/2020/11/4/21537966/trump-black-voters-exit-polls.

· 75. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

· 76. Christopher Caldwell, “Immigration’s Hidden Costs,” Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2016, 50.

· 77. Caldwell cites George J. Borjas: “The earnings of the North’s native workforce will drop by almost 40 percent, while Southern workers will more than double their earnings.” Caldwell, “Immigration’s Hidden Costs,” 50.

· 78. Caldwell, “Immigration’s Hidden Costs,” 50.

· 79. Michael Yon, War Room Pandemic, episode 794; www.pandemic.warrroom.org; Also see Todd Bensman, “Congress and Journalists Report on Historic Surge of ‘Extra-Continental’ Migrants Now Pouring Through Panama to U.S. Border,” Center for Immigration Studies, June 2, 2021, https://cis.org/Bensman/Congressman-and-Journalists-Report-Historic-Surge-ExtraContinental-Migrants-Now-Pouring.

· 80. We will look at the Great Reset in chapter eight.

· 81. Whittaker Chambers, “Big Sister Is Watching You,” National Review, December 28, 1957, www.nationalreview.com/2005/01/big-sister-watching-you-whittaker-chambers/.

8. FREEDOM RIGHT 3: RADICAL LIBERTARIANS, THE END OF THE STATE, AND THE RISE OF UTOPIAN TECHNOCRACY

· 1. Jonathan Ponciano, “Google Billionaire Eric Schmidt Warns of ‘National Emergency’ if China Overtakes US in AI Research,” Forbes, March 7, 2021, www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2021/03/07/google-billionaire-eric-schmidt-warns-of-national-emergency-if-china-overtakes-us-in-ai-tech/. See also “The Final Report,” National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, at www.nscai.gov/2021-final-report.

· 2. For a discussion of AI and smart cities, see Michael Rectenwald, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (Nashville, TN: World Encounter Institute, 2019).

· 3. Miranda Devine, “US Companies Riddled with Members of Chinese Communist Party,” New York Post, December 13, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/12/13/us-companies-riddled-with-members-of-chinese-communist-party/; Varun Hukeri, “American Companies Used to Collaborate with the Nazis. Now They’re Working with the Chinese Communist Party,” Daily Caller, July 22, 2020, https://dailycaller.com/2020/07/22/companies-chinese-communist-party-nazi-germany-collaborators-uighur-camps-forced-labor/.

· 4. Jordan Davidson, “Facebook Executive Caught on Secret Recording Warns About Big Tech’s Power: ‘They Must Be Stopped,’” The Federalist, March 16, 2021, https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/16/facebook-executive-caught-on-secret-recording-warns-about-big-techs-power-they-must-be-stopped/.

· 5. Cathalijne Adams, “U.S. Job Loss to China Swells to 3.7 Million,” Alliance for American Manufacturing, January 30, 2020, http://americanmanufacturing.org/blog/u-s-a-job-loss-to-china-swells-to3-7-million/; also see Chapter four, “Death to America’s Manufacturing Base: Why We Done Play (or Work) in Peoria Anymore” in Peter Navarro, Death by China: Confronting the Dragon—A Global Call for Action (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011), 49-66.

· 6. Cody Cain, “No, Mr. President: China Didn’t Steal our Jobs. Corporate America Gave Them Away,” Salon, May 27, 2019, www.salon.com/2019/05/27/no-mr-president-china-didnt-steal-our-jobs-corporate-america-gave-them-away/; Tom Hamburger, “Romney’s Bain Capital Invested in Companies That Moved Jobs Overseas,” The Washington Post, June 21, 2012, www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/romneys-bain-capital-invested-in-companies-that-moved-jobs-overseas/2012/06/21/gJQAsD9ptV_story.html.

· 7. See the documentary Death by China: One Lost Job at a Time, directed by Peter Navarro (Seattle: Amazon Prime Videos, 2013).

· 8. Bob Davis, “When the World Opened the Gates to China,” Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2018, www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-world-opened-the-gates-of-china-1532701482.

· 9. See “President Bill Clinton’s 1999 International Trade Speech,” www.c-span.org/video/?153935-1/international-trade-speech.

· 10. Any criticism I have of China is not about the Chinese people, who are victims, but the Communist Chinese Party and its leaders. See Steven W. Mosher, Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream Is the New Threat to World Order (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2017).

· 11. Peter Navarro, Death by China: Confronting the Dragon—A Global Call to Action (Hoboken, NJ: Pearson FT Press, 2011); and Clive Hamilton, Hidden Hand Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping the World (London: Oneworld, 2020); Clyde Prestowitz, The World Turned Upside Down: America, China, and the Struggle for Global Leadership (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).

· 12. Ben Weingarten, “Americans Need to Stop Funding the Chinese Gulag,” The Federalist, November 19, 2019, https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/19/americans-need-to-stop-funding-the-chinese-gulag/; and Ben Weingarten, “How China Exploits Commerce to Curb-Stomp the United States,” The Federalist, February 5, 2021, https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/05/how-china-exploits-commerce-to-curb-stomp-the-united-states/. On how China exploits our bipartisan ruling elite, see Peter Schweitzer, Secret Empires How the American Political Elite Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends (New York: HarperCollins, 2019).

· 13. Oren Cass, Pitchfork Economics podcast, December 1, 2020, https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/restoring-conservative-economics-with-oren-cass/; for more of his criticism of libertarianism and how it has been adopted by both Republicans and Democrats, see Oren Cass, “A New Conservatism,” Foreign Affairs, March-April 2020, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-02-12/new-conservatism-free-market.

· 14. Cass, Pitchfork Economics podcast.

· 15. For an interesting story of how the Trump administration attempted to disrupt the Wall Street libertarians, see Josh Rogin, Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021). To understand Biden’s cabinet appointments and their connection to China, see Ben Weingarten, “Why You Should Be Skeptical of the New ‘Tough on China’ Joe Biden,” The Federalist, February 17, 2021, https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/17/why-you-should-be-skeptical-of-the-new-tough-on-china-joe-biden/; and Ana Swanson, “Biden on ‘Short Leash’ as Administration Rethinks China Relations,” New York Times, February 17, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/business/economy/biden-china.html.

· 16. Phrase taken from the title of Jerome Tuccille’s, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2012).

· 17. Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Dutton / Signet, 1992).

· 18. Marilyn Moore, “Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged Places in the Top 20 on the Great American Read,” Atlas Society, November 1, 2018, https://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/6244-ayn-rand-s-atlas-shrugged-places-in-the-top-20-on-the-great-american-read.

· 19. Brian Doherty, “Rand and the Right,” Reason, October 15, 2007, https://reason.com/2007/10/15/rand-and-the-right.

· 20. Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3.

· 21. Burns, Goddess of the Market, 3.

· 22. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, 30th anniversary ed. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 143. For the best summary of Rand’s views, see Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

· 23. Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement, 143.

· 24. Brian Doherty, “Rand and the Right,” Reason, October 15, 2007, https://reason.com/2007/10/15/rand-and-the-right.

· 25. Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement, 143.

· 26. For conservatives this would not do. William F. Buckley, founder and editor of the National Review and the leader of the conservative movement at the time, found the novel’s godlessness alarming and a danger to the conservative movement, which at the time was forging an alliance between economic conservatives and religious traditionalists. Rand threated this alliance. When Rand read Chambers’s review, she was furious, and from that day on she declared war on the conservative movement. Looking back, most historians of the conservative movement agree that Buckley and Chambers won, and Rand was kicked out of the movement. But that doesn’t mean that Rand stopped influencing a whole generation of young people on the right.

· 27. Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement, 143.

· 28. Burns, Goddess of the Market, 203. Also, for a favorable view of Rand, see Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

· 29. Burns, Goddess of the Market, 253.

· 30. Burns, Goddess of the Market, 219.

· 31. Roy A. Childs Jr., “Objectivism and the State: An Open Letter to Ayn Rand,” LewRockwell .com, accessed February 27, 2020, www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/roy-a-childs-jr/.

· 32. Burns, Goddess of the Market, 252.

· 33. Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 209-21.

· 34. On Rothbard’s battles with Beltway libertarians, see C. Jay Engel, “Murray Rothbard Versus the Koch Libertarians,” Bastion, February 16, 2019, www.bastionmagazine.com/articles/murray-rothbard-versus-the-koch-libertarians. To understand why libertarians are not conservatives, see Nathan W. Schlueter and Nicholai G. Wenzel, Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017).

· 35. To understand Rothbard’s outreach to the radical Left, see Justin Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2014), 248-53; and Murray N. Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right (Auburn, AL: Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 2007), chaps. 13–14.

· 36. For the story of Rothbard’s attempt at a paleo-libertarian alliance, see George Hawley, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016), 196-201.

· 37. “Our Mission, Vision, & Core Values,” Libertarian Christian Institute, accessed February 29, 2020, https://libertarianchristians.com/mission.

· 38. For a list of their resources on Romans 13, see Doug Stuart, “Romans 13 for Dummies,” Libertarian Christian Institute, June 16, 2018, https://libertarianchristians.com/2018/06/16/romans-13-for-dummies.

· 39. Greg Boyd, The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007).

· 40. As Boyd tells the story, when he originally preached the material that later would become the book, 20 percent of the congregation, a thousand people, left the church.

· 41. Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), 271-72; see also Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

· 42. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 614.

· 43. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 615.

· 44. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 616.

· 45. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The California Ideology,” Alamut, August 1995, www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/17/the-californian-ideology-2/.

· 46. Barbrook and Cameron, “California Ideology,” 2.

· 47. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 618.

· 48. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 618-19.

· 49. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

· 50. Barbrook and Cameron, “California Ideology,” 11-12.

· 51. To understand high-tech’s obsession with immortality, see Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (New York: Penguin, 2018); and Chip Walter, Immortality, Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions, and the Quest to Live Forever (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2020).

· 52. Oren Cass, “A New Conservatism,” Foreign Affairs, April 2020, 7.

· 53. Dani Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 1997); see also Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011). For a helpful summary of Rodrik’s views and the reaction they engendered, see Nikil Saval, “Globalization: The Rise and Fall of an Idea that Swept the World,” The Guardian, July 14, 2017, www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/14/globalisation-the-rise-and-fall-of-an-idea-that-swept-the-world.

