A Review of Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America
To successfully date a beautiful woman, you must study Heraclitus closely. You never meet the same woman twice. She is, as fire, always moving, changing, complexifying–creating and burning immense amounts of (your) energy. So how do you tame the fire? How do you know where the blaze is going? Read her next move? Women, fire, Trump: all must be traced and studied as repeated becomings.
Donald J. Trump, like my Mrs. Waters, cannot be understood simply by where she is at a given moment. This is the mistake many have made with Trump, a mistake I have yet to make with my wife.
Taking a snapshot of Trump at any given moment will reveal a multitude of seemingly contradictory opinions devoid of a clear political direction, yet taken as a trajectory, we see something very real and terrifying to the American Left. He has moved from Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley to Rubio 3.0 and Tulsi Gabbard; from Mike Pence and Jared Kushner to J.D. Vance and an army of frat boys. Trump’s political movement is hard to parse because we’re often standing too close when we need to see each stroke as a blue-sky Monet: Sometimes strange. Never expected. Always offensive.
Since 2017, writers, wonks, and nonprofits have been trying to make their mark by defining Trumpism after Trump. Now, after his nonconsecutive election to the presidency, his legacy comes into remarkable focus. His is the second coming of the long nineteenth century: a Reveille for Andrew Jackson’s America. President Jackson was the man who left no successor because America was his successor. Every man was his vice president, his lieutenant, his son. Jackson himself was Caesar in the American Empire of Liberty.
Even as no resource or conference or organization has contained Trump’s fiery complexities into an articulable agenda, Kevin Roberts’ work, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, comes very close to mapping his movement’s trajectory. Unsurprisingly, the whole book is built around the theme of fire (the subtitle was originally Burning Down Washington to Save America) and features a foreword by the heir-apparent of the torch: J.D. Vance.
The book is excellent on its own terms and offers a far more creative and original vision for the American Right than most contemporary Swamp-publications, blending Reaganite Western optimism for America’s future regarding technology and individualism with Southern prioritization of the family and tradition with distrust of federal overreach. In many ways, the whole of the past three decades of passion and thought on the right is synthesized for the moment in Dawn’s Early Light.
Optimism can be found on almost every page, and not just for the spirit of capitalism. In a move I have not seen his fellow Roman Catholics make, Roberts calls the Right “The party of Creation.” It’s a double entendre, as the Right is the confessor of God’s creation as it is, yet also as creators in their own right. This gives him the flexibility to stand upon the old tradition of natural law and nature’s God while viewing both basic familial life, like childbirth, as well as technical development, like space programs, through the lens of creative optimism.
Himself a devoted reader of C.S. Lewis, one wonders if Roberts believes The Abolition of Man is already complete, or so nearly complete that technological advancement is the only way to salvage the American image marred by “the party of Destruction.” Roberts himself admits that his parents’ divorce (amidst a terrible recession) and his brother’s subsequent suicide both revealed a quiet family network grounded in his centuries-long Cajun heritage, yet the crises of the 1980s also used up all the social capital he had there. As a successful educator and family man, he gratefully learned from his family’s past and has since moved to Wyoming, Texas, and now Washington, D.C., to preserve the way of life that saved him. But this reader was a little skeptical: is the fraying world of Roberts’ childhood still kicking? Are there any more Buchananite Cajuns waiting in the wings? Anyone who can place a strong, moralizing hand on the budding Right-wing techno-optimism?
The hometown decline that Dr. Roberts experienced in his childhood is a potential red flag for another reason: not only will small towns not produce the men who love their homes, but the development of technology might actually entrap those born leaders into a downward, entropic cycle. In the words of First Things reviewer Nathan Pinkoski, “We may be entering a world of scarcity, in which innovation will happen at two speeds. In such a world, actual innovation happens only among a few. For the rest of the nation, progress stalls.” Jeremiah warned against prophets who foresaw the coming destruction yet shouted, “‘peace, peace; when there is no peace.”
