Pilgrims at 400

 For National Review this Thanksgiving weekend, I wrote about an obscure American colossus: the 81-foot-tall National Monument to the Forefathers. (There are some pictures at the link if you want to see this 19th-century giant.)

New Englanders in the 1800s embraced a cult of the Pilgrims, portraying them as founders of what would become the United States. In a famous 1820 oration, Daniel Webster called Plymouth “the spot where the first scene of our history was laid.” Virginia’s Jamestown, built by tidewater adventurers, might have been the first English settlement chronologically, but Webster and other New Englanders sought to make Plymouth (and Boston) first in principle.

History’s commemoration here bears the hints of political theory, or at least political apologia. While Webster’s 1820 speech on the Pilgrims celebrated “civil and religious liberty,” it also turned to broader conditions that at once supported such liberties and could also be advanced by them. He argued that the relative economic equality of the Pilgrims laid the groundwork for a democratic society, as the continued diffusion of property was essential for the continuance of republican self-government. To Webster, the Pilgrim project was partly about defending liberty, but it also demanded the promotion of the general welfare, virtue, and religious devotion.

The piece looks at architecture, the Pilgrims (400 years later!), and the role of history as a vehicle for legitimization for a pluralist democracy.

If you can't get enough of the Pilgrims (and who can!?), see also James Panero's reflection on Plymouth Rock for the New Criterion.

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State Power and the Cold War

For National Review earlier this week, I wrote a piece about making the GOP a party of Lincoln for the 21st century. That piece thinks about how the GOP can support both pro-worker and pro-growth policies. Right now, there's a bigger debate going on about the future direction of the Republican Party, with many people arguing that it should become more of a pro-worker party.

I'd like to turn for a second to a subtext of this debate. One narrative for debates about the future of the right goes something like this: The American right was for a long time the party of laissez-faire and minimal governance--in ideals if not in reality--so arguments for making the GOP more populist are also call to break with this inheritance of movement conservatism and move in a more statist direction.

This argument has certain elements of truth (many elements of the American right have been proponents of more libertarian or "classically liberal" economics). But it might also elide some important points, especially that the American right has long been a proponent of massive state action.

The famous "three-legged stool" of movement conservatism (social conservatism, market-based economics, and Cold War hawkishness) had state power at its core. As I've written before, proponents of an assertive stance against the Soviet Union focused on American state power as a key vehicle--more about government military spending, and much less letters of marque. Moreover, that government spending on the Cold War also often functioned as a form of industrial policy. ARPA/DARPA invested in many key technologies (such as the Internet), the space program spurred on many innovations, and defense contracting provided a major source of industrial production. And there were political implications for these investments, too. South California was both a major aerospace hub and a citadel for the GOP. (Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, cutbacks in aerospace and defense in the aftermath of the Cold War were soon followed by a GOP retreat in the Golden State.)

This suggests that the theoretical divisions between the policies of traditional "movement conservatism" and a more populist politics might not be quite as sharp as they first seem. The belief that government action plays an essential role in securing the conditions of freedom and the recognition of personal dignity might be seen as a throughline. We no longer live in the world of 1979, so the precise policies might have to change, and much could be gained through looking back at the deeper traditions of American politics for fusing civic regulation and personal freedom. A politics of the commonwealth, national integrity, and liberty has a long lineage in American life, from the Federalists onward. Conservatives in the 20th century drew from that tradition, and they still can draw from it in the 21st.

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