· 54. From an interview with Asher Schechter, “Globalization Has Contributed to Tearing Our Societies Apart,” Pro Market, March 29, 2018, https://promarket.org/2018/03/29/globalization-contributed-tearing-societies-apart/.

· 55. Samuel P. Huntington, “Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite,” National Interest, March 1, 2004, 1; https://nationalinterest.org/article/dead-souls-the-denationalization-of-the-american-elite-620.

· 56. Huntington, “Dead Souls.”

· 57. Ross Douthat, “The Rise of Woke Capital,” New York Times, February 28, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/corporate-america-activism.html.

· 58. Ben Weingarten, “America Is Fast Becoming a Woke Theocracy,” Newsweek, July 21, 2020, www.newsweek.com/1518938; also see Stephen R. Soukup, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business (New York: Encounter Books, 2021).

· 59. Weingarten, “America is Fast Becoming a Woke Theocracy.”

· 60. Ben Weingarten, “Woke Capitalists Sell Out US to China Behind Mask of Virtue,” Real Clear Politics, June 4, 2020, www.realclearpolitics.com/2020/06/03/woke_capitalists_sell_out_us_to_china_behind_mask_of_virtue_513154.html.

· 61. Joel Kotkin, “New-Feudalism in California,” American Affairs, Summer 2020, Vol. IV, Number 2; https:/americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/neo-feudalism-in-california/.

· 62. Mark Piesing, “Silicon Valley’s ‘Suicide Pill’ for Mankind,” Unherd, August 20, 2018, https://unherd.com/2018/08/silicon-valleys-suicide-pill-mankind; see also Nick Bilton, “Silicon Valley’s Most Disturbing Obsession,” Vanity Fair, October 5, 2016, www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/10/silicon-valley-ayn-rand-obsession; Wesley J. Smith, “The Transhumanist Bill of Wrongs,” Discovery Institute, October 23, 2018, https://spectator.org/the-transhumanist-bill-of-wrongs/Wesley J. Smith; “New-Time Religion,” First Things, December, 2014, www.firstthings.com/article/2014/12/new-time-religion; and Alexander Thomas, “AI and Transhumanism: Could Quest for Super-intelligence and Eternal Life Lead to a Dystopian Nightmare?” Newsweek, August 1, 2017, www.newsweek.com/644128.

· 63. Mark E. Jeftovic, “Transhumanism: The New Religion of the Coming Technocracy,” Axis of Easy, June 24, 2020, https://axisofeasy.com/aoe/transhumanism-the-new-religion-of-the-coming-technocracy/.

· 64. Thomas, “AI and Transhumanism,” 5-6.

· 65. Thomas, “AI and Transhumanism.”

· 66. Thomas, “AI and Transhumanism.”

· 67. Michael Rectenwald, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (Nashville, TN: New English Review Press, 2019).

· 68. See Peter Navarro’s The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought And How They Can Be Won (Hoboken, NJ: FT Press, 2006); Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy To Replace America As The Global Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2016); Steven Mosher, Hegemon: China’s Plan To Dominate Asia And The World (New York: Encounter Books, 2000).

· 69. Tanner Green, “It Is Time For A Libertarian Case Against China,” Scholars Stage Blogspot, April 29, 2020, https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/04/it-is-time-for-libertarian-case-against.html?m=1; see also Tanner Green, “China Does Not Want Your Rules Based Order,” Scholars Stage Blogspot, June 4, 2016, https://scholars-stage.org/china-does-not-want-your-rules-based-order/; “Give No Heed To The Walking Dead,” Scholars Stage Blogspot, July 1, 2019, https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/07/give-no-heed-to-walking-dead.html?m=1.

· 70. For the best description of the China class and those who are in it, see Josh Rogan’s Chaos Under Heaven (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021). Also for a good overview of those in the China Class who are now in the Biden Administration, see Ben Weingarten, “Why You Should Be Skeptical Of The New ‘Tough On China’ Joe Biden,” The Federalist, February 17, 2021, https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/17/why-you-should-be-skeptical-of-the-new-tough-on-china-joe-biden/.

· 71. William R. Hawkins, “Plutocrats Are Only Part Of A Larger Problem,” The Journal Of Political Risk, February 6, 2020, 3.

· 72. Hans F. Sennholz, “Globalization Under Fire,” Mises Institute, August 20, 2000, https://mises.org/library/globalization-under-fire.

· 73. Robert Murphy, “Is There a Libertarian Case Against Free Trade?,” Mises Institute, March, 13, 2006, https://mises.org/library/there-libertarian-case-against-free-trade.

· 74. Murphy, “Is There a Libertarian Case?,” 8.

· 75. John Tamny, “Blaming Globalization for Our Society’s Problems Is Just Another Version of Victim Mentality,” Foundation for Economic Freedom, November 12, 2018, 5-6.

· 76. Ryan McMaken, “The Difference Between Good Globalism and Bad Globalism,” Mises Institute, March 28, 2018, https://mises.org/wire/difference-between-good-globalism-and-bad-globalism.

· 77. Daniel W. Drezner, “There is No China Crisis,” Reason, May 2020, 17; also see Mihai Macovei’s “There Are No Winners in the US-China ‘Tech War,’” Mises Institute, July 28, 2020, https://mises.org/wire/there-are-no-winners-us-china-tech-war-0.

· 78. Drezner, “There is No China Crisis,” 17.

· 79. For the most comprehensive defense of big tech from a libertarian perspective, see Matthew Feeney’s “Conservative’s Big Tech Campaign Based on Myths and Misunderstandings,” Medium, May 28, 2020, https://medium.com/@M_Feeney/a58160c8a785.

· 80. Rachel Bovard, “We Must Break Up Big Tech: It’s The Greatest Private Threat to Liberty in Our Modern Age,” American Consequences, January 2021, https://americanconsequences.com/big-tech-rachel-bovard/.

· 81. Bovard, “We Must Break Up Big Tech.”

· 82. Bovard, “We Must Break Up Big Tech.”

· 83. To understand how the Davos Men are using the pandemic to solidify their world incorporation, see Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset (Geneva, Switzerland: World Economic Forum, 2020).

· 84. Rectenwald, Google Archipelago.

9. ORDER RIGHT 2: POISON PILL CONSERVATIVES

· 1. David Neiwert, Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 2020). While there are always people who take a narrative too far, and their theory of conspiracy doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, all conspiracy theories whether on the left or the right need to be tested.

· 2. Just when people might have some self-doubt, questioning whether they themselves may have succumbed to crazy conspiracy theories (yes, some theories are crazy conspiracies), the ruling elites say something out loud that they once would have whispered in private (like the Green New Deal isn’t about the environment but really about massive redistribution and economic state control), see Marc Morano, Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think (Washington DC: Regnery, 2021). Also consider the new election law in Georgia, passed by elected state representatives and signed by the governor. Upon ratification, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, and Major League Baseball moved to punish the people of Georgia, particularly for including the voter ID provision, something that all three companies require of their employees or customers. Or consider the push for vaccine passports, threating the free movement of American citizens and the confidentiality of a patient’s medical history. Or consider all the people in the Biden administration who have financial ties to China, openly defending the CCP, a transnational criminal organization that enslaves millions of its own people, see Reheem Kassam and Natalie Winters, “Revealed: China’s State Propaganda Group Boasts Control Over Western Think Tanks, ‘Election Integrity’ Groups, and Even Joe Biden’s National Security Team,” National Pulse, April 1, 2021, https://thenationalpulse.com/exclusive/exc-china-state-propaganda-boasts-control-over-think-tanks/.

· 3. For a helpful study for defining conspiracy theories, who conducts them, and for what purpose, see Lance de Haven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014).

· 4. Tucker Carlson Tonight, March 22, 2021, https://youtu.be/6jy_oG4gcSw.

· 5. Rod Dreher, “Kristi Noem’s Surrender to Big Business,” American Conservative, March 23, 2021, www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/kristi.

· 6. Rod Dreher, “The Queering of Young America,” American Conservative, February 24, 2021, www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-queering.

· 7. Dreher, “Queering of Young America.”

· 8. Andrew Walker, quoted in Dreher, “Queering of Young America.”

· 9. See Ryan T. Anderson, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment (New York: Encounter Books, 2018); and Andrew T. Walker, God and the Transgender Debate: What Does the Bible Actually Say About Gender Identity (Purcellville, VA: Good Book Company, 2017).

· 10. Margot Cleveland, “The Worst Thing About Kristi Noem’s Sports Capitulation Is Her Lies,” The Federalist, March 26, 2021, https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/26/the-worst-thing-about-kristi-noems-sports-capitulation-is-her-lies/.

· 11. Emma Green, “The Christian Retreat from Public Life,” the Atlantic, February 22, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/benedict-option/517290.

· 12. For a good example of a reviewer who sees Dreher as overly pessimistic, driven by fear, and joyless, see Trevin Wax, “Are Western Christians Facing a Totalitarian Threat from the Left?” Gospel Coalition, September 18, 2020, www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/live-not-by-lies-rod-dreher.

· 13. Green, “Christian Retreat from Public Life.”

· 14. Rod Dreher, “Christian Life Under Total Surveillance,” American Conservative, February 10, 2021, www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/christian-life-under-total.

· 15. Dreher, “Christian Life Under Total Surveillance.”

· 16. Dreher, “Christian Life Under Total Surveillance.”

· 17. Rod Dreher, “The Whale and the Net,” American Conservative, March 8, 2021, www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/whale.

· 18. Dreher, “Whale and the Net.”

· 19. For an outstanding overview of critics who take on Dreher’s “Christ Against Culture” view while insisting that Dreher has much in common with the “Christ Transforming Culture” perspective, see James D. Clark, “The Kuyperian Impulse of the Benedict Option,” Themelios 43, no. 2 (2018), https://themelios.thegospelcoalition.org/article/the-kuyperian-impulse-of-the-benedict-option.

