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The present moment is one of growing discomfort, both in America and in Europe, with the regnant liberal political theory often described as liberal democracy. It is frequently said that the only genuine alternatives to liberal democracy are Marxism and Fascism, but I don't believe this is true. I want to sketch an alternative viewpoint that I will call conservative democracy. This position is closer to the spirit of traditional constitutionalism in both America and Britain than the liberal political theories of our day. Moreover, it is far better equipped to maintain the free institutions of these nations than liberalism.
There are prominent scholars and public figures who are convinced that "things are getting better" in almost every way. As for me, I find it difficult not to see the Western nations disintegrating before our eyes. The most significant institutions that have characterized America and Britain for the last five centuries, giving these countries their internal coherence and stability-the Bible, public religion, the independent national state, and the traditional family-are not merely under assault. They have been, at least since World War II, in precipitous decline.
In the United States, for example, some 40 percent of children are today born outside of marriage. The overall fertility rate has fallen to 1.76 children per woman. American children for the most part receive twelve years of public schooling that is scrubbed clean of God and Scripture. And it is now possible to lose one's livelihood or even to be prosecuted for maintaining traditional Christian or Jewish views on various subjects.
Add to this the fact that the principal project of European and American political elites for decades now has been the establishment of a "liberal international order" whose aim is to export American norms and values to other nations, and you have a stunning picture of what the United States has become-a picture that in certain respects resembles that of Napoleonic France: an ideologically anti-religious, antitraditionalist universalist power seeking to bring its version of the Enlightenment to the nations of the world, if necessary by force.
The present revival of nationalist sentiment in Britain and America seeks, in one way or another, to resist this trajectory. Perhaps 70 percent of President Trump's votes came from Evangelical Christians...