What is America and what does it mean to be an American? We Americans have been debating this question for centuries, yet we seem even less united on a common understanding than Americans of prior generations.

America’s original national motto was E Pluribus Unum: “Out of many, one”. It contained the notion that this diverse country of ethnicities and religions and ideologies were somehow unified in some sense. In 1956, our national motto changed to “In God We Trust”. Yet this was no less of a statement on American unity. In 1956 the Cold War was raging, and the government of the United States sought to distinguish itself from the atheistic Soviet Union. Trusting in God was simply what it meant to be an American.

And yet no one can deny that there are plenty of Americans who would not claim to believe, let alone trust, in God. And the idea that the best way to describe ourselves in light of our current political divides is “Out of many, one” seems downright laughable.

Why is it so hard to come to a common agreement on what it means to be an American? What ideas have been tried in the past? Why did they fail and to what extent were they ever successful? How important is it that we reach some kind of consensus? Joining Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis to discuss these questions and more is returning guest Avi Woolf.

About Avi Woolf

Avi Woolf is a writer, editor, translator, and podcaster whose work has been published in Arc Digital, Commentary, National Review, The Bulwark, and The Dispatch. He is chief editor of the online Medium publication Conservative Pathways, and he—in his words—"hopes to help forge a path for a conservatism which is relevant for the 21st century while not abandoning the best of past wisdom.”

Avi has been a guest on the show in two previous episodes as well: the first in which he explored the need for conservatism to find a way to appeal to people who live in urban areas in Episode 26 – Urban Conservatism and the second in which he mulled over the love/hate relationship the Right has long had with institutions of higher education in Episode 49 – God and the Speechless at Yale.

Avi hosts his own podcast entitled Avi’s Conversational Corner, a podcast on culture, history, and politics in a broad perspective. You can find Avi on Twitter @AviWoolf

Jonah Goldberg, founder of the digital media company The Dispatch, is fond of reminding his fellow conservatives that sometimes technological advancements are more disruptive to society than ideological trends. In his view, the advent of the automobile and contraceptives did more to shatter societal norms in the last century than any theory to escape from a progressive German university.

Had the United States remained a largely agrarian society it’s possible the ideas of the American Left would have never evolved much beyond the teachings of Thomas Paine we explored in Part 2 or the perspective of equality and limit-government espoused by Thomas Jefferson. But the end of the nineteenth century on into the beginnings of the twentieth brought with it one of the greatest upheavals to societal norms humanity has ever witnessed: the Industrial Revolution.

While the Industrial Revolution advanced Americans and the rest of the developed world into previously unknown levels of prosperity, it also shattered the familiar comforts of the past. The capitalist machine doled out both profits and losses in a chaotic, seemingly uncontrollable manner. People groups were unsettled and left to the mercies of uncharted waters. The idyllic countryside where hard-working Americans could happily labor with their neighbors and loved ones in close-knit communities were rapidly being replaced with factory-laden landscapes drenched in the stench of soulless materialism.

What’s more, this new world did not seem to benefit people as equally as the markets of the past. By 1913, an estimated 18% of the nation’s income went to the wealthiest 1% such as businessmen like John D. Rockefeller who became the wealthiest American of all time (adjusted for inflation). Worse still, these wealth imbalances were perceived to result in political imbalances as more and more Americans came to see the system as rigged to favor the rich and the powerful at the expense of the people.

Enter the Populists

By 1882 this populist sentiment had formed into a political party—the Populist Party—and a growing movement in favor of taking power from the new industrial elites and returning it to the people. “The ideology of Populism was not a difficult thing for historians…to identify,” writes historian and populist-sympathizer Thomas Frank. “Its signature ideas—equality, hostility to privilege, anti-monopoly—were part of a radical nineteenth-century tradition that could be traced to Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.”

And just what did the populists want? The clearest expression of their demands can be found in the 1882 Omaha Platform which stated, in part:

“The conditions which surround us best justify our cooperation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized…The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled…The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection…The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind…The national power to create money is appropriated to enrich bond-holders…We seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of the ‘plain people,’ with which class it originated…We believe that the power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded…as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.”

The Populist Party began running candidates from national on down to local offices and had some successes, particularly in the sparsely populated Western states. But because populists were distrustful of the elites who controlled the power structures of society, their weapon of choice was to alter or amend constitutions of states and even the United States Constitution, thus circumventing the legislative, executive, and judicial bodies that stood in their way.

Between 1909 and 1919 populists successfully amended the Constitution an astounding four times. First, to enact a national income tax to curb the wealth inequalities brought about in the Industrial Revolution. Second, the popular election of U.S. Senators would, theoretically, ensure the Senate would be presided over by representatives of the people and not special interests. Third, the vice of alcohol, which was of particular concern to the often religious and morally zealous populists, was made illegal with prohibition. Finally, women’s suffrage expanded the franchise to an even larger share of the people.