· 20. Rod Dreher, “The Benedict Option: A Conversation with Rod Dreher,” Albert Mohler, February 13, 2017, https://albertmohler.com/2017/02/13/benedict-option-conversation-rod-dreher.

· 21. Dreher, “Whale and the Net.”

· 22. Damon Linker, a left-of-center thinker, spoke for many on the left when he said that few books on the decline of politics in our country can “match the power of the breathtakingly radical explanation contained in Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. . . . It’s the most electrifying book on cultural criticism published in some time, and it’s hard to imagine its radicalism being surpassed anytime soon.” Damon Linker, “An Ominous Prophecy for Liberalism,” The Week, February 22, 2018, https://theweek.com/articles/749378/ominous-prophecy-liberalism. See Dreher’s review, “Deneen’s Book Gets Even Hotter,” American Conservative, February 27, 2018, www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/patrick-deneen.

· 23. Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 3.

· 24. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, 1.

· 25. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, 1.

· 26. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, 4.

· 27. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, 4.

· 28. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, 18.

· 29. Patrick J. Deneen, quoted in Robert R, Reilly, “For God and Country: Can Good Christians Be Good Americans?” Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2017, 5.

· 30. Patrick Deneen, quoted in Reilly, “For God and Country,” 5.

· 31. Al Mohler, “How Liberalism Failed: A Conversation with Patrick J. Deneen,” Al Mohler, February 13, 2018, https://albertmohler.com/2018/02/13/liberalism-failed-conversation-patrick-deneen.

· 32. Mohler, “How Liberalism Failed: A Conversation.”

· 33. David T. Koyzis, Political Visions & Illusions (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019).

· 34. In an article in First Things, Koyzis, sounding very much like Dreher, says, “modern liberalism in its various forms—including those popularly labelled ‘conservative’—has had centuries to shape and misshape our societies.” David T. Koyzis, “Living Communally in God’s Good Creation,” First Things, May 2017, www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/05/living-communally-in-gods-good-creation.

· 35. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, 18.

· 36. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, 19-20.

· 37. I am grateful to Father James Schall, one of my professors at Georgetown, who introduced me to the thought of Leo Strauss, assigning his Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and his The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

· 38. As Deneen writes, and I think correctly, “Strauss’s highly philosophic and often obscure analysis of the history of political thought proved enormously influential throughout the mid-twentieth century down to our own day. His work has inspired several generations of students who have advanced his analyses and basic premises in their academic work, but perhaps more remarkably still, has spawned countless political think-tanks, institutes, programs and centers devoted to the project of political conservativism.” Patrick J. Deneen, “Week 7: Natural Rights Conservatism—The Case of Leo Strauss,” American Conservative, March 25, 2015, www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/week-7-natural-rights-conservatism-the-case-of-leo-strauss.

· 39. Deneen, “Week 7: Natural Rights Conservatism—The Case of Leo Strauss.”

· 40. Deneen, “Week 7: Natural Rights Conservatism—The Case of Leo Strauss.”

· 41. Deneen, “Week 7: Natural Rights Conservatism—The Case of Leo Strauss.”

· 42. Deneen, “Week 7: Natural Rights Conservatism—The Case of Leo Strauss.”

· 43. Deneen, “Week 7: Natural Rights Conservatism—The Case of Leo Strauss.”

· 44. Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert, The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

· 45. Patrick Deneen, quoted in Reilly, “For God and Country,” 8.

· 46. For one of the best examples of the order right 1 conservative position that agrees with Deneen’s declension narrative but departs from Deneen’s explanation of why it happened and what the solution is, see Notre Dame professor, Vincent Phillip Munoz, “Defending American Classical Liberalism,” National Review, June 11, 2018, https://nationalreview.com/2018/06/american-classical-liberalism-response-to-radical-catholics/.

· 47. As we will see in chapter ten, it is not only order right conservatives who push back but order right 3 thinkers who, while they agree with the poison-pill theory, differ from order right 2 by claiming they don’t go far enough, are not radical enough, afraid to call for the destruction of the American system and its replacement with something new.

· 48. See Robert R. Reilly, “Fools or Scoundrels? A Response to Patrick Deneen,” Public Discourse, October 16, 2017, www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/10/20245.

· 49. For the different Straussian camps, see Zuckert and Zuckert, “Straussian Geography,” in The Truth About Leo Strauss, 228-60.

· 50. While this is a much bigger argument than we can cover here, West Coast Straussians have had to claim that Strauss was either wrong about Locke or simply misunderstood him. But how one interprets Locke is at the heart of how one sees the founding and which side of the rupture it is on. For those scholars who hold to a “non-Locke” Locke, see Steven Forde, “Natural Law, Theology, and Morality in Locke,” American Journal of Political Science 45, no. 2 (2001): 396-409; Peter C. Myers, “Lockeans, Progressives, and Liberationists,” Society 50 (2013); John W. Yolton, “Locke on the Law of Nature,” Philosophical Review 67, no. 4 (1958): 477-98; Thomas G. West, “The Ground of Locke’s Law of Nature,” Social Philosophy and Policy 29, no. 2 (2012): 1-50.

· 51. For Reilly’s criticism of Deneen’s take on Madison, see Robert R. Reilly, “For God and Country,” Claremont Review of Books 13, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 6-8, https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/for-god-and-country.

· 52. For Reilly’s discussion of John Locke, see Robert R. Reilly, “For God and Country,” Claremont Review of Books 13, no. 3 (summer 2013): 9-14, https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/for-god-and-country.

· 53. Patrick J. Deneen, “Corrupting the Youth? A Response to Reilly,” Public Discourse, September 19, 2017, www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/09/20087/.

· 54. Robert R. Reilly, “For God and Country,” Claremont Review of Books 13, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 6-8, https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/for-god-and-country.

· 55. Deneen, “Corrupting the Youth?”

· 56. Rod Dreher, “Our War of Religion,” The American Conservative, March 9, 2021, www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/our-war-of-religion-live-not-by-lies-woke/.

10. ORDER RIGHT 3: THE ILLIBERAL NEW RIGHT

· 1. Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham, “Millions of White Evangelicals Do Not Intend to Get Vaccinated,” New York Times, April 5, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/world/millions-of-white-evangelicals-do-not-intend-to-get-vaccinated.html.

· 2. To understand why conservative evangelicals don’t trust the experts or their views, see Steve Deace and Todd Erzen, Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History (Brentwood, TN: Post Hill Press, 2021).

· 3. Many of those evangelicals who are “vaccine cautious,” that is, those who have questions they want answered, have been influenced by former New York Times writer Alex Berenson, who since the pandemic started has appeared almost weekly on Tucker Carlson Tonight. See Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths About COVID1-19 and Lockdowns: Part 4: Vaccines (n.p.: Blue Deep, Inc., 2021).

· 4. Dias and Graham, “Millions of White Evangelicals”; Jennifer Steinhauer, “Younger Military Personnel Reject Vaccine, in Warning for Commanders and the Nation,” New York Times, February 27, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/02/27/us/politics/coronavirus-vaccine-refusal-military.html.

· 5. See Ernie Mundell and Robin Foster, “Biden Administration Working on ‘Vaccine Passport’ Initiative,” US News, March 29, 2021, www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-03-29/biden-administration-working-on-vaccine-passport-initiative; Lexi Lonas, “Arizona Attorney General ‘Alarmed’ by Biden’s Door-to-Door Vaccination Push,” The Hill, July 7, 2021, https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch561926-arizona-attorney-general-alarmed-by-bidens-door-to-door-vaccination-push. By the fall of 2021, the Biden administration decided the “public education campaign” had failed. Though he promised he would never mandate vaccines, President Biden changed his mind and on September 9 announced sweeping new federal vaccine requirements, Zeke Miller, “Sweeping New Vaccine Mandates for 100 Million Americans,” AP News, September 10, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-coronavirus-pandemic-execuve-branch-18fb12993f05be13bf760946a6fb89be.

· 6. For a recent illustration of how the media criticized the Military Industrial Complex, and how even after getting caught spreading false stories they didn’t apologize or correct the story, see Glenn Greenwald, “Journalists, Learning They Spread a CIA Fraud About Russia, Instantly Embrace a New One,” Greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists -learning-they-spread, April 16, 2021; see also Glenn Greenwald, “The Media Lied Repeatedly About Officer Brian Sicknick’s Death,” at Greenwald.subtack.com/p/the -media-lied-repeatedly-about-officer, April 19, 2021.

· 7. In his “What Is Trump to Us?,” Angelo Codevilla contends that five years ago when Trump was elected no one would have imagined that the oligarchy would grow so strong that it now “has destroyed the American republic.” American Greatness, July 6, 2021, https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/06/what-is-trump-to-us/.

· 8. You may wonder why I don’t address in detail the Capitol breach of January 6, 2021; after all this would seem the best place to do so, especially since a number of those involved were thought to be part of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and QAnon. But because at the time I wrote this chapter it was still being investigated and serious doubts existed about an organized plot by these groups, I decided not to use it. See footnote 14 in the Introduction.

· 9. Laurie Clarke, “Why Scientists Fear the “Toxic’ Covid-19 Debate,” www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/coronavirus/2020/10/why-scientists-fear-toxic-covid-19-debate.

· 10. Richard John Neuhaus, The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics: The Celebrated First Things Debate with Arguments Pro and Con and “The Anatomy of a Controversy” (Dallas: Spence, 1997).

· 11. Derek Robertson, “How an Obscure Conservative Theory Became the Trump Era’s Go-to-Nerd Phrase,” Politico, February 25, 2018, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/25/overton-window-explained-definition-meaning-217010/.

· 12. Patrick J. Buchanan, “1992 Republican National Convention Speech,” Patrick J. Buchanan, August 17, 1992, https://buchanan.org/blog/1992-republican-national-convention-speech-148.

· 13. Buchanan, “1992 Republican National Convention Speech.”

· 14. While Buchanan dislikes Strauss, his argument here is close to Strauss’s first-wave argument shared by Deneen, holding that it was compromised.

· 15. Patrick J. Buchanan, Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007), chaps. 1–2.

