Better Together

Brion McClanahan penned two able critiques of President Trump’s “1776 Report” for the April/May and July 2021 issues of this magazine. I notice that his charge (in “Stop Playing the Left’s Game,” July 2021 Chronicles) that “our allies at Claremont…give unwitting aid and comfort to the left” is mirrored by Michael Anton’s assertion (in “Americans Unite,” in the online magazine American Greatness) that Chronicles does the same. Both sides are essentially right, but that is only because our common enemies will use any and all means to destroy us.

 

If we argue that the Founding Fathers were white leaders of a white country seeking to form a federal republic that would last longer than most had in the past, then we are white supremacists. If we argue that the founders were cautious egalitarians who believed that slavery should come to an end gradually and only by the consent of the people of the states, then we are liars and hypocrites.

 

From what I can see, the distance between the paleo right and the liberal right (if I can use that term for the Claremont Institute scholars) is narrowing and links are growing. That is encouraging. I would only point out the continual mischief caused by one tenet of the Claremont/Hillsdale school: the so-called deferred promise of equality supposedly codified in the Declaration of Independence. This is considered by the Claremonters as the first organic law, and thus authoritative and binding, of the United States.

 

It is not only Willmoore Kendall and M. E. Bradford who have denied that such a promise was ever made, much less that it was made obligatory by being somehow incorporated into the fundamental laws of the country. American history scholars as diverse as Vernon Parrington, Garry Wills, Pauline Maier, and Eugene Genovese have also argued against this interpretation of the Declaration. Just because Lincoln believed it does not make it so.

 

The constitutional federated republic bequeathed by our ancestors is now an empire beset by civil strife and oppressed by a malevolent managerial regime. At such a time, Americans must take a side for or against that regime. By backing Trump in 2016, New Criterion Editor Roger Kimball, historian Victor Davis Hanson, and Michael Anton joined the side of the populist-nationalist resistance to that regime. Increasingly joining are white Democrats, working-class Hispanics, and middle-class blacks. If our populist-nationalist movement is to succeed, we can do so only by working together. Then we can refound the republic upon a basis which all members of our victorious movement can support.

—H. A. Scott Trask

Chesterfield, Mo.

 

As a guy who was director of administration at The Heritage Foundation and with Sam Francis in the early 1980s, executive vice president at The Rockford Institute for 10 years, and a vice president of The Claremont Institute when Michael Anton was in Claremont writing for the Claremont Review of Books, I was struck most favorably by the tone of Darrell Dow’s review of Mr. Anton’s book The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return. Thank you for publishing this fair-minded review.

 

While not wishing to minimize the differences among conservatives and even libertarians, there comes a point where it needs to be stated forcefully that what unites us is far greater than the anti-American left-wing radicalism so prevalent among the “wokerati” of today’s cancelculture warriors.

—Michael Y. Warder, Sr.

Upland, Calif.

 

 

The focus in the July issue on the urban majority (“A Tale of Two Americas,” by Bruce P. Frohnen), which dates from the 1920 census, is quite relevant to the future of the United States. While there are now only 15 States with rural majorities—and that’s because the Census Bureau classifies any development concentration from population 2,500 on up as urban—it seems more likely that the real national split will be 25 rural states to 25 urban states, as citizens in the suburban, exurban, and rural areas claim representational presence and separation from the major urban centers that exist in all the states.

 

Indeed, there are such secession movements already underway within all 50 states as nonurbanites seek to segregate themselves from the ever-increasing problems of the central cities. All of these cities are now decidedly “tax-minus” as their more productive (dare I say more civilized?) residents have been fleeing. This urban flight has been going on ever since the first elegant brownstone houses went up on the former Dutch market-garden fields of northeastern Manhattan Island in the post-Civil-War decades. The district originally called Haarlem was urbanized by Wall Street commuters but switched to low-income renter status as the first families fled for more distant places like Scarsdale and Greenwich. The new “Harlem” became the national codeword for underclass slum.

 

It has been politically incorrect since then to anticipate a terminal date for the traditional central cities, but as they change demographically and economically they have become increasingly irrelevant. The rest of the population of each state is becoming weary of subsidizing them, especially after reading about the cultural traits of their inhabitants.

—Martin Harris

Jonesborough, Tenn.

 

Mr. Harris is right to emphasize the role increasing urbanization has played in undermining American self-government. Demographics are not destiny, however. Rural areas can also become hotbeds of political radicalism and cultural rot. And many American cities (especially in the South) for decades bucked the trend toward cultural breakdown and government dependence.

 

Rural folk are less likely to choose progressive politics and somewhat more resistant to them. That said, big cities’ population density, concentration of power, and simple scale have long worked against Americans’ social order and self-governing character.

 

Sadly, even urban failure has been bad for self-government. The flood of refugees from cities to suburbs has simply spread the blight of progressivism. By “progressivism” I mean, here, rhetoric and policies aimed at stripping religion and traditional standards of conduct from the public square and replacing customary norms and ties with a system of “social services” that enforce government dependency and hyper-individualism. The rise of progressivism and its co-opting of ethnic politics is too long a story to get into here. But the urban result has been “local” rule by petty bureaucrats within a social-services state that demands federal subsidies, then doles out patronage and ideology to increasingly atomized masses while protecting the prerogatives of local elites.

 

The flight from Blue (Democratic Party) cities and states endangers the character of healthier regions of the United States for much the same reason: too many people brought up in progressive areas refuse to recognize that voting for progressive policies and politicians brings cultural, economic, and political ruin. Combined with the Supreme Court’s unconstitutional dictate that everyone be allowed to vote essentially the moment he enters a new district, Blue flight has flipped states like Nevada into especially corrupt, anti-traditional centers of progressivism, and threatens to do the same in other states.

 

Thus, no place in America is safe from “urban” or “Blue State” rot. Urban planning is a significant part of the problem. Zoning and other laws make it essentially impossible in much of America to build or defend livable neighborhoods, let alone the self-sustaining towns, complete with their own, independent commercial centers, that dominated America well into the 20th century.

 

The history of Northwest Ohio illustrates how traditional towns sustained self-government and cultural continuity in changing times. During the late 19th century, German immigrants gravitated to that largely German immigrant area, usually by train. Conductors would ask passengers “Catholic or Lutheran?” and then let them off at the town corresponding to their answers. Methodists and others came, remained, or converted, and larger towns developed multi-denominationally. But to this day villages abound in the area with their distinctive, single churches and local identities. One can hardly imagine a repetition of such patterns today.

 

All of which explains why recent local “secessionist” events are so important. The Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta seeks to escape the death grip of the hopelessly corrupt, race-bound central city. Several counties in Oregon seek to trade domination by drug-addled, crime-ridden, Antifa-subservient Portland for membership in still-functioning Idaho. Numerous cities and localities—and even states—are openly rejecting federal and state rules aimed at terminating rights of self-defense and forcing citizens and their young children to accept experimental vaccines and Critical Race Theory indoctrination. The success of such local secessionism and “liberty laws” (to borrow an antebellum phrase) is essential if we are to resuscitate local self-government and, with it, the American character and fighting spirit.