My home state of Oklahoma, which gained statehood at the height of the populist era in 1907, was significantly influenced by the movement. Notre Dame history professor Walter Nugentsaid Oklahoma’s constitution “was a model of Populist-Progressivism, perhaps the fullest statement ever of Democratic agrarian radicalism.” At its ratification, the Oklahoma constitution was the most lengthy governing document of any government. President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt was hesitant to sign the document, chiding that it was “not fit for publication”. To this day, many of the executive and legislative efforts in the State of Oklahoma are frustrated by an intensely complicated constitution intended to deprive elites of the ability to run the affairs of the people.

Populism vs. Progressivism? It’s Complicated

Nugent used the curious term “Populist-Progressivism” to describe the model used to establish Oklahoma’s constitution. But while this is a fair description in Oklahoma’s case, it also may misleadingly imply that populism and progressivism were the same things. What, then, is progressivism? Historian Joseph Tartakovsky writes that his fellow historians “still struggle to define it, except to agree, broadly, that it was a diverse national response to the strains of industrialization and urbanization between 1890 and 1917. Chronologically, it followed the Populist movement and preceded the New Deal, with links to both, yet also distinct from both.” That timeframe is open to debate as it somewhat overlaps the populist era and even today large swaths of the American Left describe themselves as “progressive”. But we’ll save that divergence for a future post.

To Tartakovsky the primary difference in progressivism was less about first principles and goals than it was tactics and tone. Tones that were “calm and middle-class by contrast to the frantic, farmer-led Populism.” Both movements were persuaded that the government had a role to play in protecting the interests of the people who were otherwise at the mercy of powerful special interests.

Historian Nugent solves the Populist-Progressive bifurcation by essentially equating them as one and the same, while acknowledging the difficulty of establishing a uniform definition to the movement. “Because Progressivism manifested itself in everything from railroad regulation to woman suffrage to immigration control to realist art and literature to the first real mass media and paved roads, the movement’s core theme has been hard to pin down,” admits Nugent. “‘Reform’ itself was that theme, vague as the term was and is. But much of the Progressive spirit lay in that very openness to change, that conviction that ‘something needs to be done’.”

Teddy Roosevelt: First of the Progressives

Teddy became president in that weird nebulous between the populist and progressive eras, making it further difficult to distinguish between them. The son of a wealthy New York City family with ties to Eastern establishment, Teddy was a strange champion for the common folk. However, his criticisms of Oklahoma’s “Populist-Progressive” constitution should not be taken to mean he was critical of the sentiments of the movement itself. He was, in fact, the first of America’s progressive presidents who heralded the virtues of the people and was critical of unchecked capitalist forces. Teddy’s views on how government might be used to help the people sound as if they came straight from the Omaha Platform itself:

“[This] does not represent centralization. It represents merely the acknowledgment of the patent fact that centralization has already come in business. If this irresponsible outside business power is to be controlled in the interest of the general public it can only be controlled in one way—by giving adequate power of control to the one sovereignty capable of exercising such power—the National Government.”

Teddy’s solution to the inequalities in wealth and power that plagued the Industrial Revolution was for the government to even the score. “[Teddy] spoke in the authentic Progressive way,” argues Nugent. “Private enterprises capable of exerting economic power over masses of people, irresponsibility—i.e., without responsibility to the people they controlled—had to be regulated by the representatives of those people.” Teddy’s idea of progress wasn’t to upend the idea of America as developed by the Founders, but to use the power of government to protect that idea from the new and growing threats to liberty in the form of powerful and entrenched business interests.

Woodrow Wilson: Critic of the Founders

Yet the next of the progressive presidents, Woodrow Wilson, very much would challenge the ideas of the American founding. For it was those ideas that, in Wilson’s views, put a needless constraint on government’s ability to act on the people’s interests. Conservative commentators such as Jonah Goldberg rarely mince words when describing Wilson’s views of the American founding:

“It is difficult to exaggerate Wilson’s arrogant and sovereign contempt for the system set up by the Founders. ‘The reformer is bewildered,’ he whined, by the need to persuade ‘a voting majority of several million heads.’ Elsewhere he scoffed, ‘No doubt, a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle.’”

Wilson’s rhetoric represented uncharted territory for the Commander and Chief. Previous administrations may have differed sharply on the vision they claimed the Founders had intended for the nation, but they did not attempt to argue their vision was mistaken. Wilson’s argument against the Constitutional restraints placed on government by the Founders was that they fundamentally misunderstood the true nature of government:

“The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of ‘checks and balances.’ The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live.”

