Why RETVRN Is Not a Solution

The American right needs to have a forward-looking vision for America. Plus, what effective altruism and faithful presence have in common.

Michael Lind recently published a provocative piece in Compact called “Forget the Founding Fathers.”

What would the Founding Fathers think of today’s America? How would they advise us to address the great domestic and foreign challenges of our time? Would they be proud of contemporary Americans for preserving their handiwork, or would they despair at what has become of the United States in the 21st century?

The answer to all of these questions is the same: Who cares? Seriously. Who cares what James Madison would have thought about internet regulation? Who cares what Thomas Jefferson might have said about the war in Ukraine?

The cult of the American founding has no parallels in other English-speaking democracies. A British prime minister who declared that 21st-century Britain must turn for guidance to Robert Walpole or Pitt the Younger would be considered daft.

While there’s a lot one could debate about this piece, it gets at something important. Americans on the right need to spend much more time looking forward than they do looking backward.

We should venerate the Founding Fathers, but they don’t have the answers to today’s problems.

To the extent that American postwar conservatism has a positive vision, much of it is a retro one. It’s about getting back to the Constitution. (Indeed lots of people call themselves “Constitutional conservatives,” even though the Constitution they cherish has been dead and gone for decades). Or getting back to the principles of the American Founding. Or restoring “classical liberalism.” Or populists thinking that we will “bring back the jobs” through onshoring.

There are good impulses here. We shouldn’t be afraid of pointing back to what was good in the past. The past is the source of American identity from which we need to build the future. And not all changes in our society have been good ones to say the least.

At the same time, America has always been a restless, protean, forward looking country.

One of the key paradigms of American culture and identity is the idea of the frontier.

The geographic frontier was declared closed in 1890, but we’ve continued to be a frontier nation in many ways: expanding empire during and after World War II, the suburban “crabgrass frontier,” the space exploration frontier, and the technological frontier. It’s no surprise that the leading edge of AI research is here in America, for example.

Elon Musk is an example of this kind of forward looking person, trying to open the interplanetary frontier on Mars, and driving incredible technological advancement created right here in America along the way.

The American right has largely become backwards looking and has no future vision for either the country or itself. It is certainly not a frontier movement - rural homesteading is fine, but is a retreat not an advance - and in that sense it is missing something important about America.

To the extent that conservatism has ideas, they are mostly small ball, like tweaking child tax credits and the like.

What would a proper 21st America look like, one that is healthy, growing, pushing forward? What does that vision look like for Americans on the right? What does the authentically American idea of the frontier look like today?

These are the questions that today’s right should be seeking to answer. Those answers won’t be found by looking back to a bygone era.

What Effective Altruism and Faithful Presence Have in Common

The Financial Times had a great recent essay on the movement known as “Effective Altruism.” Effective altruism is a tech heavy, well-funded movement that originated in a form of hyper-utilitarian philosophy developed at Oxford. The crypo fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was one of the leading EA figures. Despite the obvious corruption in the movement, it remains very influential and with its tech billionaire backing is flooding the zone in Washington to try to take over the artificial intelligence world. There’s plenty about EA online you can google if you don’t subscribe to the FT.

It occurred to me that there's an interesting parallel between "effective altruism" and its appeal to the tech elite, and the "faithful presence" approach of sociologist James Davison Hunter (as outlined in his book To Change the World) and its appeal to evangelicals in elite urban centers.

Both are mechanisms that can be used to rationalize and justify self-interested behavior by people who are or aspire to be elites.

In the case of EA, this comes through in the "earn to give" approach, in which the most "rational" way to be philanthropically effective is not to do good works but make a lot of money, which you will then in theory give away.

Next came a career-advice service called 80,000 Hours, encouraging students to choose the career that would do the most good — which in many cases would mean finding ways to “earn to give” to effective charities, rather than directly devoting oneself to, say, medicine, social work or development. In both cases the motivation to reach for the maximum good one could do was central.

This was obviously a big part of the thinking underlying SBF's approach, and certainly appeals to people who have made a pile in the tech industry, or aspire to do so.

In the case of faithful presence, Hunter's observation that culture changes from the top down, through overlapping networks of elites and institutions at the center likewise valorizes the pursuit of elite career success in global cities. The best way to influence culture is not through doing anything gauche like culture warring or politicking, but by becoming a partner at Goldman Sachs, a reporter in the elite media, a success on Broadway, etc. Then, in theory, you change the culture by being "salt and light" in this position of elite success and access.

Also, neither EA nor faithful presence require taking any genuinely unpopular or risky positions.

In the case of EA, I see people taking what appear to be nominally radical positions, such as saying that AI needs to be firmly limited, or with someone positioned at all times with a hand hovering above a kill switch. But I have not witnessed any EA driven rationale for something that would truly cause someone a lot of social static, such as arguing that for EA reasons we should shut down or significantly curtail international migration. Surely, if EA is true, it should generate at least some positions that go against the current elite consensus in ways that are unpopular and socially risky to hold. Maybe I'm missing something here. I'd be happy to be corrected. But I have not seen things like this in my reading. Indeed, someone like SBF was basically a garden variety Democrat.

In the case of faithful presence, culture warring or any other traditional manifestations of evangelical cultural engagement that are unpopular or lower your social status are explicitly rejected. In To Change the World, Hunter is a bit vague about what faithful presence is. He writes things like “faithful presence means that we are to be fully present to each other within the community of faith and fully present to those who are not.” But in none of his descriptions did I note that it required doing things that might put you at risk of getting cancelled.

In fact, I might suggest that the best capsule summary of faithful presence in its practical takeways for evangelicals in elite cities is to "pursue elite success and keep your head down."

To be fair, this may not be how Hunter intended for it to be understood, but it lends itself to be taken that way.

I have personally spoken against the culture war approach myself. But as with EA, in a Negative World, certainly there has to be at least some takeaway from faithful presence that goes contrary to the elite secular consensus in at lease some material and risky way.

Both EA and faithful presence have purposes and approaches that sound noble, and could be implemented for noble purposes. But both are also very consistent with cloaking the pursuit of self-interest in vague and high minded sounding rhetoric.