What's still worth conserving? A Brief Introduction to Amplificationism

Lately, conservatism has come under ideological scrutiny in the wake of RINOs inadvertently exposing the popular yet false understanding of the right-left political divide, all via their unhinged and unrelentless hate of Trump and the political realignment he is escorting into the Federal government. People began to (rightfully) question and deconstruct the concept they had come to know as conservatism.

Browsing the sociopolitical landscape reveals an ostensible dearth of conservative values and perspectives. A brief glance at the polity may reveal a near total absence of conservative values from civil society. As a result, a vocal minority with substantial financial backing have started to promote a radical set of solutions for the right’s worries. Arising from conservatism’s penumbra, reactionism and neo-reactionism (or NRx) have garnered supporters proposing them as reliable and worthwhile sociopolitical instruments for reimposing the civil observance of traditional values.

Unfortunately, too many on the right have come to believe these specious proposals are the only available means of fortifying America to survive the fallout of (neo)liberalism- specifically, the jettison of mere consent as society’s highest moral imperative. Beyond the futility of recovering something from the past (or any effort to approach it), these views promise a paternalistic societal order at the cost of popular self-governance. Far from saving the US, giving up liberty for a sense of security from the government is what Ben Franklin warned of: the US republic will last only if the public is ready, willing, and able to sustain it in their role as ordinary citizens rather than merely as politicians or civil servants. That is, citizens cannot abdicate their duty to hold the government accountable and closely scrutinize its undertakings. Providentially, the felicitous solution for preserving those distant roots of order is not in the past; they are still discoverable in the overlooked present- they merely require amplification.

Before exploring what is it about America that is worth conserving for the benefit of posterity, it is worth explaining why American Exceptionalism is worth saving in the first place. After WWII, the Pax Americana allowed the value of citizenship and representative government to spread the globe. As a ramification of US foreign policy which permitted defeated nations to govern themselves according to classically liberal principles in the wake of a global war (inspired by Washington’s abdication of power following his second term in office), the proliferation of human rights and the realization of free trade. Civility became a norm of international law; people from all over the world began to expect the government to respect their dignity as individuals. Most importantly, the US expanded its exceptional political theology which affirmed a Christian ethic and metaphysic that first matured in Europe, sans any compromise to a given sociopolitical legacy or extant social institution, class structure, or ruling oligarchy/dynasty (North Americans tribes had neither established strict nor permanent social hierarchies).

America's exceptional nature stems from observing truth, justice, and liberty (to achieve excellence of moral character, not merely to exercise freedom of choice) as its guiding principles and identity rather than blood, political power, or soil. That is, the US recognizes natural rights as natural facts of the world, preceding all government and secular authority; natural theology has its ground in humanity’s relationship with nature. In short, our rights derive from Nature or (Nature's) God; rights cannot gain legitimacy from the government nor any group of mortals. To secure these rights after enshrining them in the Declaration of Independence, the Founders led by Madison codified republicanism as the source of the nation's political philosophy and establishing its governance via the Constitutionalism meticulously delineated in the Federalist Papers.

Recognizing the wisdom of the Founding is to appreciate how the Framers designed the government’s role to facilitate the cultivation of civic virtue in each citizen. Civic virtue is the principal requirement for civic service, and the only reliable approach toward fostering a sense of gratitude or appreciation in an individual for the extremely unlikely chance, great privilege, and sacred honor to be a citizen of the United States of America.

Paradoxically, an effective but counterintuitive stratagem to thwart a corrupt political regime with de facto control of political institutions broadcasting a mulish agenda and fueled by a lucratively produced propaganda machine is quasi civil disobedience. That is, with the use of civic affordances that are accessible to ordinary citizens. Instead of disobeying civil order, one disobeys the ruling class by amplifying and utilizing the very civilian institutions the sociopolitical elite class seeks to diminish the relevant importance of and render as merely ceremonial and vestigial.

If the regime was not corrupt, then ordinary civil disobedience would serve as the appropriate form of resistance since their use of the law follows ethical principles. Therefore, resistance to the given status quo is to amplify the role designed by the Founders to politically empower ordinary citizens to petition the government for a redress of grievances. That is, our rights and powers as the citizenry are like a muscle strengthened by resistance and withered by its neglect. Amplifying underserved civic institutions and opportunities helps to cultivate and ease participation in the robust civic life of every citizen.

Conserving what is exceptional about the US requires both a consistency of principle and a centripetal progression toward widening and deepening the application of the Founding to every American citizen’s liberty vis-a-vis the state’s legitimate role in their life, reflecting the perpetuation of a more perfect union. Such an approach to conservatism is the philosophy of amplification or Amplificationism.