Wilson’s Folly

Those who followed my blog might notice a peculiar similarity in Wilson’s description of government as organic life and the conservative notions of political society as a living organism from thinkers like Sir Roger Scruton and Edmund Burke (topics covered here). However, there is a remarkable difference in these seemingly similar notions. Scruton and Burke were describing the gradual process of human habitats growing and adapting, and how such gradual change allowed for a fuller understanding of Natural Law to take shape over time. They were not denying the permanent traits of human nature or the need for a check against otherwise arbitrary powers of the state.

Wilson, on the other hand, was arguing that individuals such as himself were sufficiently enlightened and that society had evolved to the point where the checks and balances placed on state power by the Founders were now a hinderance towards the sort of progress society needed. This was hardly the first time Wilson misapplied the teachings of his betters. As I discussed in a recent podcast with Jonah Goldberg, from Hegel to Lincoln to Darwin to Burke, Wilson was a master at transposing the teachings of great thinkers to lead him to the inevitable conclusion that the enlightened few ought to have power to progress the rest of us forward.

Admittedly, Wilson is not a sympathetic figure. Particularly in light of contemporary standards on racism and bigotry. Although, as this article from Vox points out, Wilson was extremely racist even by the standards of his time. As such, some on the Left might balk at me including Wilson in the progressive timeline. Nevertheless, Wilson’s legacy has had an oversized influence on the Left on down to today in that he was the first to successfully build a political movement that dared to question the traditional beliefs of the Founders. As such, progressivism has long been willing to question our traditions and take seriously the notion that progress might require a fundamental break with the past.

FDR: Progress on Steroids

This willingness to chart a new course was amplified further in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which took place, somewhat ironically, a couple of decades after historians marked the end of the progressive era by 1917. “A good many Progressives who survived into the 1920s…could not accept the New Deal because for them it went too far toward statism, across the grain of their deep individualism,” explains Nugent. “But others did become New Dealers, seeking in the very different context of the 1930s Depression to work toward a more just and generous society.” Yet whether FDR can be classified by historians as the next iteration of progressivism or not, he certainly talked like a progressive:

“Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, [Wall Street bankers] have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truth.”

The advent of the Great Depression and World War II gave FDR the popular cover to expand the administrative state into an alphabet soup of new agencies that handled everything from work programs to social security. FDR fundamentally changed the relationship of the American people to their government. Never again would the state return to the limited scope of the pre-New Deal era.

The Progressive Paradox

Where does this leave us? Winding through the three progressive presidential administrations we see a common thread between Teddy, Wilson, and FDR that government ought to be empowered to help the people in their cause against an intrusive business class that threatened exploitation and advancing the few at the expense of the many. Teddy was the first president to speak in this authentic progressive manner. Wilson added to this idea by working to obliterate the traditional system of checks and balances that hampered the progressive understanding of reform. And FDR’s New Deal expanded the state’s reach far beyond anything that had ever come before.

Yet among these champions of the progressive mindset of fighting for the interests of the common folk lies a curious paradox: all three of these men did not live the lives of working-class Americans but hailed from some of the wealthiest, most elite circles in the country. And, while that alone would not preclude them from taking up the plight of the little guy, it is at least a curiosity that deserves some examination. And that paradox is where we’ll pick things up in Part 4.

While it can be tempting for American conservatives—such as myself—who often venerate the Founding generation to view American progressivism as a stark aberration from the common beliefs of our ancestors, the truth is a bit more complicated. Just as confusions often arise when one attempts to synthesize the American variant of conservatism with a trans-national “conservative” worldview, the roots of the American Left have a distinctly American flavor and American origins.

This temptation for conservatives to look at the Left as a mostly recent pandemic of un-American ideas that spread from continental Europe is not helped by the fact much of what we think of as the American Left began to take recognizable shape in the late nineteenth century. The dawn of the populist and progressive eras—two distinct, yet related movements—took America by storm in the early 1890s and became the dominant political force for a generation. “Populism is not only a radical tradition,” writes historian Thomas Frank, “it is our radical tradition, a homegrown Left that spoke our American vernacular and worshipped at the shrines of [Thomas] Jefferson and [Thomas] Paine rather than [Karl] Marx.”

Struggles of the Marxist American

While some American Leftists may sing the praises of Marx, Marxism has long struggled to gain a foothold in American society at large and, indeed, even among many on the American Left. No doubt this is at least partially due to the historical differences in American and European societies. As Sir Roger Scruton noted, “America lacks the multiple barriers to social advancement that have existed in Europe; it has abundant space, abundant resources, abundant will and opportunity; in particular it has a political structure inimical to the creation of long-standing hereditary elites. The result is that ‘classes’, such as they are, remain fluid, temporary, without apparent moral attributes.” The history of class struggle Marx preached finds better converts in nations where the people believe themselves to be forever chained to the class they are born into and not in a dynamic society where class is something that may—theoretically—be overcome.