· 16. Buchanan, Day of Reckoning, “The Gospel According to George Bush,” chap. 3, where Buchanan celebrates Jamestown as our true founding, not Puritan Massachusetts.

· 17. Patrick J. Buchanan, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), 139.

· 18. Charles R. Kesler, The Federalist Papers, Introduction and Notes, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Signet Classic, 2003), 36-40.

· 19. Buchanan, State of Emergency, 142.

· 20. Buchanan, State of Emergency, 150.

· 21. Following Buchanan’s lead, Trump called for a border wall, stricter immigration control, economic protectionism, and keeping America out of unnecessary endless wars. See James Matthew Wilson, “The Triumph of Buchananism,” Front Porch Republic, November 9, 2016, www.frontporchrepublic.com/2016/11/the-triumph-of-buchananism.

· 22. Patrick Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2011), 190.

· 23. Ann Coulter, Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2015); and Michelle Malkin, Open Borders Inc.: Who’s Funding America’s Destruction? (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2019). See also George Hawley, Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press), 161-62; and William F. Buckley Jr., In Search of Anti-Semitism (New York: Continuum International, 1993).

· 24. Tucker Carlson, Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox News, April 12, 2021.

· 25. For a list and description for all the groups, thinkers, and bloggers included in the alt-right, see Hawley’s Alt-Right, particularly chaps. 1-3, 4-85.

· 26. Hawley, Alt-Right, 4.

· 27. Hawley, Alt-Right, 5. See Jane Coaston, “Why the Alt-Right Trolls Shouted Down Donald Trump Jr.,” Vox, November 11, 2019, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/11/20948317. See James Kirkpatrick, Conservatism Inc.: The Battle for the American Right (London: Arktos Media, 2019).

· 28. Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumbler to Trump and the Alt-Right (Hampshire, UK: Zero Books, 2017).

· 29. Jacob Siegel, “The Alt-Right’s Jewish Godfather,” Tablet, accessed March 5, 2020, www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/218712/spencer-gottfried-alt-right.

· 30. Rod Dreher, “Vermeule, Deneen, Pappin, Muñoz at Notre Dame,” American Conservative, November 3, 2018, www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/vermeule.

· 31. Patrick J. Deneen, “A Catholic Showdown Worth Watching,” American Conservative, February 6, 2014, www.theamericanconservative.com/a-catholic-showdown.

· 32. Rod Dreher, “More Thoughts on Integralism,” American Conservative, November 5, 2018, www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/more-thoughts; While Deneen is slightly more moderate than Vermeule and the other radical Catholics, he nonetheless breaks with modernity (modernity is bad) in all its forms, and like them Deneen wants to see the end of the liberal project (polluted by all three waves of modernity) and something new take its place. So in one sense, this dialogue was unfair, it really was three Rad Trads against one (Muñoz).

· 33. Edmund Waldstein, “What is Integralism Today?” Church Life Journal, October 31, 2018, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/what-is-integralism-today. Dreher thought that Vermeule and Pappin won.

· 34. Waldstein, “What is Integralism Today?”

· 35. Kevin Gallagher, “Eclipse of Catholic Fusionism,” American Affairs, August 2018, https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/08/the-eclipse-of-catholic-fusionism.

· 36. Gallagher, “Eclipse of Catholic Fusionism.”

· 37. Adrian Vermeule, quoted in Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Don’t Fall for It: The Illiberal Temptation,” American Interest, April 26, 2019, www.the-american-interest.com/2019/04/26/the-illiberal-temptation. To see just how far Vermeule is willing to go, see his “Beyond Originalism,” the Atlantic, March 31, 2020, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-constitutionalism/609037/.

· 38. Vermeule, quoted in Schoenfeld, “Don’t Fall for It.”

· 39. One critic says, “It is notable that today’s anti-liberal theorists are, for the most part, rather vague about what they envision replacing the liberal-democratic order they decry. . . . One of its most aggressive critics cannot even pencil-sketch the contours of a plausible superior alternative,” in Schoenfeld, “Don’t Fall for It.”

· 40. See John McWhorter, “The Elect: The Threat to a Progressive America from Anti-Black Anti-Racists,” It Bears Mentioning, March 9, 2021, https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-the-threat-to-a-progressive-755.

· 41. Angelica Stabile, “Economist Glenn Loury Tackles the Issue, Impact of Race on ‘Tucker Carlson,’” Fox News, June 9, 2021, www.foxnews.com/media/glenn-loury-race-tucker-carlson-fox-nation.amp.

· 42. Stanley Kurtz, “Dominionist Domination,” National Review, May 2, 2005, www.nationalreview.com/2005/05/dominionist-domination-stanley-kurtz.

· 43. Kurtz, “Dominionist Domination.”

· 44. Robert Gagnon and Edith Humphrey, “Stop Calling Ted Cruz a Dominionist,” Christianity Today, April 6, 2016, www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/april-web-only/stop-calling-ted-cruz-dominionist.html.

· 45. Kurtz, “Dominionist Domination.”

· 46. Michael Gerson, “A Holy War on the Tea Party,” Washington Post, August 22, 2011, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-holy-war-on-the-tea-party/2011/08/22/gIQAYRcOXJ_story.html.

· 47. Kurtz, “Dominionist Domination.” Also see Ross Douthat, “Theocracy, Theocracy, Theocracy,” First Things, August 2006, www.firstthings.com/article/2006/08. See also Michael J. McVicar, “The Libertarian Theocrats,” Political Research Associates, September 1, 2007, www.politicalresearch.org/2007/09/01/libertarian-theocrats. For McVicar’s full length biography of R. J. Rushdoony, who many say is the father of reconstructionism, see Christian Reconstruction: R.J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

· 48. For a discussion of Diamond’s “soft dominionism” versus “hard dominionism,” see Francis Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 535-36; see also Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 246-55.

· 49. Rod Dreher, “A Defense of Jericho March Criticism,” The American Conservative, December 13, 2020, https://theamericanconservative.com/dreher/defense-of-jericho-march-criticism/.

· 50. Patrick J. Buchanan, “If We Erase Our History, Who Are We?” Patrick J. Buchanan, August 15, 2017, https://buchanan.org/blog/if-we-erase-our-history-who-are-we-127510.

· 51. Rod Dreher, “Buchanan’s Shameful Defense of White Supremacy,” American Conservative, August 18, 2017, www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/buchanan.

· 52. Dreher, “Buchanan’s Shameful Defense of White Supremacy.” A few days after Buchanan’s article, another conservative writer Tom Piatak jumped to Buchanan’s defense. See Tom Piatak, “Rod Dreher and the Politics of Betrayal,” Chronicles, August 21, 2017, www.chroniclesmagazine.org/rod-dreher-and-the-politics-of-betrayal.

· 53. Paul Gottfried, quoted in Siegel, “Alt-Right’s Jewish Godfather.”

· 54. Sohrab Ahmari, “Terrible American Turn Toward Illiberalism,” Commentary, October 2017, www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/sohrab-ahmari/terrible-american-turn-toward-illiberalism.

· 55. Ahmari, “Terrible American Turn Toward Illiberalism.”

· 56. Rod Dreher, “What I Saw at the Jericho March,” American Conservative, December 12, 2020, www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/what-i-saw.

· 57. Dreher, “What I Saw at the Jericho March.”

· 58. Dreher, “What I saw at the Jericho March.”

· 59. For the Project Veritas three-part series release, see: Part 1: https://www.projectveritas.com/news/part-1-cnn-director-admits-network-engaged-in-propaganda-to-remove-trump/; Part II: https://www.projectveritas.com/news/part-2-cnn-director-charlie-chester-reveals-how-network-practices/; Part III: https://www.projectveritas.com/news/part-3-cnn-director-charlie-chester-says-network-is-trying-to-help-the-black/. According to Chester, CNN “played up the COVID-19 death toll for ratings, “promoted anti-Trump ‘propaganda’” just to get him out of office, and “help[s] BLM,” burying any and all stories that don’t fit their narrative (that America is racist) or might make them look bad (like Blacks attacking Asians), and only running stories that attack Whites and divide the country.

· 60. I want to thank Charlie Kirk for the Twitter guillotine metaphor.

PART THREE: FORMING THE NEW VITAL CENTER

· 1. R. R. Reno, The Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (Washington, DC: Gateway Editions, 2019).

· 2. Joel Kotkin, “The Pandemic Road to Serfdom,” The American Mind, May 1, 2020, https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-pandemic-road-to-serfdom/.

11. THE NEW VITAL CENTER: THE AMERICAN SYNTHESIS AND THE FOUR SOULS

· 1. Cristina Marcos, “Pro-Trump Lawmakers Form Caucus Promoting ‘Anglo-Saxon political traditions,’” The Hill, April 16, 2021, https://thehill.com/homenews/house/548731-pro-trump-lawmakers-form-caucus-to-promote-anglo-saxon-political-traditions.

· 2. “America First Caucus Policy Platform,” Punchbowlnews.com, accessed April 30, 2021, https://punchbowl.news/wp-content/uploads/America-First-Caucus-Policy-Platform-FINAL-2.pdf.

· 3. Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader), “America is built on the idea that we are all created equal,” Twitter, April 16, 2021, 1:41 p.m., https://twitter.com/gopleader/status/1383158647266611203.

· 4. “America First Caucus Policy Platform,” Punchbowlnews.com.

· 5. Savannah Behrmann and Phillip M. Baily, “White Nationalist Language of American First Caucus Sets of New Alarms on Racism,” USA Today, April 22, 2021, www.usatoday.com/amp/7261157002.

· 6. Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger), Twitter, April 16, 2021, 3:44 p.m. Within days of it being leaked, Representative Marjorie Taylor Green, as well as other representatives thought to be behind the new caucus, distanced herself from the platform document, saying it was written by low-level staffers, was only a draft, and that she hadn’t seen it until Punch Bowl News published it.

