The conservative ascent

Barack Obama’s precipitous rise to the White House and his awesome expansion of federal power are frequently explained either as the products of failure or as crucial elements in progressivism’s undoing of American Constitutionalism. While each account is not exclusive of the other, both seek an explanation for the challenges posed by Obama’s presidency to self-government properly understood. The former wagers that the distorting effects of Bush’s foreign policy, a badly flawed Republican Party, and the 2008 market crash were crucial to his mastery of fortune. President Obama stands as the accidental leader. The comforting thought is that as political prospects for Obama have grown dimmer, the repeal of Obama’s mandate to govern is surely just around the bend of the Potomac. We conservatives can almost see it. Alternatively, other more trenchant observations point towards the ongoing corruption of America’s founding spirit. Within this tale of deformation, occurring for well nigh a century, President Obama represents a fresh and dramatic episode in government expansion.

This fuller account convincingly focuses on the deep unlearning of the constitutional heritage bequeathed to America by the Founding Fathers. The chief antagonist of said unlearning is progressivism. Contradicting the natural rights legacy of The Declaration of Independence, progressivism asserts that citizens are not equal under law because of a common human nature and its innate liberty, but are made equal, and given meaningful lives, through the state’s bundling and dispensing of rights. The fundamental challenge to Madisonian constitutionalism could not be more apparent. The American Founding is now polluted and besotted by statist ideas. Her standard must be renewed in our time if free government is to endure.

This compelling tale of American constitutional and civic woe, popularized almost daily by Fox News maestro Glenn Beck, connects Americans with certain sources that have contributed to our oncoming fiscal train wreck, among other impending disasters. Other conservative insights, however, are overlooked in this attempt to reinvigorate American limited government and free markets. We stand in need of better thinking. Unconsidered is that the recovery of these goods might be possible only through richer appreciation of the moral and spiritual insights that undergird republican liberty. Perhaps no figure in American conservatism better deserves our attention in this regard than Whittaker Chambers, the anti-communist par excellence.

In his epic memoir Witness, Chambers observed that “political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible.” For Chambers, the ennobling experiment in republican liberty must be grounded in God, the human soul, and the intrinsic dignity of the person. Man’s freedom has a purpose that is intelligibly disclosed to him by God. Politics can be politics and economics can be economics only when man ascends above his immanent condition. The failure to acknowledge this reality ends in man’s existential torment that seeks its Sisyphean relief in ideological certainty.

Believing that man’s conscience could discern the good and know truth, albeit in limited fashion, the political conclusions were that man does not reach his end in service to the state or any other temporal order. As Chambers stated, “Freedom is a need of the soul and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom.”

Man’s purposes are not unlocked by a state that bundles and dispenses rights to its citizens. In fact, the state receives its direction and its limits from citizens possessed with the thick account of freedom that Chambers defended.