I do not want to imply that Marx and the idea of class struggle is of no importance to the American Left—far from it!—only that we have historically lacked the stagnant class structure that made Marxism far more appealing to much of the rest of the world. This historical difference manifests itself, at times, in different goals of the American Left. “What has distressed the American critics of the free economy is not private property—which is the cornerstone of their own independence—but the private property of others,” Scruton offers as an example. “In recent times it is the spectacle of property in the hands of ordinary, gross, uneducated people that has troubled the domestic critics of American capitalism.” The Left champions the working class in America while bemoaning the red state, white, Evangelical, MAGA-loving world they inhabit.

At the heart of much of the Left is a paradox we will explore at some length in the posts to follow; namely, a collectivist individualism that requires both the enlightened elite to lead the way and an unyielding faith in the virtue of the common folk to follow. “The role it affords to the government and its links to European social thought might at first suggest that this attitude leans toward communitarianism,” writes Yuval Levin. “But its American form is actually a radical form of individualism, moved by much the same passion for justice that [Thomas] Paine had and by much the same desire to free people of the fetters of tradition, religion, and the moral or social expectations of those around them.”

Leftist Birth Paines

Both the conservative political analysis Yuval Levin and the progressive historian Thomas Frank trace much of the roots of the American Left to Thomas Paine. Who was Thomas Paine? While he’s best known to us Americans as a patriotic rabble-rouser whose Common Sense pamphlets were largely responsible for stirring national sentiment to declare independence from Great Britain, his later writings and efforts to aid the French in their subsequent revolution is where we find the origin of the American Left.

Paine believed that the American and French revolutions signaled a new dawn for humanity. He boldly proclaimed his “present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of Reason, and the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world.” Like any good pamphleteer, Paine may have been overselling it. But his beliefs were nonetheless sincere. The tyrannical structures of the past—steeped in injustice and inequality—would soon fall to legions of righteous revolutionaries replacing archaic and immoral monarchies with liberating democratic societies.

Paine’s political views were strictly rational, and he firmly believed reason alone could show us the way to a better political order. Not only was such knowledge accessible through reason, but it could be commonly understood among the people and did not have to reside in the ivory towers of esoteric knowledge where only the elites dwell. “It is time that nations should be rational, and not be governed like animals, for the pleasure of their riders,” Paine proclaimed. The “riders” were those rulers in the monarchy and church who usurped authority over their subjects for their own selfish benefits. Even warfare was largely the fault of irrational conflicts between nations that could be resolved once nations were rebuilt on a more rational footing to serve the people and not their masters.

These governments of hereditary tyranny were all erected on faulty principles of self-preservation and expediency. What was needed were purer principles derived through reason whereby governments could secure the rights due every individual by virtue of their mere existence. “Paine’s is a politics of applied principle,” writes Levin, “and he believes the only way to rescue polities constructed on the wrong principles is to tear them down and rebuild from scratch.” The governments of the past were a mistake. The revolutionary spirit of the age would set things right. Progress.

We also find in Paine the beginnings of the modern welfare state. Not only did individuals have a right to live free from societal coercions, but governments had a duty to provide for those individuals whose freedoms were limited by being born into a life of poverty. “A son of the poor himself, [Thomas] Paine had a sincere and passionate hatred of the poverty he saw all about him in Europe,” explains political science professor Francis Canavan. “This hatred led him to propose a strong and positive governmental program for the abolition of poverty.”

Leaving Paine Behind

Yet not everything Paine espoused fully defines the modern American Left. “The fundamental utopian goal at the core of Paine’s thinking—the goal of liberating the individual from the constraints of the obligations imposed upon him by his time, his place, and his relations to others—remains essential to the left in America,” continues Levin. “But the failure of Enlightenment-liberal principles and the institutions built upon them to deliver on that bold ambition and therefore on Paine’s hopes of eradicating prejudice, poverty, and war seemed to force the left into a choice between the natural-rights theories that Paine thought would offer means of attaining his goal and the goal itself.”

While both the Left and Right celebrate certain ideas and actions of the American founding era, the attitudes and rhetoric of the Left are bereft of the wild-eyed confidence Paine had in his generation to abolish war, poverty, and tyranny through classical liberal means of ensuring the government does not encroach on our rights. Rather, the Left has turned to a broader understanding of how systems of injustice have oppressed, marginalized, and spread inequalities and how the government might be used to set these things right.

