They hosted Decius’ argument that the only way to proceed as if virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, and character really matter to conservatives is to energetically elevate a man who goes on Howard Stern to brag about his serial adultery; who swindles his creditors with strategic bankruptcies; who praises Vladimir Putin as a good leader; who fleeced working class Americans credulous enough to attend Trump University; who eagerly puts his name in big letters atop gambling dens; who displays his erratic temperament and historically narcissistic personality daily; who might take any position under the sun on any number of issues; who is as ignorant of religion and dismissive of Judeo-Christian ethics as they come.
Strip away the clever writing and this is idiocy. But Decius is not an idiot. He has ingeniously smuggled a radically anti-conservative agenda into a conservative think tank.
Wittingly or not, the Claremont Institute has published an essay that wants to persuade conservatives of a major alt-right premise. As a reader sympathetic to that movement put it, the alt-right “rejects the procedural fetishism of parliamentary and representative democracies.” It rejects “the ideas of blank slate human nature, proposition nationalism, the dominance of economic thinking, and a society built off Enlightenment-era social engineering. You might then refer to the Alt-Right as the Illiberal Right. It is essentially a rejection of the entire ideology of Liberalism, including the idea that ‘all men are created equal’ is self evident in any way.”
The Decius essay argues from the same premise: that conservatism grounded in the principles of the Founding, in the Declaration and the Constitution, should be abandoned.
