- Aug 2022
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claremontreviewofbooks.com claremontreviewofbooks.com
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If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.
A breathless paragraph that does articulate well and generously the conservative (nay) reactionary position of those who year to return to an "orange" (or even amber) order before the arrival of green.
The issue is they want to go back rather than forward which is the only option. We need to "transclude" green -- and orange and amber. Yes we do want virtue, and values, and (probably) a reduced government -- and more. And we need to recognize difference and systematic injustice and a multiplicity of perspectives. And go beyond that into something new.
This ultimately is simply reactionary. One can sympathize and appreciate it. One imagine what it was like for Catholics in their old ordered world with the all good things of the high middle ages bemoaning the arrival of the protestant heretics. But there is no going back. We can go forward -- and still take much of what was good from that past.
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