Mandate for Leadership-Third Conservative Promise-Nationalism, the border, global threats
Our Way or the Highway
From a Google Image Search - Neonationalism - Berkeley
Mandate for Leadership 2025
Promise #3-Defend Our Nation's Sovereignty, Borders and Bounty Against Global Threats
Nationalism and Isolationism
Here is the conservative argument for Nationalism - in this case isolating America to protect our identity, our prosperity, and our traditions. We have tried isolationism before in the days when Hitler was eating Europe. When Japan joined the fray and attacked Pearl Harbor our isolationist stance ended. It's a small planet.
Note - When the text is in quotes the Mandate is being quoted directly. When there are parentheses that is commentary.
"The United States belongs to "We the people." All government authority derives from the consent of the people, and our nation's success derives from the character of its people. The American people's right to rule ourselves is the obverse of our duty: We cannot outsource our obligation to ensure the conditions that allow our families, local communities, churches and synagogues, and neighborhoods to thrive. The buck stops with each of us, so each of us must have the freedom to pursue the good for ourselves and those entrusted to our care.
To most Americans, this is common sense. But in Washington, DC, and other centers of Leftist power like the media and the academy, this statement of basic civics is branded as hate speech. Progressive elites speak in lofty terms of openness, progress, expertise, cooperation, and globalization. But too often, these terms are just rhetorical Trojan horses concealing their true intention-stripping "we the people" of our constitutional authority over our country's future."
(Does the left still have control over the media? Between digital woes and vulture capitalism, local news is being taken over by conservative groups like Sinclair and Nexstar. Conservatives have been at war with academia since students on college campuses decided they did not want to hear them speak. Conservatives have been successful at changing the messages of our media and conducting a campaign to discourage college as a route to employment.)
(Liberals are not the ones that are stuffing the Supreme Court in order to interpret the Constitution their way. They are not the ones collecting state governments and increasing the number of red states until there are enough to call a Constitutional convention to rewrite the Constitution according to conservative principals. Liberals are not the ones teaming up with Christians to declare that our founders never intended to actually separate church and state.)
(Who are the elite? Do Corporations lean right or left?)
"America's corporate and political elites do not believe in the ideals to which our nation is dedicated - self-governance, the rule of law, and ordered liberty. They certainly do not trust the American people, and they disdain the Constitution's restrictions on their ambitions.
Instead, they believe in a kind of 21st century Wilsonian order in which the "enlightened," highly educated managerial elite runs things rather than the humble, patriotic working families who make up the majority of what the elites contemptuously call 'fly-over country'."
(How many "humble, patriotic working families" can even read this paragraph with its reference to the Wilsonian order? Once again, who are America's corporate and political elites? Would you say they are right-wingers who graduated from Ivy League colleges or left-leaners? These same humble workers elect these people and would like to be able to trust them to consult their wishes as they run the government. Conservatives are hardly innocent of underestimating the American people. No one has spent more time trying to keep people from voting than conservatives.)
"They (Liberals) disdain the Constitution's restrictions on their ambitions..."
(Conservatives like totally unregulated and unfettered corporations, lower taxes on corporations and wealthy Americans. The fewer regulations on manufacturers, the less freedom for workers to exercise some control over their working conditions - especially if you come up with a creative strategy like 'right to work' laws that limit the powers of unions by cutting the funding they get from union dues. They have made the middle class smaller. Conservatives, by insisting that those on the left are the 'elites' try to convince Americans that the Left is responsible for what the right is doing to hurt workers’ rights.)
Wilsonian Hubris
"This Wilsonian hubris has spread like a cancer through many of America's largest corporations, its public institutions, and its popular culture. Those who run our so-called American corporations have bent to the will of the woke agenda and care more for their foreign investors and organizations than their American workers and customers. Today, nearly every top-tier US university president or Wall Street hedge fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high school football game in Waco, Texas. Many elites' entire identity, it seems, is wrapped up in their sense of superiority over those people. But under our Constitution, they are mere equals of the workers who shower after work instead of before."
(Conservatives have said that they "love the poorly educated." There is no data to back up the claims Roberts made in this paragraph. Take a poll of university presidents and Wall Street Hedge Fund managers and it is highly likely that they are Republicans (conservatives). The right has supposedly freed workers from the tyranny of labor unions - so that they will once again be subject to the tyranny of the CEO's. We are even seeing a return of child labor. We are being herded towards serfdom.)
We Love the Poorly Educated
"This is as it should and must be. Intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees, financial success, and all other markers of elite status have no bearing on a person's knowledge of the one thing most necessary for governance: what it means to live well. That knowledge is available to each of us, no matter how humble our backgrounds or how unpretentious our attainments. It is open to us to read in the book of human nature, to which we are all offered the key just by merit of our shared humanity. One of the great premises of American political life is that everyone who can read in that book must have a voice in deciding the course and fate of our Republic."
(Trump is not the only one who "loves the poorly educated." Americans are being used as pawns in the conservative war on 'woke.' A college education still has value in America and the humanities were not purposely designed to spread liberal ideas. Conservatives have mounted a campaign against 'liberal' colleges and the number of Christian conservative colleges is rising. So is the insistence that training programs will bring Americans jobs that a college education may not bring. Do most people regret going to college? That is doubtful. This does not mean that the left finds no value in Americans who don't attend college. It does seem that conservatives have preyed on Americans who went to work after high school making them believe they are not valued by libs and turning them into a political group to exploit their hyped-up grievances.)