It would be more than a century later—during the height of the Industrial Revolution—when the twin forces of populism and progressivism would forge the next iteration of the American Left. And that is where we’ll pick things up in Part 3.

Josh takes a break from the guests to cover a little conservatism 101. Russell Kirk’s pithy list Ten Conservative Principles: begins with what Kirk called an enduring moral order: “The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.”

The full implications of this idea—not to mention the arguments in favor or disapproving of this view or the thorny business of trying to agree upon a working definition of “moral order”, “human nature”, or “permanent truths”—is precisely what makes this so challenging to untangle. But untangle we must for, if we ever hope to understand conservatism, we must first understand the foundation conservatism rests upon.

It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of order. It’s not some idea relegated to trivial conversations amongst people with a lot of time on their hands, it is quite literally the glue that holds reality together. “Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos,” explained Kirk, “In a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify.” Everything conservatism defends as worth conserving rests on the idea that there exists some standard by which we can truthfully distinguish what things have value from mere popular preferences. Our ability to make these distinctions is important, but such efforts would be utterly hopeless if order did not exist. In that case all we could say is that some people prefer some things while other people prefer other things; we couldn’t make actual truth statements about those things.

Edmund Burke put it more succinctly: “Good order is the foundation of all good things.” The connection between order and foundation is key. The existence of order—that is, something that is fixed, absolute, immutable, and completely outside of humanity’s ability to create or destroy—is precisely what grounds reality. Without it, all that’s left is chaos and appetite. Humans don’t submit to the gods they create; and if we come to believe there is no truth greater than whatever “truth” we create for ourselves we shouldn’t act surprised when a spirit of benevolence and comradery is insufficient to hold barbarism at bay. Without order, we don’t have a basis for justice or a universal argument for natural rights and liberty from coercion.

If Kirk’s assertion of the existence of an enduring moral order is true, we’re faced with an abundance of questions, such as:

• Can we define this moral order, or at least discern it? If so, how?
• What is the relationship between societal order and the order within each individual in society?
• Where does this order come from? Is it spiritual in nature?
• What political and legal implications does a moral order impose?
• Doesn’t the flirtation with ideas of a moral order quickly descend into authoritarian theocracy? How does the conservative guard against that?
• What implications does this have for politics or the state? Or is this a matter of faith that should be left out of political considerations altogether?
• What is the relationship between order and liberty? Are these ideas in conflict or can they be reconciled?

Josh tackles all that and more in this episode

The conservatism I wish to defend in the pages of this blog rejects a simplistic, bilinear paradigm that pits every political viewpoint on a scale of Left vs. Right. Nevertheless, the familiar Left vs. Right model is frequently used to express our political differences as it’s easy to absorb visually. In these series I’ve compared and contrasted conservatism to many ideologies that might be considered “on the Left”—such as classical liberals, socialists, populists, and secularists—but I have not yet compared and contrasted conservatism to the collectivist “Left” because no such monolithic ideology exists.

But just because “the Left” doesn’t represent a single-minded ideology it may not be entirely fruitless to compare and contrast conservatism with contemporary progressivism; the closest thing to a uniform “Left” we have in the United States. To that end I would like to dedicate this series to untangling progressivism, both how it might be understood to be part of the broader Left as well as how progressives differ from one another. And, of course, to explore what the conservative has to say on the matter.

The fact that those who may broadly be called progressives very much do differ from one another should not be taken for granted. It is often challenging to spot the nuanced differences in some group when one is standing outside looking in. Just as some on the “Left” are guilty of viewing conservatives too narrowly as being alike in motives and mindsets—“Anyone who voted for Trump must be a racist”—it can be just as easy for conservatives to attribute some uniform malady or nefarious intent to explain the complexities of the modern Leftist.

With that caveat in mind, I would like to begin this series by attempting to define progressivism from my admittedly disadvantaged perspective of viewing the “other side” from a biased, conservative lens. However, I dare say that reading progressive sources attempting to define progressivism themselves can sometimes be no better. Attempting to define the very things you believe creates its own special kind of bias. As a Twitter follower, Daniel Zene Crowe, rightly observed: “Today, ‘Progressivism’ is as doctrinally opaque as ‘Liberalism’ was in its day, largely for the same reasons. Self-description invariably begins with platitudes and descends from there: To be a Progressive means to bravely stand against exploitation, cruelty, heartlessness, injustice, and despotism—you know, the evil platform of The Enemy.” In other words, “we stand for good things and those other guys stand for bad things.”

