The Crisis of Modern Liberalism and the Conservative Argument

In the Summer edition of the Claremont Review of Books Jonah Goldberg reviews Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Ten Years of the Claremont Review of Books and finds that much of modern conservative thought owes much to the influence of the Claremont Institute and its flagship publication (though it's certainly not anywhere close to as influential as it should be).  As Jonah notes, since its inception, the main project of the Claremont Institute has been to recover the natural right and natural law understandings that pervade both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.  As Jonah explains:

At home or abroad, the fundamental question of the Constitution is how, in a free society, shall men use power over other men. The founders' answer was, in short, very carefully. That is why we have checks and balances, separation of powers, divided government, and all of the other mechanisms that make it hard for us to oppress one another. For this form of government to work, citizens must believe in self-government, an idea itself grounded in the framers' understanding of human nature as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and elsewhere. No other publication has more effectively or eloquently made that argument over a sustained period of time. This is all the more impressive given that they have done so without falling into cant or cliché. Each piece in this book—and in the magazine—reads like what it is: an honest and deep examination of the books and ideas that shape the intellectual climate. 

But even through the heydays of conservatism (or what's thought today to be its heyday) during the Reagan Revolution in the waning years of the Cold War, what made the diverging views of conservatism coalesce was a common enemy that manifested itself in the guise of the twin evils of communism and Marxism.  Now that this common enemy has been defeated for now, modern conservatism until recently had been largely more focused on what it was against rather than what it was for.  Politically, this changed in the 2010 election with the advent of the Tea Party and other organizations that began as a movement against "big government" and were for a return the Constitution and the principles of the American Founders.  The return to first principles coincides with Jonah's observation that the temporary Cold War coalition masked an ever-widening fissure in what later came to be called modern conservatism, or what began as the reaction against the Progressive Movement.

In the person of Barack Obama do we have a politician, along with the Democratic Party behind him, moving back to arguments of the earlier Progressives who openly called for an overturning of founding principles so that our country could instead be guided by the currents of History.  No longer being content with simply continuing on the rhetorical tradition that FDR had created and was sustained through Bill Clinton's presidency -- concealing radical critiques of the Constitution and its principles in speeches that seemed to suggest that they and the Democratic Party were following completely within the Founding tradition --, Obama returned to Osawatomie, Kansas and voiced arguments not heard in public since the days of long ago.

I will leave by quoting Charles Kesler, who nicely sums up what should supply the metaphysical grounding underneath the conservative counter argument:

Some conservatives start, as it were, from Edmund Burke; others from Friedrich Hayek. While we respect both thinkers and their schools of thought, we begin instead from America, the American political tradition in all its genius and profundity, and the relation of our tradition to revealed wisdom and to what the elderly Jefferson once called, rather insouciantly, "the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc." We think conservatism should take its bearings from the founders' statesmanship, our citizens' loyalty to the Declaration and Constitution, and the scenes, both tender and proud, of our national history.