A discerning eye can perceive an underlying rationale for various groups on the New Right. On the one hand, there is a populism that would put all of its eggs in the basket of some charismatic or brash personality. This is not merely a “Boomer” phenomenon. The fact is that many millennials will support a “reality TV star” or “influencer” so long as his tweets qualify as “base.” For the populist of our day, getting things done seems reducible to “owning the libs,” a kind of rule by entertainment.

On the other hand, there is a rising monarchism that calls not so much for a Caesar or Alaric as for an Oliver Cromwell, everyone very much convinced that he will represent the interests of his own tradition. This view is still a minority, but it represents a more thoughtful demographic of young men who can at least excel the populist group in proper moral outrage and political vision. The key is “power before principles.” The necessity to wield power with at least enough force at the outset will somehow put the revolution to flight. Never mind that “the revolution” or “the Left” or “the deep state” present even more concepts for which there is little agreed upon definition. But such is the idea. 

How to express what these two views have in common, under the surface, came into sharper focus for me after a recent post about the U. S. Constitution. The post was initially of a tweet whose author I do not know, and may very well be rooted in assumptions I do not hold. It was what I typically regard to be a useful jumping off point or thought experiment. It presented the following dilemma: “Is the U.S. Constitution working as intended? If yes, then it is monstrous. If not, then what good is it?”

An excerpt from Stephen Wolfe’s book The Case for Christian Nationalism was offered in reply to my post,

“Civil laws in themselves have no force; they are, as Cicero said, a mutus magistratus or a ‘dumb magistrate’ … As Bullinger writes, only through magistrates do laws ‘shew forth their strength and lively force.’”1

Even if power does not precede principles in time, it can at least overshadow them in demand. If the demand comes increasingly from an unprincipled mob, then there will be no shortage in the supply of demagogues.

I should point out that what follows is not a critique of Christian Nationalism, which is a bit more complex taken as a larger system of thought. It is more a critique of the impulse at the core of the current populism and which may bring out the worst in any “nationalism” or “monarchism” to come.

To bring it down to the level of our own day, once all conservative parties recognize that the Constitution isn’t coming to save them like some magic carpet, the old system of checks and balances is revealed to be the wrong tool for the task at hand. Some more singular, galvanizing force of will must exert itself. There is a truth in that of course. But it is not the whole truth. 

Mindless Intensification of Will is Mere Violence  

The Scriptures tell us, “When a land transgresses, it has many rulers, but with a man of understanding and knowledge, its stability will long continue” (Prov. 28:2). History is filled with vindications of this Proverb; but what is its real emphasis?

Even granting the most excellent magistrate, if the will animates the law, it only does so because the will is, as Edwards said, the mind choosing;2 or, if one prefers the same ultimate principle from Aquinas, “it belongs to the reason to direct to the end, which is the first principle in all matters of action, according to the Philosopher.”3 Law is a rational thing. So is legitimate authority.

To his credit, Wolfe continues in that quotation above,

“Furthermore, since magistrates make judgments with a view to the common good, magistrates must be prudent. They must be capable not only of discerning the public good (viz., going beyond personal interest), but have that public’s good at heart.”4

Judgments of intellect precede orders of will. That is the case from the most simple of creatures on up to the most complex. The magistrate is not the one being exempt from this psychological reality. Nor is this some pie-in-the-sky appeal to Plato’s philosopher king. How can the magistrate “punish those who do evil and praise those who do good” (1 Pet. 2:14) if he knows neither the difference between good and evil, nor that his task is to apply force at all?

Nor is this simply a matter for the statesman. What about the citizen who would like to know which of these governors or governments governs best? To put it as simply as it can be: How do you know when a civil official simply does not know what he is talking about? How do you know that he is sure to fail at the task at hand? You would have to know a thing or two about the task yourself, wouldn’t you? This is the role of intellect in governmental legitimacy. It is of utmost practical importance to anyone who would be convinced; and even a monarchist must convince. He must be a populist at first. He must at least persuade as many as he sees necessary to cross the metaphorical Rubicon of his time and place.

A political philosophy that proposes only to wield more power, or the next power, has not told me much except that a bunch of people are about to be getting payback. But to what end? And to the populist version of this, we might also ask: Where does this end exactly? If one proposes to remain within the present Constitutional order and yet trade electoral blows with the other side indefinitely, do you honestly expect no equal and opposite counter force? In fact, one would expect the counter forces to continue to escalate. 

Likewise, a candidate for office whose idea of wielding power rises no higher than spouting sophomoric, if not utterly incoherent, insults at his own personal opponents, is not telling me much about how he will ever get around to dealing with the country’s actual violent opponents. He does not draw out the eventualities, and so does not demonstrate that he has calculated either his means or his ends. What he gives us is all a play that may entertain the simple, but there is no clear path to a tolerably just realm. It may have the appearance of decisive rule, but it is all smoke and no fire. 

As tiresome as broad-brush criticisms of “the Boomers” can be, that generation did pride itself in a kind of private sector pragmatism, thinking it safe to dismiss the theoretical as a phase that enough of those hippies would grow out of. We might think of their maxim, “Those who can do, and those who can’t teach,” as one example of this thinking. And as I said, it is not just the Boomers. This cannot be reduced to a generational problem. All the way down to the Millennials, it seems that “results” and “winning” have been defined by seventy years of staring into screens. This did not start with smartphones.

Ever since the advent of television, human beings in the West have been conditioned to think of solutions to complex problems requiring only twenty minutes, minus commercial breaks, by only fairly good looking people with a laugh track running in the background.  

The idea that superior ideas matter to a superior force of will is a tough sell.

Advocates of the man on horseback, or simply the Orange Man, may not appreciate the call for a philosophically informed citizenry, and especially for the man in question to be able to articulate his own civic mind. But so it must be, that the triumph of the will over intellect is as disastrous in politics as in any other area of life.

I cannot tell you how many times I have explained why I do not support any candidate who cannot express his “isms” past a grade school level (today’s grade school, mind you), only to be met with a rolled eyes and a false dichotomy. “He gets things done!” A simple analysis of what those things are, and why and how they are to be done, is still forthcoming. Power before principles. Trust the plan.

No thanks.

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1. Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2022), 254.

2. Jonathan Edwards, The Freedom of the Will, in Works: Volume One (Edinburgh, Banner of Truth, 2009), 4.

3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II. Q. 40, Art. 1.

4. Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism, 255.