· 7. While the AFC platform never defines “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” or exactly what they mean by it, Encyclopaedia Britannica says that “by the time of the Norman Conquest [1066], the kingdom that had developed from the realm of the Anglo-Saxon peoples had become known as England, and Anglo-Saxon as a collective term for the region’s people was eventually supplanted by ‘English.’” Presently, writes Britannica, “‘Anglo-Saxon’ continues to be used to refer to a period in the history of Britain generally defined as the years between the end of the Roman occupation and the Norman Conquest.” The vast majority of the early settlers of New England were from East Anglia, a region in southeast England, who descended from the Anglo-Saxons, and these East Anglia Puritans brought with them to the new world English political traditions, many of which became the foundation for the American system of checks and balances. Perhaps the AFC platform was trying to communicate the importance of English political traditions and institutions to the founding of America, a point that no historian disputes. But the reaction might have been more favorable if they had written “English political traditions” or “Anglo-Protestant [a phrase Samuel Huntington prefers] political traditions.” See “Anglo-Saxon,” Britannica.com, accessed May 3, 2021, www.britannica.com/topic/Anglo-Saxon.

· 8. I am aware that there is disagreement over exactly what creed means. For some, creed is synonymous with the freedom left 2 and freedom right 2 positions (godless constitution and libertarian freedom), what Strauss called the second and third waves of liberalism. This is what the America First Caucus meant by “abstract ideas.” But there are also scholars who want to define creed as first-wave liberalism (something good and worth preserving) and closer to what I describe in the order left 1 position, which avoids the mistakes of the second and third waves of liberalism but in doing so doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. For a succinct summary of their view of the creed and why it is so important to hang on to, see Charles Kesler, “The Crisis of American National Identity,” Heritage Foundation, November 8, 2005, www.heritage.org/political-process/report/the-crisis-american-national-identity-part-the-lehrman-lectures-restoring; and James W. Ceaser, “Creed Versus Culture: Alternative Foundations for American Conservatives,” Heritage Lectures, March 10, 2006, www.heritage.org/political-process/report/creed-versus-culture-alternative-foundations-american-conservatism.

· 9. Samuel P. Huntington, quoted in Peter Skerry, “What Are We to Make of Samuel Huntington?” Society, November-December 2005, 85, www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/cas_sites/polisci/pdf/skerry/Huntington_essay.pdf. For a full account of Huntington’s argument, see Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (London: Free Press, 2004).

· 10. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (London: Free Press, 2004), 339.

· 11. Huntington, Who Are We?, 20.

· 12. Peter Skerry, in his very insightful review (see note 8) of Huntington’s Who Are We?, points out that critics who fault Huntington for stressing culture over creed are missing the point. As Skerry observes, for Huntington we need both culture and creed, and he actually doesn’t prioritize one over the other. And when it seems he does, he really is just giving one priority because the needs of national identity at any given moment necessitate it. When America was locked in the cold war after WWII, which was a battle of ideas with communism, he stressed the creed, says Skerry. Now with the threats from immigration and rapid cultural change, we need to stress culture.

· 13. Huntington, Who Are We? 344.

· 14. Huntington, Who Are We? 41.

· 15. Damon Linker, quoted in W. James Antle III, “Nationalism and its Discontents,” American Conservative, September 18, 2019, www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/nationalism-and-its-discontents.

· 16. Ultimately, even Huntington failed at holding them together because he didn’t have a standard, a proper grounding, to do so. This is the problem we saw with Schlesinger and the other mid-century vital-center thinkers (chap. two) who believed we could ground our democratic republic in pragmatism shorn of any outside authority, whether revelation or natural law/natural rights. But it is a similar problem with both those on the extremes of order right and order left: both look to a form of historicism that baptizes whatever culture they most approve of, whether some moment in the past or the spirit of the times in the present. The problem for Huntington is similar: how do we know what in our tradition and history is good and what is bad? Without an outside authority (i.e., natural law, revelation, or some form of the creed), how do we know if our version of culture is just and fair? In his American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 16, he admits this problem: “No theory exists for ordering these values in relation to one another.” So Huntington wants both culture and creed, but he is not sure how to ground this balance, which leads to the continual conflict.

· 17. James W. Ceaser, Designing a Polity: America’s Constitution in Theory and Practice (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 7.

· 18. John Adams, quoted in Ceaser, Designing a Polity, 7.

· 19. See the discussion of this back and forth between nature and history in James Ceaser’s Nature and History in American Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 33-51.

· 20. For his discussion on how the founders moved from history to nature, see Ceaser’s Nature and History in American Political Thought, 22-33.

· 21. Ceaser, Nature and History in American Political Thought, 35.

· 22. Ceaser, Nature and History in American Political Thought, 35.

· 23. Ceaser, Nature and History in American Political Thought, 35.

· 24. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail (New York: Penguin UK, 2018); Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? (Berkeley: Mint Editions, 2021); D. H. Dilbeck, Frederick Douglass: America’s Prophet (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 75-92.

· 25. James Ceaser, “Alexis de Tocqueville and the Two Founding Thesis,” in Tocqueville’s Voyages: The Evolution of His Ideas and Their Journey Beyond His Time, ed. Christine Dunn Henderson (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2014), 111-41.

· 26. The other being Puritan New England.

· 27. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Debra Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 31-32.

· 28. While the literature on this topic is vast, for a general introduction the literature and the concept of the rivalry between Jamestown and Plymouth as the true location of the American Founding, see Ritchie Devon Watson Jr., Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).

· 29. As an example of how this rivalry between oligarchy and constitutional republicanism played out after Lincoln’s death, see Forrest A. Nabors, From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017).

· 30. I want to thank Thomas West for giving me the idea of using “soul” to describe each of my four new vital center positions. See his essay, Jaffa Versus Mansfield: Does America Have a Constitutional Soul or a “Declaration of Independence” Soul?, https://vindicatingthefounders.com/author/jaffa_v_mansfield.pdf.

· 31. For the two of the finest books on James Madison’s political thought, see Colleen A. Sheehan, The Mind of James Madison: The Legacy of Classical Republicanism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Colleen A. Sheehan, James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

· 32. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, The Federalist Papers, Introduction and Notes by Charles R. Kesler, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Signet Classic, 2003).

· 33. See Ralph Ketcham, “James Madison at Princeton,” Princeton Library Chronicle 28, no. 1 (Autumn 1966); Ralph Ketcham, “James Madison and Religion—A New Hypothesis,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 38, no. 2 (June 1960); Ralph Ketcham, “James Madison and the Nature of Man,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19, no. 1 (January 1958). See also Benjamin F. Wright, “The Federalists on the Nature of Political Man,” Ethics 59, no. 2 (January 1949); and Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

· 34. See Garrett Ward Sheldon, “Liberalism, Classical Republicanism, and Christianity in The Political Philosophy of James Madison (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), xi-xvi.

· 35. James W. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 9.

· 36. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 12.

· 37. See Garrett Ward Sheldon, “Liberalism, Classical Republicanism, and Christianity in the Political Philosophy of James Madison,” in The Political Philosophy of James Madison (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), xi-xvi. See also note 23 above for more resources on Madison and the link between his faith and his political philosophy.

· 38. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 13.

· 39. See Larry P. Arnn, The Founders’ Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What We Risk by Losing It (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2012).

· 40. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 14.

· 41. Annette Gordon-Reed, an African American and a scholar on Jefferson and his slavery, still admires Jefferson and finds him important to study and value. See her Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York: Liveright, 2016). Jefferson’s continued importance can be seen clearly in a new book, John Meacham, ed., In the Hands of the People: Thomas Jefferson on Equality, Faith, Freedom, Compromise, and the Art of Citizenship (New York: Random House, 2020). On the right, see Daniel L. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2002).

· 42. For an overview of the debate over the role of classical republicanism in our founding and all the major historical works that grapple with this topic, see the Garrett Ward Sheldon, “Early American Historiography and the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson,” in The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991).

· 43. Sheldon, Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, 141.

· 44. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 10.

· 45. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 10.

· 46. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 10.

· 47. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 11.

· 48. Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggle (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 21.

· 49. For the definition of the constrained vision, see Sowell’s “Constrained and Unconstrained Visions,” in Conflict of Visions, 18-39.

· 50. See The Federalist Papers 10 and 51, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: First Signet Classic, 2003), 71-79, 317-22. It is important to note that not all Madisonian scholars hold to the “Madisonian system” view. George Carey contends that this view is too cynical and makes Madison into a purely secular liberal, closer to freedom left 2. Also “if there is such a thing as ‘the Madisonian system,’ Madison never proposed it.” While Carey might fault The Federalist Papers for not being comprehensive enough in describing the plan for a virtuous citizenry, it nonetheless “points to a positive idea of citizenship as necessary for liberal democracy, though this citizenship is of a different sort than the classical republic virtue.” According to Carey, in attempting to hold constitutionalism together with republicanism, Madison often comes across as ambivalent. For example, in Federalist Paper No. 10, elements of constitutionalism sit alongside elements of republicanism. Ultimately, for Carey, while the authors of the The Federalist Papers tried to reconcile the two, they realized that a virtuous citizenry would have to draw from other sources. Moreover, we know the The Federalist Papers’ authors had a vison for virtue because they used words like esteem and confidence and ability and virtue. But even with these concerns for virtue, this group of scholars admits that The Federalist Papers need to be supplemented by other sources from the founding to fill out the vision. This view has over the years found a home in order right 1. See George W. Carey, “The American Founding and Limited Government,” Imaginative Conservative, July 5, 2012.

· 51. Martin Diamond, “Ethics and Politics: The American Way,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, ed. Robert H. Horwitz, 3rd ed. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1986), 83.

· 52. Diamond, “Ethics and Politics,” 99.

· 53. Alexander Hamilton, quoted in Diamond, “Ethics and Politics,” 100.

· 54. Diamond, “Ethics and Politics,” 101. Thus this quadrant, freedom right 1, follows Tocqueville’s view that self-interest must be allowed to flourish because it is built into human nature, and no amount of utopian thinking can change this reality. But it is not the self-interest of unencumbered self, people who retreat into their private realm of avarice and greed, people who are only out for themselves. While Tocqueville’s self-interest rightly understood is not a high and noble doctrine, it gets the job done and at the same time protects individual liberty, something that republicanism couldn’t guarantee. According to Alan S. Kahan, self-interest well understood “functions for Tocqueville as a secular complement to religion.” For Tocqueville, the doctrine is a tool; it gets us one step closer to democratic greatness. But it can only go so far. See Alan S. Kahan, Tocqueville, Democracy and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 60.

