Conservatives should focus more on building “alternative political structures” than the next election cycle, speakers said Wednesday at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington.
Celebrated author, educator, and former slave Booker T. Washington offers three key lessons for building these alternative institutions, noted Delano Squires, a research fellow in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation.
“Construction and collaboration must be built on what we believe, not who we oppose,” Squires told conferees at the Capital Hilton.
The second lesson, Squires said, is that “building is better than bellyaching.”
And the third lesson is “institutions must be built to weather the storm.” In part, he said, that means the focus must be “the next generation, not the next election cycle.”
Squires and others on a panel called “Alternative Political Structures” discussed the Left’s hold not only on government and the political system, but on the media, universities, and other elite institutions.
Squires, a contributor at TheBlaze Media, elaborated on each lesson and discussed some of the racial tensions in the United States.
“On one side, there are a subset of black progressive pundits and institutions that associate the nuclear family, objectivity, punctuality, rational thinking, and even mathematics itself with whiteness,” he said. “On the other side are a subset of white conservatives who associate Juneteenth, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ with wokeness. So what is a patriotic black conservative in the Washington mold to do?”
Squires said the answer is to build institutions based on core principles to rival media outlets such as The Root and The Grio and advocacy groups such as the NAACP that “see black conservatives as racial turncoats.”
“New institutions will need to be built on a core set of values—faith, family, free enterprise, dignity, and self-respect—in order to survive,” the Heritage scholar said.
N.S. Lyons, author of “The Upheaval,” a Substack newsletter, looked at the rise of conservatives in Hungary as a model for conservatives in the United States.
Conservatives in Hungary began to work outside politics in what Lyons called “civic circles,” earning trust and legitimacy through community organizing.
The conservative movement in Hungary ultimately achieved electoral landslides and now “runs its own conservative deep state, transforming the media, culture, industry, the universities, and ultimately the whole country,” he said.
“If the bulk of the people turn first to an organization outside the state and its institutions, whether because those state institutions are too incompetent or too actively hostile to help them, then that parallel organization has more legitimacy than the state,” Lyons said. “And once that organization has more legitimacy than the state, there’s a real possibility that it may soon replace the state, such is the way of nature and nature’s law.”
Lyons said he was describing traditional conservatism as expressed by French philosopher and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, who chronicled the United States in the 1800s and concluded that Americans had stronger independent spirits than Europeans, who were more prone to rely on government.
“You, being good conservatives, may be disturbed by all my allusions to learning from the lessons of the Left or even from revolutionaries,” he said. “You’ll be reassured that what I am suggesting is only really an extension of the finest traditions of American conservatism. Consider this classic observation from Alexis de Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America.’”
However, many conservatives are looking for Tocqueville in the wrong places, argued William Schambra, a senior fellow emeritus at Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.
Many alternative structures are already in place, operating in the tradition of conservatism but lacking the label of conservative or Republican, Schambra said.
He referenced conservative black commentator and activist Bob Woodson, founder of 1776 Unites and the Woodson Center.
“Bob reminded us that it was precisely black America’s historical ability to create its own parallel policy that allowed it to survive and even flourish, giving the lie to the 1619 Project’s narrative of black helplessness in the face of America’s settler colonialism,” Schambra said.
The Hudson Institute scholar said conservatives shouldn’t try to create their own social services complex.
“Following Bob Woodson’s lead, it’s instead possible to discover local institutions that make up in moral authority what that they lack in material resources,” Schambra said, adding:
The problem is, they don’t look conservative to us. They’ve never written an op-ed calling for tax cuts for the wealthy. They don’t subscribe to National Review. … Nonetheless, through the very act of assuming responsibility for solving their own problems, they embody Tocqueville’s principles. They thereby reject progressivism, this claim that only professional experts are competent to address our problems. They also thereby reject the contemporary Left’s claim that only revolution can address the disabling effects of settler colonialism.
American conservatives are quick to talk about the dangers of the “woke mind virus,” but are themselves caught up in the “vote mind virus,” said Ernst Roets, executive director of the newly established Afrikaner Foundation and also head of policy at the Solidarity Movement in South Africa.
“The vote mind virus would like us to believe that the most important, or the only thing, we can do to bring about change is to vote in the next election,” Roets said. “Because the vote mind virus tells us that the world will end if our party loses the next election, but that we will flourish if our party wins the next election.”
“The vote mind virus proclaims that every upcoming election is the most important election we have ever had,” he said. “This is because the vote mind virus is built on the idea that the government is always the source and the solution to all our problems. Don’t get me wrong, voting is important. Voting is very important. But what we do between elections is much more important than what we do on Election Day.”