Couldn’t a conservative claim to be all about pretty much the same thing? If we’re going to make any—if you’ll pardon the pun--progress in understanding progressivism we must be able to understand progressives as they understand themselves shorn of platitudes and banalities that confuse more than they clarify. Further, we’ll need at least some understanding of how progressivism differs from the past to the present and how progressives in the present differ from one another.

This is an enormous endeavor, and I will admit to only being capable of laying out some cursory thoughts in the posts ahead that will, I’m afraid, fail to satisfy all or even most progressives who read this series that I have correctly defined their views—Let alone persuade them that conservatism is a better alternative!

With those stipulations out of the way, let’s charge ahead. In Part 2 I’ll explore some of the history of progressivism and how it differs from the progressivism of today. Then in Part 3 I’ll attempt to define some of the differences between progressives today. After that, I hope to share some thoughts on how progressivism differs from conservatism.

For thousands of years the ways in which cities and towns developed has provided us with a of blueprint for what human habitats need to flourish. Yet today many of our cities and towns have forsaken these tried-and-true methods and instead imposed rational planning and an overreliance on pricey infrastructure projects to foster growth and further development. What are the potential downfalls of departing from these practices of the past?

Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined by Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns to traverse the world of urban planning and discuss the need for a return to the ancient models of development, the terrible costs of over-indebted infrastructure projects to younger Americans, whether or not Wal-Mart is a net boon or detriment to local communities, and how conservatism can help us form a more prosperous and enjoyable world.

Podcast Survey

Help us make the podcast even better: Take the listener survey for a chance to win a Saving Elephants coffee mug.

About Charles Marohn

Charles (or “Chuck” to friends and colleagues) Marohn is the founder and president of Strong Towns, a nonprofit that supports thousands of people across the United States and Canada who are advocating for a radically new way of thinking about the way we build our world. Marohn is a professional engineer and a land use planner with decades of experience. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, both from the University of Minnesota.

Marohn is the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2019). He hosts the Strong Towns Podcast and is a primary writer for Strong Towns’ web content. He has presented Strong Towns concepts in hundreds of cities and towns across North America. Planetizen named him one of the 10 Most Influential Urbanists of all time. He is a long-time commentator on KAXE Northern Community Radio. He currently co-hosts KAXE’s Dig Deep program, a monthly examination of public policy issues affecting Minnesotans.

Marohn grew up on a small farm in central Minnesota. The oldest of three sons of two elementary school teachers, he joined the Minnesota National Guard on his seventeenth birthday during his junior year of high school and served in the Guard for nine years. In addition to being passionate about building a stronger America, he loves playing music, is an obsessive reader, and religiously follows his favorite team, the Minnesota Twins. Chuck and his wife live with their two daughters in their hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota. You can find him on Twitter @clmarohn

Listener Mail

Josh responds to a listener’s question about conservatism’s challenges with appealing to minorities and whether our nation’s institutions are worth conserving given the history of American slavery and other past sins.

In 1976 historian George H. Nash wrote The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, a celebrated historical accounting that established much of the narrative for how we think about the development of modern conservatism even today. George Nash joins Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis to discuss the various strands of thought that emerged after the second World War that eventually evolved into a political movement on the Right. Along the way, Dr. Nash shares his insights on the colorful individuals who shaped the debate, how they fought one another, and how an eventual loose consensus was brought forth. Finally, he offers some thoughts on what a lifetime of studying the history of conservatism can teach aspiring conservatives today.

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About George H. Nash

George H. Nash is the epitome of a gentleman and a scholar. A graduate from Amherst College who received his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University, Dr. Nash is an authority on the histories of American conservatism and the life of President Herbert Hoover. Dr. Nash is an independent scholar, historian, and lecturer. He speaks and writes frequently about the history and present direction of American conservatism, the life of Herbert Hoover, the legacy of Ronald Reagan, the education of the Founding Fathers, and other subjects. His writings have appeared in the American Spectator, Claremont Review of Books, Intercollegiate Review, Modern Age, National Review, New York Times Book Review, Policy Review, University Bookman, Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He has lectured at the Library of Congress; the National Archives; the Herbert Hoover, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson presidential libraries; the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum; the Hoover Institution; the Heritage Foundation; the McConnell Center; and at various universities and conferences in the United States and Europe. Several of his lectures have been featured on C-SPAN. He has also been interviewed by C-SPAN, National Public Radio, numerous radio stations, and the print media. Dr. Nash lives in Massachusetts.

Listener Mail

At the end of the episode, Josh responds to a listener’s question about a comment he made in the episode that dropped on Election Day 2020. Josh had expressed his views that that time that neither major party candidate represented an existential threat to the United States and the listener askes, given what we now know about the election aftermath, accusations of widespread election fraud, the incursion on January 6, and the subsequent white washing of the Republican party, would Josh now view Trump as an existential threat to the country?

