THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

For some time now, many "liberal conservatives" (Russell Kirk's approving term for Alexis de Tocqueville in The Conservative Mind) have repeatedly objected that conservative postliberal critics of America simply ignore the facts of American history. (My own contributions to this discussion date back to my Public Discourse exchange with Patrick Deneen in 2014.) The repeated postliberal claim that America was founded upon an anthropology of expressive individualism finds no support in the public speeches, writing, events, laws, and institutions that constitute American political identity.

To the contrary, those speeches, writings, events, and laws explicitly and repeatedly affirm, and provide for, the belief in a Providential God, the public good of religion, the natural law, the common good, moral limits on the market, the prohibition of obscenity, and the exclusive recognition and support for heterosexual monogamous marriage. It is not until late into the twentieth century that these beliefs and their political expression begin to erode. In nearly every case this is not done from the ground-up by democratic deliberation and decision-making, but is imposed from top-down by the Supreme Court relying upon scandalously bad evidence and arguments and in the face of strong democratic opposition.

Conservative postliberals simply have not responded to this objection. But this has not prevented them from gaining the attention of elite public institutions and publications, as well as the adulation of a growing segment of American conservatives who are encouraged, alongside their woke opponents, to indulge a sense of alienation from their regime.

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