· 55. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 166. Moreover, as we will see in the final chapter, part of the deficit weakness of the system that still remains has to do with the fact, as Tocqueville contended, that the laws (the constitution) of a country were not enough to restrain and shape a virtuous citizenry. There is a vital role that religion must play to assist “self-interest properly understood.” Laws (i.e., the constitution, the creed) are not enough.

· 56. Diamond, “Ethics and Politics,” 108, italics added.

· 57. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 20.

· 58. Alan S. Kahan, Tocqueville, Democracy and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 63.

· 59. See Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Oxford, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

· 60. Abraham Lincoln, “Lyceum Address,” Abraham Lincoln Online, accessed May 3, 2021, www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm.

· 61. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 290.

· 62. Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address,” accessed at https://rmc.libary.cornel.edu/gettysburg/good_cause/transcrpt.htm.

· 63. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” accessed at https://www.nps.gov/linc/learn/historycutlure/lincoln-second-inaugural.htm.

· 64. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 20.

· 65. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 20.

· 66. Rossiter, ed., The Federalist Papers, 9.

· 67. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Translated, Edited, and with an Introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000), 7.

· 68. Nathan W. Schlueter and Nicholai G. Wenzel, Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 29.

· 69. Schlueter and Wenzel, Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives? 29. Here Schlueter is summarizing Robert George’s argument in Robert George, Marking Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

· 70. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 20

· 71. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 20.

· 72. Abraham Lincoln, “First Debate: Ottawa, Illinois,” The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, Illinois, August 21, 1858, www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate1.htm. As Nathan Schlueter says so well, political education is not only the task of political leaders, it is primarily the task of citizens, especially parents, teachers, pastors, and other persons in positions of authority and leadership. But as Schlueter reminds us, this soft perfectionism means that government and the constitution only play a secondary role in assisting in this task. As the Northwest Ordinance, passed by the Continental Congress in 1787, said, “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” For all the founders, contends Schlueter, good government played a positive but secondary role in shaping a virtuous citizenry, that is, the “habits of the heart,” the political culture and dispositions of its citizens that are needed to support the creed. Schlueter and Wenzel, Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives?, 42.

· 73. Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 46.

· 74. The Federalist Papers, quoted in Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 46.

· 75. Samuel Francis Smith, “America (My Country, ‘Tis of Thee),” 1831.

· 76. For a helpful account on patriotism, see Walter Berns, Making Patriots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

· 77. Tocqueville’s phrases cited in Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 169.

12. PATRIOTIC CITIZENSHIP: THE SWEET OFFER FOR RESIDENT ALIENS AND ALIENATED RESIDENTS

· 1. Franco Ordonez, “Almost 19,000 Migrant Children Stopped at US Border in March, Most Ever in a Month,” NPR, April 8, 2021, www.npr.org/2021/04/08/985296354/almost-19-000-migrant-children-stopped-at-u-s-border-in-march-most-ever-in-a-mon; John Kass, “Biden Called for the Border Surge. And Now He Owns It,” Chicago Tribune, March 24, 2021, www.chicagotribune.com/columns/john-kass/ct-prem-biden-border-crisis-john-kass-20210324-s6nxh76uofgs3n53xtxcmdpjty-story.html.

· 2. Todd Bensman, “Catch-and-Bus: Thousands of Freed Border-Crossing Immigrants Are Dispersing Across America,” Center for Immigration Studies, March 31, 2021, https://cis.org/Bensman/CatchandBus-Thousands-Freed-BorderCrossing-Immigrants-Are-Dispersing-Across-America.

· 3. Arelis R. Hernandez, “Fewer Migrant Families Being Expelled at Border Under Title 42, but Critics Still Push for Its End,” Washington Post, July 13, 2021, http://washingtonpost.com/immigration/fewer-migrant-families-being-expelled-at-border-under-title-42-but-critics-still-push-for-its-end/.

· 4. Two of the best are Todd Bensman (toddbensman.com) and Michael Yon (michaelyon -online.com). See also John Moore, “I’m a Photojournalist. Why Is the Administration Banning Me from the Border Facilities?” Washington Post, March 22, 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/03/22/journalists-banned-border-facilities-migrants/; Gabrielle Fonrouge and Aaron Feis, “Journalists Granted ‘Zero’ Access to Cover Border Crisis Under Biden,” New York Post, March 21, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/03/21/journalists-granted-zero-access-to-cover-border-crisis-photog/.

· 5. Ted Hesson and Mark Hosenball, “US Arrested Two Yemenis on Terror Watchlist Who Tried to Cross Border from Mexico,” Reuters, April 5, 2021. See also Todd Bensman, America’s Covert Border War: The Untold Story of The Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration (New York: Post Hill Press, 2021).

· 6. Leah Barkoukis, “Border Patrol Official Tells ‘Harrowing Stories’ of Sexual Abuse Children Are Experiencing on Journey to US,” Townhall, March 31, 2021.

· 7. Andrew R. Arthur, “Rove Op-Ed Exposes Costs of Biden Border Crisis: An Open Border Is an Invitation to Criminals and a Snare for Unwary Immigrants,” Center for Immigration Studies, July 9, 2021, https://cis.org/Arthur/Rove-OpEd-Exposes-Human-Costs-Biden-Border-Crisis.

· 8. Emily Benedek, “Is the Religion of Mass Immigration Hurting America? Tablet, August 13, 2020, www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/mass-immigration-america.

· 9. For my analysis of the America First Caucus, especially the need to better define its grounding and its definition of “Anglo-Saxon political principles,” making sure it is grounded in the new vital center, see chapter eleven.

· 10. Joel Rose, “Immigration Agencies Ordered Not to Use Term ‘Illegal Alien’ Under New Biden Policy,” NPR, April 19, 2021, www.npr.org2021/04/19/988789487/immigration-agencies-ordered-not-to-use-term-illigal-alien-under-new-biden-polic.

· 11. Andrew R. Arthur, “The Words ‘Alien’ and ‘Assimilation’ Banned by the Biden Administration,” Center for Immigration Studies, April 20, 2021, https://cis.org/Arthur/Words-Alien-and-Assimilation-Banned-Biden-Administration.

· 12. America First Caucus Policy Platform, Punchbowl News, https://punchbowl.news/wp-content/uploads/America-First-Caucus-Policy-Platform-FINAL-2.pdf; Also, for how mass immigration is destroying trust among groups in America, see Edward J. Erler, “Does Diversity Really Unite Us?” Imprimis, July-August 2018.

· 13. America First Caucus Policy Platform, page 3, Punchbowl News, https://punchbowl.news/wp-content/uploads/America-First-Caucus-Policy-Platform-FINAL-2.pdf.

· 14. Marc A. Thiessen, “Democrats Were for a Wall Before They Were Against It,” Washington Post, January 10, 2019, www.washintonpost.com/opinions/demorcrats-were-for-a-wall-before-they-were-against-it/.

· 15. Andrew R. Arthur, “Polling Reveals Troubling Signs for Biden on Immigration,” Center for Immigration Studies, February 5, 2021. https://cis.org/Arthur/Polling-Reveals-Troubling-Signs-Biden-Immigration.

· 16. For thirty decades of surveys demonstrating how a supermajority of Americans want less immigration and how resentment against illegal immigration in America and in Europe is leading to the populist uprising, see Ryan James Girdusky and Harlan Hill, They’re Not Listening: How Elites Created the Nationalist Populist Revolution (New York: Bombardier, 2020).

· 17. Mychael Schnell, “100 Business Executives Discuss How to Combat New Voting Rules,” The Hill, April 11, 2021, https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-a-lobbying/547609-100-executives-discuss-how-to-combat-voting.

· 18. To see how those in the order right quadrant are working through issues over immigration and national sovereignty, see the talks at the 2019 National Conservative Conference held in Washington, DC, nationalconservative.org/natcon-dc-2019. To learn more about the book that inspired the conference, see Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 2018). See also Edward J. Erler, “Illegal Immigration Destroys Sovereignty: Our Ruling Classes Reject Our Right to Govern Ourselves,” The American Mind, April 5, 2021.

· 19. Christopher Caldwell, “The Hidden Cost of Immigration,” Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2016; and George J. Borjas, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016).

· 20. Chris Conover, “How American Citizens Finance $18 Billion in Health Care for Unauthorized Immigrants,” Forbes, February 26, 2018.

· 21. To see how illegal immigrants run a new deficit, taking more from the welfare system than the taxes they pay, see James Jay Carafano, John G. Malcolm, and Jack Spencer, eds., “An Agenda for American Immigration Reform,” Heritage Foundation, February 20, 2019. See also Robert Rector and Jason Richwine, “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the US Taxpayer,” Heritage Foundation, May 6, 2013; and Steven A. Camarota, “Welfare Use by Legal and Illegal Immigrant Households,” Center for Immigration Studies, September 9, 2015, https://cis.org/Report/Welfare-Use-Legal-and-Illegal-Immigrant-Households.

· 22. Ben Popper, “Is Silicon Valley’s Immigration Agenda Gutting the Tech Industry’s Middle Class,” Verge, July 3, 2013, www.theverge.com/2013/7/3/4486910/is-silicon-valleys-immigration-agenda-gutting-the-tech-industrys.

· 23. Amy L. Wax, “Debating Immigration Restriction: The Case for Low and Slow,” Georgetown Law 16, issue S (Fall 2018). See also Amy Wax’s transcript from her the National Conservative Conference talk, “Here’s What Amy Wax Really Said About Immigration,” The Federalist, July 26, 2019, https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/26/heres-amy-wax-really-said-immigration/; and Edward J. Erler “Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation-State,” The American Mind, March 18, 2019, https://americanmind.org/features/the-case-against-birthright-citizenship/.

· 24. Face the Nation, May 2, 2010, transcript, www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/FTN_050210.pdf.

· 25. James K. Hoffmeier, The Immigration Crisis: Immigrants, Aliens, and the Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009).