Few conservative thinkers are as little known, controversial, or had as great an impact on the conservative elite as Leo Strauss. Who was Leo Strauss, what did he believe, and how does that inform conservative thought today? Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined by Seth Root to disentangle the mysteries of Straussianism including his views on esoteric writing, the ancients vs. moderns, reason vs. revelation, and arguments against historicism and relativism. Seth also enlightens us on the different variants of Straussianism and why he identifies as a West Coast Straussian.

About Seth Root

Seth Root is the cohost of the In The Trenches Podcast, a show for conversations with people that are right in the middle of the war of ideas. Seth was a fellow at Conservative Partnership Institute and an incoming intern at the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding.

Listener Mail

Josh responds to a Mark’s email about his blog post Fifty Conservative Thinkers and conservatism and the environmental movement. Mark is the author of Old Man on a Green Bike: Chronicles of a Self-Serving Environmentalist, a book on the politics and practicalities of conscious bicycling, inspiring readers to take to two wheels for their own sake, and maybe also the good of the planet.

“Even when I changed, it should be to preserve,” Edmund Burke writes in his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France. These were not idle words of a political metaphysician but a sober, concise description of Burke’s governing philosophy as a leading voice in the British Parliament. In Burke’s day, Great Britain’s greatest rival, France, was undergoing a soon-to-be catastrophic revolution. Divisions and animosity ran high, and the revolutionaries, called Jacobins, were out for blood. The French monarch had failed to satisfactorily address the growing discontent among his subjects and now it was far too late to negotiate a quick end to the crisis.

But Burke’s interests in the internal affairs of France were more than those of an academic observer. There were powerful voices within his own country who were preaching the same message of revolutionary fervor and were sympathetic to the Jacobin cause. In fact, the entire European continent and even the newly formed United States of America would soon be dealing with similar revolutionaries in their midst. Burke described the Jacobins as ruthlessly seeking to set the world aflame:

“What is Jacobinism? It is the attempt (hitherto but too successful) to eradicate prejudice out of the minds of men, for the purpose of putting all power and authority into the hands of persons capable of occasionally enlightening the minds of the people. For this purpose the Jacobins have resolved to destroy the whole frame and fabric of the old societies of the world, and to regenerate them after their fashion. To obtain an army for this purpose, they everywhere engage the poor by holding out to them as a bribe the spoils of the rich.”

Burke had been seen as an ally to the American colonists seeking to assert the rights they believed were due them as loyal British subjects. While he did not support the American Revolution explicitly, his efforts to support the American cause of liberty and work out a compromise that might avoid war is a large part of the reason there’s a statue of Edmund Burke in Washington D.C. today. Thus, when the French Jacobins began to rebel with rhetoric that was similar to America’s fight for “liberty”—yet far different in its method, scope, and understanding of liberty—there were some who thought Burke might again be an ally to the cause.

Much to their dismay, however, Burke became their most fierce and powerful opponent. His Reflections are arguably the most persuasive and eloquent anti-revolutionary text ever written, and this moderating voice of reason who worked tirelessly to avert war with America became a strong advocate of war with revolutionary France. As Russell Kirk explained, in Burke’s view, “since the rightful leaders of France could not regain authority by themselves…the fanatics of the Revolution must be put down by force from without.”

Why was Burke so accommodating towards one group demanding liberty and so opposed to another? While Burke was a fierce defender of the French monarchy, he was not advocating rigidity in the face of calls for reform or denying that the Jacobins had valid grievances—“A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation”—rather, he was exercising the same principles in both the case of America and France. Yet the circumstances were so different that the application of those principles would also differ.

In the case of America, the colonists were seeking to exercise their rights as they understood them within the British tradition. In the case of France, the Jacobins were seeking to invent for themselves previously undiscovered rights by tearing down the traditions that stood in their way. Burke recognized that the traditions themselves were the lifeblood of the order and liberty both nations sought, but they could survive only if they had the flexibility to bend to the needs of its people. When traditions became so inflexible that gradual, contemplative change was not possible, there was a grave danger they would break in two.

And once a tradition has snapped in two, true productive, progressive change is nearly impossible. As Burke notes:

“Early reformations are amicable arrangements with a friend in power; late reformations are made under a state of inflammation. In that state of things the people behold in government nothing that is respectable. They see the abuse and they will see nothing more. They fall into the temper of a furious populace provoked at the disorder of a house of ill-fame; they never attempt to correct or regulate; they go to work by the shortest way: to abate the nuisance, they pull down the house.”

While the Burkean conservative might advocate gradual reform, this should not be mistaken for complacency. There’s typically only a limited window of opportunity where gradual reforms might be tolerated before an impatient populace begins to demand increasingly radical change.

