My thanks to the editors at Law & Liberty and to the commentators for their thoughtful observations on my forum lead, “Conservatism and Class.” Each wanted something more from my essay: George Hawley a detailed policy agenda respecting the demands of individualism; Nicole Williams a critique of “corporate capitalism” to fully explain the origins of our current crisis; and Brent Orrell an appreciation of the inevitability of looser communities and the consolations of comfort and safety provided by the administrative state.

I can oblige none of them and must compound my sin, in so short a response, by overlooking areas of agreement to focus on the ways in which their comments highlight, for me, the depth of our crisis as a people.

My essay urges that we move away from the atomistic utilitarianism (a.k.a. nominalism) that dominates public discourse toward a realist understanding of human nature and the social order. Key, here, is recognizing that logic like that of Frank Meyer, as quoted by Hawley, is tragically wrong. To say that “all social institutions derive their value and, in fact, their very being from individuals and are justified only to the extent that they serve the needs of individuals” is to ignore much of what makes us humans, whose characters rely upon and are in significant measure constituted by their relationships.

For good or ill, society by nature is an association of associations. Moreover, our associations are more than collections of individuals. They have common purposes, common needs, and even a common mind in the form of shared assumptions, traditions, and customs. If associations are seen as existing merely for the convenience of their members, they will atrophy and their members will stop sacrificing for them. People will be more likely to leave their towns, betray their professions’ norms, or abandon their families.

Over time, this individualism has sapped our associations’ vitality, especially as the government has demanded they transform themselves to achieve “fairness,” “diversity,” and other values none can fully embody. We are left, increasingly, with only spiritually impoverished classes—politically relevant associations unhinged from their proper moorings in tradition and social life—preoccupied with seeking control over the levers of political power.

Given this perspective, how can I disagree with Williams’ powerful depiction of the destruction of American communities? Not a lack of common feeling, but a more optimistic understanding of human nature leads me to reject the central element in her analysis. “Corporate capitalism” as Williams and others term it, is not a conscious being that acts on its own. No grand complex of industrial and economic factors “disincentivized” charity, injected turmoil into daily lives, or even, on its own, centralized power.

The problem, as Williams at several points recognizes, is that people often act through a combination of selfishness and ideology. Their acts, made to seem reasonable by our failure to grasp our essentially social nature, corrupt persons and classes, empower the ideologues, power brokers, and robber barons of the age. The story of our cultural corruption has been told elsewhere. The point is that government corruption, personal greed, and Progressive ideology combined, over time, to forge a new class structure, members of which operate in contempt of our constitutional order and traditional commitments to faith, family, and local self-government.

And so, we come to Orrell. I take it as given that he believes he is serving the greater good in promoting programs for worker retraining and supporting “liberal democracy.” But his comments show the chasm in understanding between those ensconced in the current establishment, broadly conceived, and the bulk of Americans in “flyover country,” including workers and locally embedded elites. I note especially Orrell’s depiction of an American people voluntarily cowering in fear of COVID until the federal government swooped in to save them. Despite apocalyptic rhetoric from the media and CDC, few people in middle America called for their children to be muzzled or their families to be subjected to mandatory experimental gene therapy. Most complied out of fear of the punitive consequences of any refusal. Even now, official sites and search engines censor and suppress the visibility of vast amounts of scientific evidence debunking the myths and outright lies that produced the “emergency” and made COVID’s effects far worse than they otherwise would have been.

It is not evidence-deprived “victimology” to point out that Americans today can afford neither homes nor cars, that deaths of despair have reached epidemic levels, or that the most basic measure of well-being—life expectancy—has actually declined as apparatchiks have solidified their hold on our nation. It is not mere nostalgia to regret the destruction of communities of memory, faith, and geography. It is not irrational to see a common mind among those who hold positions of power and authority in our increasingly national government—a mind devoted to filtering out the voices of faith, tradition, and common feeling that once enlivened and even structured our social order. And, while increasing numbers of “public servants” believe that Americans are incapable of self-government and require their almost parental guidance, it is a sign of basic human self-respect to refuse the ministrations of a therapeutic state to “adjust” our people to make them safe, pliable, and useful subjects.

Our ruling classes see people who seek to protect our borders, jobs, children, and families, and to return power to state and local government as dangerous “populists” who will burn down “our democracy” if they are not shamed and censored. They have separated themselves from most Americans in location and spirit. Even as we who remain rooted in natural associations recognize their humanity, we must admit that they are our political and cultural adversaries if we are to salvage something of our constitutional republic and way of life.

We the people have been corrupted. But corruption can be counteracted through restoration of personal and community responsibility. Because our social natures are in fact natural, they and our associations can recover over time once they are allowed to do so. This requires, first, that we recognize the sources of our corruption in both ideology and rule by corrupt classes and, second, act to displace those who foster it with promises of an easy, “autonomous” life rooted in dependency on technocratic expertise.