Not Just Any Rights
11th July 2023
As a sample of his engaging new book, War on the American Republic (WAR), Kevin Slack has laid out an energizing roadmap for the New Right. A recovery of Western Christianity and its concomitant worldview as the foundation for American civilization and the means of “moral aggression”; a reinvigoration of republican virtue; true citizenship as the antidote to corrupt national bureaucracy; and “genuine nationalism” over and against “false patriotism and tribalism.” All this is most welcome. Slack rightly indicts the over-intellectualized conservatism of yesteryear for its inattentiveness to action, its penchant for in-house theory—endless academic programs, conferences, and panels to no end—and effeminate aversion to conflict. WAR deserves three cheers for its masculine, overtly Christian, and unapologetically American mood, not to mention its fiery prose. Slack isn’t squeamish about asserting nationalist economic policy or protectionist immigration restrictions.
Like many New Right commentators, Slack is best at issue spotting. That is, he is a peerless critic of the conservative malaise, and amoral progressive insanity, that is the impetus for the nascent New Right. This is no less true of Slack’s jabs at the conservative legal movement (CLM), always dominated by libertarians, and to which so much intellectual capital has been expended over the past several decades with negligible returns.
Given the illegitimacy of our current “kleptocracy” amidst a “managed national decline,” Slack is right to note the increasingly farcical nature of “legal appeals to the Constitution and precedent.” Originalism and “judicial engagement” as dueling jurisprudential theories have produced not-so-dueling results, viz., simultaneously bloated bureaucracy and a web of regulatory exemptions that empower predatory, unaccountable corporate monopolies. Hence, kleptocracy.