“For traditional conservatives, this year’s presidential election has been a dispiriting affair,” Charlie Cooke writes in the new cover story of National Review magazine: “The Road Back.”
“The Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, is an old-school San Francisco progressive who is ruthlessly hostile to most aspects of the American constitutional order,” while the Republican, Charlie continues, “for the third time in a row, Lord help us! — is Donald J. Trump, a capricious, narcissistic old man who tried to steal the 2020 election by rewriting the 1876 Electoral Count Act and the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution.”
But there is good news out there. First, there is the American system, which prevents small majorities from creating sweeping change without a true public mandate. In times like these, gridlock and divided government can be a feature, not a bug, by stopping bad bills and bad ideas in their tracks.
Second, there is the evidence from the states — in which, Charlie writes, “conservatism is ascendant” despite the sclerotic nature of the federal behemoth in Washington.
Over the last decade or so, conservatives have not only managed to win a stupendous number of elections at the state level, but having done so, they have pushed through substantive policy changes. Among their various victories have been the passage of the largest set of state-income-tax cuts since the 1920s, the widespread deregulation of business, the development of right-to-work laws, the restoration of the Second Amendment, the restriction of abortion, the advancement of school choice, and the resisting of faddish theories on crime, policing, and homelessness that have done great damage to progressive-run states such as California, Washington, and New York.
“For a conservative classical liberal such as myself,” Charlie writes, “this election season has been alarming and grotesque, and I am convinced that, one way or another, we are destined to pay a price for it. But I do not worry about conservatism in the longer term, because I believe that the central insights of conservatism are correct.”
You can read the whole thing here.
This is a special issue on the 2024 election — which is less than two weeks away. And we have all the angles covered.
- Audrey Fahlberg reports from the Buckeye State on Bernie Moreno’s race to unseat Sherrod Brown in Ohio and put a new Republican Senate majority in power.
- Christine Rosen examines the role of social media in Kamala Harris’s rise — and her campaign’s notable vacuity — in “The TikTok Candidate.”
- Dan McLaughlin looks at how both Trump and Harris could each challenge the American system in their own way, in “Two against the Constitution.”
- Noah Rothman laments the lack of a Reaganite conservative option in 2024.
- Jerry Hendrix and Brent Sadler lay out what could be a transformative naval agenda for Trump’s first hundred days, should he win the presidency.
- And Yuval Levin puts it all into perspective when he explains why extremely close races “feel more intense but matter less,” in his essay “An Election, Not a Transformation.”
And for those who need to leaven the coverage of the 2024 race, check out James Rosen on Pete Rose, John Miller on the horror tales of Sheridan Le Fanu, and Jack Butler on his search for the Mothman in Point Pleasant, W.Va.
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