Maybe Kevin Roberts’ vision (and it’s a farsighted vision: he predicted an alliance between Silicon Valley Tech and social conservatism before Trump’s assassination attempt and subsequent apotheosis) is too good to be true, and he’s closed his eyes to the inevitable Managerialist decline of the United States. Put another way, “What if the American frontier has forever closed?”
The only way to answer Pinkoski is to go back to, you guessed it, the American Founding.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.” So prophesied the American radical Thomas Paine. Paine is the persona non grata of the founders’ generation, everything conservatives stand against. Yet there was something he understood about the nature of the United States: that it was an opportunity not seen since the days of Noah. The atheistic prophet of biblical utopianism was not alone in seeing America as a new civilizational beginning. Terrified, the Federalist, Fisher Ames, wrote to a friend of America’s westward expansion that “by adding an unmeasured world, we rush like a comet into infinite space.” This was not a compliment for a New Englander.
Troublesome prophet and cranky Federalist alike testified to the truth: America is a new world. They were blasphemous in a strong, God-fearing civilization. New worlds emerge through treason, sedition, or national collapse. For any but God to deluge the world is mass murder. But once the judgment is done, outside man’s control, the only thing to do is to raise up an altar, be fruitful, and multiply.
Edmund Burke lived in a Christian civilization, surrounded by steepled temples–all belonging to the conforming Church of England. Nature in England was sanctified. But for the framers of our constitutional government, not to mention the Acadian settlers of Louisiana, the Scots-Irish cresting the Appalachians, the trappers, and explorers going even further west–the United States were a collection of outposts and cabins in a continent waiting to be reaped. And reaped it was. For the next century and a half, Americans tamed the West–nature itself–and all those who lived there. Theodore Roosevelt, realizing this closing of a sphere, frantically searched for ways of propagating that masculine greatness and spirit that had inspired Noah and his covenantal fulfillment in David Livingstone, giving dignity and life to the sons of Ham.
T.R.’s aims came crashing down in the world wars, technological nightmares, as America found herself crusading for an old world hellbent on suicide. In those two noble attempts to revive Christendom along American principles of liberty and sovereignty, three of T.R.’s sons died, and with them went the last vestiges of the old American right and their tripartite rally of life, liberty, and property.
It was the president of this second crusade, a Roosevelt whose bodily breakdown matched the decline of the nation’s old ways (and the precise inverse of his cousin’s physiological trajectory), that led to the split of the modern conservative movement from the political mainstream. The old WASPs were decadent and corrupt, uninterested in the past, and thereby unable to imagine a future outside of sex and materialism. If they served in the Second World War, they would not serve afterward. So, a Mexican-born Irish Catholic would take up the mantle of tradition–and, like another New England Catholic upstart, would take up the WASP aesthetic–calling himself a conservative.
As Matthew Continetti notes, Buckley’s conservative movement was something of an aberration in the history of the American Right. Is anyone surprised? Until then, the American Right was not merely conservative of a complete civilization, it was radical–a word Dr. Roberts keenly notes refers to the roots of a tree–and the more radically grounded in the soil of the past it became, the more it would blossom into something only partially known.
But America after 1945 was like those early twentieth century baseball teams, crammed into a city block, yet with a disproportionate amount of money, influence, and success. This new American Conservatism, fighting against the secular materialism, managerialism, and apathy to communism yet missing from its ranks the greatest scientists, innovators and businessmen (especially after exorcising the John Birch Society), was a fragment of the old American right without the conversation partners that made the old Right so American to begin with. It was an America without the Mohican, Mormon, or Mexican. No more Fifty-Four Forty or Fight, no more Knights of the Golden Circle, no more renegade Carnegie or upstart Vanderbilt. The United States put away childish things and joined the adult world. America was now about conservation, like managers of a dead uncle’s estate rather than a Johnny Appleseed planting trees for future explorers. America stopped becoming and started being. And America is really bad at being.
Some will object to this progressive language–Buckley would. But Buckley had his shot, and he couldn’t conserve his world, so why should we die on his hill?
Image: Rocky Mountains. Emigrants Crossing the Plains, Fanny F. Palmer (1866).