· 26. See Peter Beinart, “How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration,” the Atlantic, July-August, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-democrats-immigration-mistake/528678/.

· 27. Jerry Kammer, Losing Ground: How a Left-Right Coalition Blocked Immigration Reform and Provoked a Backlash That Elected Trump (Washington, DC: The Center for Immigration Studies, 2020).

· 28. Cited in Andrew E. Harrod, “The Immigration Problem is Worse Than you Think,” American Thinker, July 30, 2020, www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/the_immigration_problem_is_worse_than_you_think.html.

· 29. Ann Coulter, “Bush’s America: Roach Motel,” AnnCoulter.com, June 6, 2007, https://anncoulter.com/2007/06/06/bushs-america-roach-motel.

· 30. Coulter, “Bush’s America.”

· 31. Ann Coulter, Adios, America! (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2015), 245.

· 32. “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065,” Pew Research Center Report, September 28, 2015, https://pewresearch.org/hispanic/2015/09/28/modern-immigration-wave-brings-59-million-to-u-s-driving-population-growth-and-change-through-2065.

· 33. For an oft-quoted study that shows how diversity erodes trust between ethnic groups and engenders balkanization among groups, regardless of skin color, see Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30, no. 2 (2007), www.aimlessgromar.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/j-1467-9477-2007-00176-x.pdf.

· 34. Noah Pickus, “From Them to Us,” Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2005, https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/from-them-to-us. See also Tamar Jacoby, ed., Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to Be American (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

· 35. Peter Skerry, “Do We Really Want Immigrants to Assimilate?” Brookings, March 1, 2000, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/do-we-really-want-immigrants-to-assimilate/.

· 36. P. P. Claxton, quoted in John J. Miller, “Reviving Americanization: A Response to Juan Perea,” in Immigration and Citizenship in the 21st Century, ed. Noah M. J. Pickus (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 80, italics added.

· 37. David Miller, Strangers in Our Midst (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 130-50.

· 38. Miller, Strangers in our Midst, 132. Even this least controversial option has come under fire in the years since Miller penned his book. See Peggy McGlone, “African American Museum Site Removes ‘Whiteness’ Chart After Criticism from Trump Jr. and Conservative Media,” Washington Post, July 17, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/african-american-museum-site-removes-whiteness-chart-after-criticism-from-trump-jr-and-conservative-media/2020/07/17/4ef6e6f2-c831-11ea-8ffe-372be8d82298_story.html.

· 39. Alexander Hamilton, quoted in Tom G. West, The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 178.

· 40. Others who fit into this freedom right 1 are Samuel Gregg, Scott Rae, Dylan Pahman, The Public Discourse, and the Acton Institute.

· 41. Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities (New York: Basic Books, 2019), and Black Rednecks and White Liberals (New York: Encounter, 2006).

· 42. Thomas Sowell, quoted in William Vogel, “Thomas Sowell’s Inconvenient Truths,” Claremont Review of Books, summer 2018. See also Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

· 43. For proof that the largest segment of the black population is now in the working and middle class, not the lower class, see Eugene Robinson, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (New York: Doubleday, 2010).

· 44. Jay Mathews, “Why Nation’s Biggest Charter Network Dumped its Slogan, ‘Work Hard. Be Nice,’” Washington Post, July 7, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/why-nations-biggest-charter-network-dumped-its-slogan-work-hard-be-nice/2020/07/07/e7896c0a-bf9e-11ea-b4f6-cb39cd8940fb_story.html.

· 45. Like Deidre N. McCloskey who rejects the idea that capitalism is built on greed and crass materialism, Sowell believes that capitalism at its best is built on a moral and ethical foundation, and when this foundation is present and continually nurtured, it will shape the very people who participate in the market economy. See Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). For the role that high levels of education play in immigrant success, see Girdusky and Hill, “Legal Immigration,” chapter five in They’re Not Listening.

· 46. To see how our founders understood these “middle class virtues” and the role they played in a stable constitutional republic, see chapter four, “ ‘Happy Mediocrity’: America’s Middle Class,” and chapter five, “Citizen Virtue: ‘Simple Manners’ Among the ‘Laborious and Saving,’” in Leslie G. Rubin, America, Aristotle, and the Politics of a Middle Class (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018), 91-118, 119-39.

· 47. Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

· 48. Miller, Strangers in Our Midst, 133.

· 49. For Galston’s critique of the unencumbered self and the procedural republic, see William A. Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chaps. 4–7.

· 50. William A. Galston, “Public Morality and Religion in the Liberal State,” Political Science and Politics 19, no. 4 (fall 1986): 823-24.

· 51. Galston, “Public Morality and Religion in the Liberal State,” 823.

· 52. William A. Galston, “Liberal Virtues,” American Political Science Review 82, no. 4 (December 1988): 1279.

· 53. Galston, “Liberal Virtues,” 1279.

· 54. Galston, “Liberal Virtues,” 1280.

· 55. Galston, “Liberal Virtues,” 1288.

· 56. Galston, “Liberal Virtues,” 1289.

· 57. Galston, Liberal Purposes, 250.

· 58. Miller, Strangers in Our Midst, 133.

· 59. Miller, Strangers in Our Midst, 142. See also David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995).

· 60. Miller, Strangers in Our Midst, 144.

· 61. Miller, Strangers in Our Midst, 144.

· 62. Miller, Strangers in Our Midst, 145.

· 63. Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 127.

· 64. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 127.

· 65. Sandel, Public Philosophy, 10.

· 66. Sandel, Public Philosophy, 10.

· 67. Sandel, Public Philosophy, 10.

· 68. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 14.

· 69. Tocqueville, quoted in Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 314.

· 70. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 320-21.

· 71. Thomas West, The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 2017). To see how West and other order right 1 writers address the crisis of immigration, see The Founders on Citizenship and Immigration: Principles and Challenges in America, edited by Edward J. Erler, Thomas West, and John Marini (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007).

· 72. Lorrain Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle, The Learning of Liberty (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Leslie G. Rubin, America, Aristotle, and the Politics of a Middle Class (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018).

· 73. West, Political Theory of the American Founding, 169.

· 74. West, Political Theory of the American Founding, 218.

· 75. West, Political Theory of the American Founding, 269.

· 76. See Charles Kesler, “Civility and Citizenship in Washington’s America and Ours,” Imprimis, 29, no. 12 (December 2000), https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/civility-and-citizenship-in-washingtons-america-and-ours.

· 77. While most of the historians in the documentary are on the left, most falling in order left 2, and all aware that Washington had slaves, they nonetheless don’t dismiss him as a racist. The reason could be that he freed some of them during his lifetime and others at his death, and his wife, Martha, freed the rest after his death. The Washington estate also financially supported the freedman for three decades, until the support wasn’t needed.

· 78. See the appendix, “Farewell Address,” in Matthew Spalding and Patrick J. Garrity, A Sacred Union of Citizens: George Washington’s Farewell Address and the American Character (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 178.

· 79. Washington, quoted in Spalding and Garrity, Sacred Union of Citizens, 178.

· 80. Washington, quoted in Spalding and Garrity, Sacred Union of Citizens, 183, italics added.

· 81. Washington, quoted in Spalding and Garrity, Sacred Union of Citizens, 183, italics added.

· 82. For an account of Washington’s strong faith and the role it played in his own virtue and the virtue of the nation, see Michael Novak, Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country (New York: Basic Books, 2007).

13. CHRISTIANITY: THE SECOND CONSTITUTION

· 1. Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (New York: Penguin, 2020).

· 2. One has only to look at cities like Los Angeles to get a glimpse of where this high-tech caste society is going: thousands of homeless people camp on the sides of freeways and entire blocks of the downtown. Or look at the anger of some in the working- and middle-classes over lockdowns and constantly changing mandates that seemed to favor the elites. Or the pressure brewing over mass immigration that threatens to explode. Or the discontent of some churches who had to close due to temporary emergency powers under the pandemic restrictions, feeling their religious liberty was being threatened. Or the animus directed at Christians who hold to historic biblical views of gender and sexuality.

· 3. “Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Speech Transcript to Federalist Society,” Rev.com, November 12, 2020, www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/supreme-court-justice-samuel-alito-speech-transcript-to-federalist-society.

· 4. Mark Tushnet, “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism,” Balkanization, May 6, 2016, https://balkin.blogspot.com/2016/05/abandoning-defensive-crouch-liberal.html.

· 5. Mark Joseph Stern, “Sam Alito Delivers Grievance-Laden, Ultrapartisan Speech to the Federalist Society,” Slate, November 13, 2020, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/alito-federalist-society-speech-insane.html.

· 6. Matt Forde, “Samuel Alito Is Tired of Winning,” New Republic, November 13, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/160199/samuel-alito-federalist-society-religion.

· 7. Katherine Stewart, “The Supreme Court’s Religious Persecution Complex,” New Republic, April 9, 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/161987/supreme-court-fulton-philadelphia-religious.

· 8. This is a classic freedom left 2 argument, the godless constitution view, wanting to bracket out religion, defending the idea of the naked public square, only to have smuggled secular religions back in.

· 9. John McWhorter, “The Elect: The Threat to a Progressive America from Anti-Black Antiracists,” Substack, January 27, 2021, https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-posing-as-antiracists.

· 10. Katherine Stewart, “The Supreme Court’s Religious Persecution Complex,” New Republic, April 9, 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/161987/supreme-court-fulton-philadelphia-religious.

· 11. For transcript of Justice Alito’s speech to the Federalist Society, go here: https://rev.com/blog/transcripts/supreme-court-justice-samuel-alito-speech-transript-to-federalist-society.

· 12. For transcript of Justice Alito’s speech to the Federalist Society, go here: https://rev.com/blog/transcripts/supreme-court-justice-samuel-alito-speech-transript-to-federalist-society.

· 13. James Davison Hunter, “Religious Freedom and the Challenge of Modern Pluralism,” in Articles of Faith, Articles of Peace, ed. James Davison Hunter and Os Guinness (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1990), 54-73.

· 14. Hunter, “Religious Freedom and the Challenge of Modern Pluralism,” 55-58.

