THE CASE FOR SOCIAL CONSERVATISM.

Two paragraphs in a Scott S. Powell essay suggesting Our President is precisely the Right Guy for our time, a premise that I will not engage, as it reeks of that Presidential Cult, lay out the principles.

Few can deny that the ascendance of the United States from colonial poverty to the world’s top economic and military superpower in just 200 years is a historic miracle. It is attributable to a few key differentiating factors: Judeo-Christian beliefs and work ethic, family values and the rule of law enshrined in the founding documents of Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Essentially, America was unique in its birth creating a system of limited government and the empowerment of its citizens to take risks, innovate and build.

The passage reads more like a Credo than a summary of social scientific or historical research laying down a chain of causation. That chain of causation might exist, but that's not the issue today.

The following paragraph develops a familiar Cold Spring Shops theme, namely, that you deconstruct institutions of long standing at your peril.

And so it should come as no surprise that America’s social and cultural decline that has accelerated in the last 50 years has coincided with growing secularism, a loss of respect for and practice of religion (and that is overwhelmingly Christianity), the decline of traditional family values and work ethic, as well as the fraying of the U.S. Constitution and the corruption of the nation’s law enforcement and judicial order, culminating in a two-tiered justice system.

Or, as I once put it, "Fast-rewind to the thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment. Those older values have their champions, and those champions well might be interpreting reality correctly."  The fun part might be that it was precisely the Contemporary Geniuses denying coherent beliefs that made a Trump presidency possible in the first place.