A “New Right” has taken shape over the last few years that tends to share the conviction that the American experiment in ordered liberty confronts a monumental crisis. Encompassing national conservatives, common-good conservatives, and postliberal conservatives, this New Right sees pervasive moral, political, and spiritual decline. Only prompt, decisive, and sweeping action, so the New Right argument goes, can save the United States from the self-destruction long underway and in danger of careening, if it has not already, beyond the point of no return. Many pin their hopes on President-elect Donald Trump to at least slow the rate of decline.

Members of the New Right are hardly the first to discern something profoundly amiss within the West and particularly within the modern tradition of freedom out of which the United States sprang. Intellectuals have been diagnosing the decline of the West – and writing its postmortem – at least since Rousseau’s mid-18th century “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.” The French philosopher decried the educated urban elites of the day whose hypocrisy and hollowness, he contended, betrayed the common good. After Rousseau came the romantics, Marx, Nietzsche, Spengler, the Frankfurt School, some traditionalist American conservatives, postmodernists, and others. From the left and the right, they excoriated Enlightenment liberalism, anticipated its collapse, and envisaged alternatives.

New Right intellectuals mock – for, as they like to say, not knowing what time it is – Americans who cling to the path of reform. Presuming an essentially well-functioning government and a healthy society, reform involves working within the established system. It takes account of changing circumstances and applies new insights to adjust laws and recalibrate policies. If, however, you believe as do many on the New Right that your country totters on the edge of a precipice, reform seems feeble and beside the point.

Proponents of restoration accept that bold measures must be undertaken to avert disaster, but they think that the original regime and the moral assumptions out of which it emerged remain sound. The problem, restorers maintain, is that neglect or malice has deformed basic political institutions and has corroded citizens’ attachment to the unwritten norms, habits and dispositions, and formal principles that sustain the regime. Consequently, major efforts must be undertaken to reclaim and restate the nation’s constitutional traditions, and to educate citizens about the regime’s structure, vital operations, and sustaining opinions and........

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