Emile Doak Reviews They're Not Listening

My review of @RyanGirdusky & @Harlan's important book up today @amconmag.

Nat'l populism is a necessary corrective to the failures of globalist neoliberalism.

But it must be tempered by the best of the classical, conservative, and Christian tradition.https://t.co/G200T5Mr29

— Emile Doak (@EADoak) September 11, 2020

AmConMag

[N]ational populism needs to be tempered by the best of the classical, conservative, and Christian tradition. The national populist revolution represents a necessary and overdue corrective to the decades of globalist neoliberalism that have plagued Western politics. It moves the political paradigm back towards the realm of limits, solidarity, community, and place. But without the tempering forces of virtue, it may over-swing into the more troubling territory of naked tribalism. In other words, the national populists need the social conservatives. 

Girdusky and Hill, two political consultants, conclude They’re Not Listening on a strikingly apolitical note, echoing shades of Rod Dreher’s “apolitical politics” in The Benedict Option: “If national populists really believe that nations are families rather than the neoliberal premise that they’re marketplaces, then they’re going to have to start acting like it,” they write, “They’re going to have to create physical communities centered around local institutions, faith-based organizations and small businesses.” There’s an irony here: Physical communities are necessarily rooted in a specific, local place, and organizations and businesses develop inherent hierarchies—or, one might say, aristocracies. So perhaps herein lies the synthesis: a national populism, lived out with a healthy respect for the local and the aristocratic. 

Get the scale right and aristocracies won't be wrongly centered on "organizations and business" but on the political community itself. Organizations and businesses in thesmselves have no relation to  political rule. (Different ends.) Aristocracies are discovered within the political community themselves and sanctioned by them.