Take, for example, immigration policy. Throughout much of the George W. Bush administration the American people—and the Republican base in particular—grew increasingly concerned about mass immigration. We can argue the merits of immigration some other time. The reason I bring it up here is because the Republican party failed to deliver immigration reforms that might have satisfied at least some of the concerns. And those concerns only grew among the Right during the eight years of Barrack Obama’s presidency.

Fast forward to 2016 and an angered Republican base nominates a candidate for president offering alarmingly simplistic, bigoted solutions to immigration. “Build the wall, deport them all” fits easily onto t-shirts and bumper stickers, but Trump’s bombastic, offensive rhetoric was bereft of the sort of clear-eyed, nuanced approach needed to handle the situation. Yet the Republican base was no longer tolerant of those offering clear-eyed, nuanced solutions. They wanted someone who was as angry as they had become to speak on their behalf. Thus, the wall was never built, our immigration policy was never reformed in any meaningful sense, and the problems have been left to fester, likely leading to demands for rhetoric and actions that are even more extreme in the future.

“[Burke] is alert,” argues Yuval Levin, “to the danger of appearing to be merely opposed to change—of seeming to defend the status quo for no other reason than that it is the way things are.” This variant of “conservatism” leaves society vulnerable to radical changes that create more problems than they solve. “On the contrary, Burke argues, he is not defending the status quo but is rather defending an effective means of reform against an ineffective one that threatens to cut society off from the possibility of real improvement.” To Burke, the most effective means of reform is to operate within the forms and structures already in existence. True, they may slow change down, but they will also soften the rough edges as changes are enacted. “Constructive change requires stability, so reformers always have to be careful.”

And just why is stability so important? Because lasting reform can only take place within tradition. “When a nation has no tradition to appeal to but a ‘tradition of revolution,’ it has confessed bankruptcy;” explains historian Garry Wills, “it can no longer marshal the potentials of the populace to serve the common stake, the constitution. When artists and philosophers and church-men cannot find a meaningful area of mutual enrichment, then politicians must supply the social cohesion ex nihilo, and enforce it by militant centralization of power.” Thus, reforms that work within a tradition have the advantage of being sticky whereas revolutions that destroy a tradition are held together by coercion.

It does not matter how important we might agree a change may be. It does not matter how rational or reasonable the change may be. If the change itself obliterates the tradition we should not expect any lasting reform. As Russell Kirk explains: “Men do not submit long to their own creations. Standards erected out of expediency will be demolished soon enough, also out of expediency. Either norms have an existence independent of immediate utility, or they are mere fictions. If men assume that norms are merely the pompous fabrications of their ancestors, got up to serve the interests of a faction or an age, then every rising generation will challenge the principles of personal and social order and will learn wisdom only through agony.”

Thus, far from being its opposite, a sense of permanence is actual needful to achieve any true progression. Tradition is the vehicle whereby we might hope to enact lasting change for the better. It is the conduit where Providence guides humanity towards a brighter tomorrow.

Syndicated columnist, author, podcaster, and political commentator Jonah Goldberg joins Josh to discuss his work in conservative media, their shared concerns with the direction of the country and sanity of the GOP, and why Woodrow Wilson was possibly an even worse human being than James Buchanan.

About Jonah Goldberg

Jonah Goldberg hosts The Remnant, a podcast featuring a “Cannonball Run”-style cast of stars, has-beens, and never-weres to address the most pressing issues of the day and of all-time, mixing history, pop culture, rank-punditry, political philosophy, and, at times, shameless book-plugging, and the nudity is (almost) always tasteful. In October of 2019 Goldberg co-launched and became founding editor of the online opinion and news publication The Dispatch. He was the founding editor of National Review Online, and from 1998 until 2019 he was an editor at National Review.

A prolific writer, Goldberg writes a weekly column about politics and culture for the Los Angeles Times as well as a frequent “newsletter” The G-File. He has authored three books, the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Liberal Fascism; The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas; and Suicide of the West, which also became a New York Times bestseller.

Goldberg is also a regular contributor on news networks such as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, appearing on various television programs including Good Morning America, Nightline, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Real Time with Bill Maher, and The Daily Show. Goldberg is an occasional guest on a number of Fox News shows and a frequent panelist on Special Report with Bret Baier.

Listener Mail

In this episode we’re introducing a new segment: listener mail. Josh selects from some of the messages he’s received and responds to them in the podcast. Few episodes have generated as much feedback as the previous episode: Episode 81 – But, He's a Fighter. Josh reads a text he received from Jeff saying how much he enjoyed the episode and a tweet and email from Dennis expressing concerns over the episode.