(Who is championing making it easier to vote and getting rid of the Electoral College? Who is offering to pay off student loans? Hint: not the conservatives. )
Alliances and Treaties
"Progressive policymakers and pundits in America either fail to understand this premise or intentionally reject it. They enthusiastically support supranational organizations like the United Nations and European Union, which are run and staffed almost entirely by people who share their values and are mostly insulated from the influence of national elections. That's why they are eager for America to sign international treaties on everything from pharmaceutical patents to climate change to 'the rights of the child' - and why those treaties invariably endorse policies that could never pass through the US Congress. Like the progressive Woodrow Wilson a century ago, the woke Left today seeks a world, bound by global treaties they write, in which they exercise dictatorial powers over all nations without being subject to democratic accountability."
(This argument is a sneaky way to support nationalism and isolationism, by suggesting that America's global interests outweigh the left's support for the American people. Most global interaction is undertaken in the interests of national security and economic stability. Although the Great Factory Migration hurt workers and was backed by American laws, the prime movers were heads of corporations, newly opened markets with access to cheap labor, and profit motives that did not necessarily benefit the government. Once again, we must ask who leads those corporations, conservatives, or liberals? Who has profited most?)
(In this section Roberts lays the foundation to also blame the so-called 'liberal world order' on the left when these policies were pursued by both sides and the word 'liberal' referred to a 'democratic world order.' The Constitution gives the federal government the responsibility for foreign affairs and treaties. Conservatives cannot both honor our allies and treaties and close America off in as isolationist nationalistic state. Climate migration and a desire to hold America in what Conservatives felt was the "golden age" - a sort of mashup between the 50s and the 80s is driving the nationalist movement. When conservatives yearn to preserve America's national identity they mean as a predominantly white, Christian nation without any of the changes of the 'sexual revolution.')
Open Borders
"That's why today's progressive Left so cavalierly supports open borders despite the lawless humanitarian crisis their policy created along America's southern border. They seek to purge the very concept of the nation-state from the American ethos, no matter how much crime increases or resources drop for schools and hospitals or wages decrease for the working class. Open-borders activism is a classic example of what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace" - publicly promoting one's own virtue without risking any personal inconvenience. Indeed, the only direct impact of open borders on pro-open borders elites is that the constant flow of illegal immigration suppresses the wages of their housekeepers, landscapers, and busboys."
(Do you have a housekeeper or a landscaper on your household staff? Conservative states have been obstinately against even raising the minimum wage and yet they are zinging the left for letting immigrants decrease working class wages. Compare the minimum wage in New York State with the minimum wage in Alabama.)
Environmental Extremism
"Cheap grace," says Roberts, "aptly describes the Left's love affair with environmental extremism." He also says, "It is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals' ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue." (Oh my!)
(Roberts makes environmentalism a religious issue and accuses the left of using it to get absolute power or single-party rule, although the left would wish to have help from the right in addressing our issues involving our soil, air, and water.)
(These are the arguments of a party that believes (or pretends to believe) that climate science is propaganda.)
"At its very heart, environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human. Stewardship and conservation are supplanted by population control and economic regression. Environmental ideologues would ban the fuels that run almost all of the world's cars, planes, factories, farms, and electrical grids. Abandoning confidence in human resilience and creativity in responding to the challenges of the future would raise impediments to the most meaningful human activities. They would stand human affairs on their head, regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature." (Again, wow!)
(It is doubtful that the left welcomes the total upheaval of our energy and our economy any more than the right does, but the left does not deny science in order to hoard wealth.)
Economic Globalism and China
(Is the left to blame for globalization and our capitalist adventures in China? It is unlikely that just one party signed on to this.)
"The same goals are the heart of elite support for economic globalization. For 30 years, America's political, economic, and cultural leaders embraced and enriched Communist China and its genocidal Communist Party while hollowing out America's industrial base. What may have started out with good intentions has now been made clear. Unfettered trade with China has been a catastrophe. It has made a handful of American corporations enormously profitable while twisting their business incentives away from the American people's needs. For a generation, politicians of both parties promised that engagement with Beijing would grow our economy while injecting American values into China. The opposite has happened. American factories have closed. Jobs have been outsourced. Our manufacturing economy has been financialized. And all along, the corporations profiting failed to export our values of human rights and freedom; rather they imported China's anti-American values into their C-suites.”
“Even before the rise of Big Tech, Wall Street ignored China's serial theft of American intellectual property."
(Roberts implies that conservatives bear no guilt for these corporate sins, which were hardly considered sins until recently. Whose bank accounts and offshore accounts are lined with the profits? Are they more likely to be those of conservatives or liberals? Who insisted that passing the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would be good for America while offering it up as a gift to the CEOs who exported American jobs?)
Summary
This article presents the third conservative promise with commentary which you most likely did not need to read because you could write your own commentary. You can see for yourself the rhetorical use of emotional language, the conservatives walking away from what they now consider bad policy, and the assignment of the blame to the left. Still, it is surprising to see such blatant propaganda and use of right-wing popular language in a report from a group that once prided itself on its erudition.
If this presents the case for right-wing retribution against the left, it is weak tea indeed.
(Mandate for Leadership 2025, Foreword pp.9-11)
https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
From the NYT
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/opinion/project-2025-trump-administration.html