· 15. Hunter, Culture Wars, 262.

· 16. Hunter, “Religious Freedom and the Challenge of Modern Pluralism,” 63-73.

· 17. Hunter, “Religious Freedom and the Challenge of Modern Pluralism,” 72.

· 18. Hunter, “Religious Freedom and the Challenge of Modern Pluralism,” 72.

· 19. James W. Ceaser, Designing a Polity: America’s Constitution in Theory and Practice (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 16.

· 20. Lindsay, Cynical Theories, chap. 2, “Postmodernism’s Applied Turn,” 45-66.

· 21. Joseph Bottum, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America (New York: Image, 2014).

· 22. Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 142.

· 23. Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 142.

· 24. Charles Taylor, “Religion in a Free Society,” in Hunter and Guinness, Articles of Faith, Articles of Peace, 105.

· 25. James Davison Hunter, “Liberal Democracy and the Unraveling of the Enlightenment Project,” Hedgehog Review 19, no. 3 (Fall 2017), https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-end-of-the-end-of-history/articles/liberal-democracy-and-the-unraveling-of-the-enlightenment-project.

· 26. Hunter, “Liberal Democracy and the Unraveling of the Enlightenment Project.”

· 27. Hunter, “Liberal Democracy and the Unraveling of the Enlightenment Project.”

· 28. Hunter, “Liberal Democracy and the Unraveling of the Enlightenment Project.”

· 29. The term court evangelicals comes from historian John Fea’s book Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018).

· 30. For a history of the Christian Right and its connection to conservatism, see Kenneth I. Kersch, Conservatives and the Constitution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), chap. 5.

· 31. James Ceaser, Designing a Polity: America’s Constitution in Theory and Practice, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010), 145, italics added. For the best explanation of how the founders understood the role of religion and the first amendment, see Mark David Hall, Did America Have a Christian Founding (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2019). See also Daniel L. Driesbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation (New York: New York University Press, 2002).

· 32. Ceaser, Designing a Polity: America’s Constitution in Theory and Practice, 145.

· 33. See chapter 2, “The Second Tablet Project,” in J. Budziszewski, The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009), 23-40.

· 34. Ceaser, Designing a Polity, 145.

· 35. James Ceaser, Designing a Polity: America’s Constitution in Theory and Practice, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010), 145.

· 36. Ceaser, Designing a Polity, 145.

· 37. Ceaser, Designing a Polity, 145.

· 38. See Alan Kahan, Tocqueville, Democracy and Religion: Checks and Balances for Democratic Souls (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 68-93.

· 39. For the power of prophetic Christianity in the abolitionist movement, see D. H. Dilbeck, Frederick Douglass: America’s Prophet (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). For the widespread involvement of religious believers in the antislavery movement in Great Britain and the United States, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). For the role of prophetic religion played in the civil rights era, see David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

· 40. Carlos Lozada, “The Book Every New American Citizen—and Every Old One, Too—Should Read,” Washington Post, December 17, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2015/12/17/the-book-every-new-american-citizen-and-every-old-one-too-should-read.

· 41. James Schleifer, “How Has Tocqueville’s Democracy Been Read in America?,” in The Chicago Companion to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

· 42. See William A. Galton, “Tocqueville on Liberalism and Religion,” Social Research 54, no. 3 (1987); James T. Schleifer, “Tocqueville, Religion, and Democracy in America: Some Essential Questions,” American Political Thought 3, no. 2 (2014); Catherine Zuckert, “Not by Preaching: Tocqueville on the Role of Religion in American Democracy,” Review of Politics 43, no. 2 (1981); and Joshua Mitchell, The Fragility of Freedom, Tocqueville, Covenant, and the Democratic Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

· 43. The best account of Tocqueville’s personal struggle with Christianity, see Doris S. Goldstein, Trial of Faith: Religion and Politics in Tocqueville’s Thought (New York: Elsevier, 1975). See also Michael Zuckert, ed., The Spirit of Religion and the Spirit of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

· 44. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s appreciation is mainly for the Protestantism of the early Puritans that he witnessed in his travels and describes as “religion” for shorthand. In this chapter I will be using the words religion, Christianity, and evangelicalism to equal this pan-Protestantism, which today would also include Judaism and Catholicism (after all, Tocqueville was Catholic) as historic versions of biblical religion.

· 45. Alexis de Tocqueville to Charles Forbes René de Montalembert, December 1, 1852, cited in Kahan, Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion, 68.

· 46. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer (Carmel, IN: Liberty Fund, 2012), Book 1:70.

· 47. Kahan, Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion, 72.

· 48. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Debra Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 200), 42.

· 49. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Mansfield, 43.

· 50. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Mansfield, 43.

· 51. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, abridged with introduction by Sanford Kessler, translated and annotated by Stephen D. Grant (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.), 135.

· 52. William A. Galston, “Tocqueville on Liberalism and Religion,” Social Research 54, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): 501.

· 53. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 444.

· 54. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Mayer, 444.

· 55. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Mayer, 294.

· 56. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Mansfield, 275.

· 57. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Mansfield, 280.

· 58. Kahan, Tocqueville, Democracy and Religion, 73.

· 59. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Mansfield, 273.

· 60. Kahan, Tocqueville, Democracy and Religion, 79.

· 61. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, cited in Kahan, Tocqueville, Democracy and Religion, 78.

· 62. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Mansfield, 279.

· 63. Catherine Zuckert, “Not By Preaching: Tocqueville on the Role of Religion in American Democracy,” Review of Politics 43, no. 2 (April 1981): 279.

· 64. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Mansfield, 265.

· 65. Kahan, Tocqueville, Democracy and Religion, 85.

· 66. James W. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 33.

· 67. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 33.

· 68. Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 36-37.

· 69. Mitchell, Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 206.

· 70. See Harry V. Jaffa, “The American Founding as the Best Regime,” Claremont Review of Books, July 4, 2007, https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/the-american-founding-as-the-best-regime.

· 71. Galston, Tocqueville on Liberalism and Religion, 513.

CONCLUSION: THE HEROIC ROLE FOR THE CHURCH

· 1. Ilya Feoktistov, “It’s Not Fear Driving COVID-19 Panic, It’s Disgust,” The Federalist, April 23, 2021, https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/23/its-not-fear-driving-covid-19-panic-its-disgust.

· 2. George Orwell, quoted in Feoktistov, “It’s Not Fear Driving COVID-19 Panic.”

· 3. George Orwell, quoted in Feoktistov, “It’s Not Fear Driving COVID-19 Panic.”

· 4. Jennifer Rubin, “We Should Soon Stop Catering to the Vaccine Holdouts,” Washington Post, April 22, 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/22/soon-we-need-stop-catering-vaccine-holdouts.

· 5. Josh Blackman, “Understanding Governor Cuomo’s Hostility Towards Jews,” Reason, October 8, 2020, https://reason.com/volokh/202/10/08/understanding-governor-cuomos-hostility-towards-jews/.

· 6. Blackman, “Understanding Governor Cuomo’s Hostility Towards Jews.” This kind of disgust is treading on dangerous ground. For as Orwell said, when we see our opponents as “dirty” or “smelly” or a “breeding ground for disease,” it opens the door “to something else,” and historically this has meant persecution and pogroms. While Rubin and Cuomo are not calling for pogroms, the something else does include persecution, or, as Rubin counsels, society must “stop catering to those bent on being a danger to themselves and others” and force them to take the vaccine or else they will have their jobs, their kids’ education, and the right to shop taken away, creating two classes of people.

· 7. Damon Linker, “Why Do So Many Liberals Despise Christianity?,” The Week, October 8, 2014, https//theweek.com/articles/443225/why-many-liberals-despise-christianity.

· 8. Matt Walsh, “It Is Time to Face the Facts,” Daily Wire, www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-it-is-time-to-face-the-facts-we-cannot-be-united.

· 9. For examples of how these possibilities are being discussed on the right, see the pseudonym Rebecca, “The Separation: A Proposal for a Renewed America,” The American Mind, November 30, 2020, https://americanmind.org/features/a-house-dividing/the-separation/; Michael Lind, “Showdown or Surrender: There’s No Separate Peace with Our Centralized Elites,” American Mind, December 14, 2020, https://americanmind.org/features/a-house-dividing/showdown-or-surrender/; Michael Anton, The Stakes: America at the point of No Return (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2020); and David French, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation (New York: St, Martin’s Press, 2020).

· 10. Walsh, “It Is Time to Face the Facts,” Daily Wire.

· 11. Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 162-63.

· 12. Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 163.

· 13. For some of the weaknesses of communitarians like Bellah, see Bruce Frohnen, The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996).

· 14. Vincent Phillip Muñoz, “Defending American Classical Liberalism,” National Review, June 11, 2018, www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/american-classical-liberalism-response-to-radical-catholics/.

· 15. See Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Revival (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1987).

· 16. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006), 44.

· 17. See Philip Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 82.

· 18. Jason Willock, “A Center That Can Hold,” National Affairs, Summer 2018, www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/a-center-that-can-hold.

· 19. See Jim Belcher, Deep Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 181-98.

· 20. For a good idea of how this is done, see Jim Belcher, In Search of Deep Faith: A Pilgrimage in the Beauty, Goodness and Heart of Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013).

· 21. Muñoz, “Defending American Classical Liberalism,” 2-3.

· 22. Harry V. Jaffa, “The American Founding as the Best Regime,” Claremont Review of Books, July 4, 2007, https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/the-american-founding-as-the-best-regime.

· 23. David F. Forte, “Noble Sinners,” Claremont Review of Books, September 17, 2019, https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/noble-sinners/.

· 24. See the helpful discussion in “The Civil Religion: Critics and Allies,” in American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 202-22 (chap. 8).

· 25. See Matthew Spalding and Patrick J. Garrity, A Sacred Union of Citizens: George Washington’s Farewell Address and the American Character (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996).

· 26. George Washington, “Thanksgiving Proclamation, 3 October 1789,” Founders Online, accessed May 11, 2021, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-04-02-0091.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

· 1. J. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 15-37.

· 2. J. Budziszewski, The Line Through the Heart (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2011).