Taking Back Washington to Save America
By Kevin d. Roberts, PhD
A Review by Dwight A. Moody, PhD
This 274-page call to action by the president of the now-famous Heritage Foundation (Kevin D. Roberts) pits the Party of Creation against the Party of Destruction in a struggle to shape American culture. These two titles demonstrate a pejorative addiction throughout the book that demeans and denounces so much of modern American life while feeding off a nostalgia for an imaginary past. On top of that, Roberts embraces a gleeful rudeness is describing so many of his neighbors, all the while strapping on the royal robe of classical Catholic traditionalism. In and around all of this self-righteousness, Roberts describes one version of our past and one version of our future, leaving me to hope and pray for options that are more faithful to the past and more hopeful for the future. If not, God help us all.
The Party of Creation is another name for the New Conservative Movement. The Old Conservative Movement began with Ronald Reagan (he asserts), the overarching hero of this fanciful interpretation of recent American history. Nowhere in this book does Roberts reveal awareness of the real origins of modern conservative energy: as a pushback against the Civil Rights Movement a quarter century before Reagan’s election. In fact, race is the hidden factor in Roberts’ entire enterprise: he mentions it only in derision when he writes of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), both of which are main features of the Party of Destruction.
His silence on black-white dynamics contrasts sharply with his proud defense of his own ethnic heritage: Cajun. Here, he bemoans how the Party of Destruction uses regulatory powers to undermine what he values most about his upbringing in rural Louisiana all the while oblivious to the far more pervasive and important cultural heritages of native Americans, African Americans, and Latino Americans. This sustained indifference to these communities all around him document the narrow-mindedness of both his descriptions and his prescriptions.
Roberts is Roman Catholic and proudly so. His frequent use of Catholic examples of what he presents as healthy, hopeful trends (Catholic classical education at all levels, for instance) tilts his head away from where most of American live and work. He is part of the resurgence of the conservative Catholic intellectual tradition which also includes Vice President Elect J D Vance (who wrote the introduction to the book). Catholic Joe Biden, on the other hand, is demeaned as a classic example of the Party of Destruction, especially with what Roberts describes as Biden’s mishandling of American foreign policy.
Biden has many Republican comrades in the Party of Destruction, which Roberts brands more frequently (and with unmitigated disdain) as the Uniparty, that “network of political, corporate, and cultural elites who share a set of interests quite apart from … ordinary Americans.” In general, he sees these people as disconnected from family life, religious life, community life, and in fact, American life. He describes them as more interested in global issues than national issues and more invested in personal wealth than national flourishing.
In particular, Roberts lays out his agenda. For families, he wants better wages, more children, less contraception, no abortion, no gay marriage, Sabbath laws, and fewer regulations for home businesses: but also more maternity and paternity leave and work from home freedoms, expanded Medicaid, and age-restrictions for pornography.
For schools, Roberts advocates for universal school choice, emphasis on reverence for parents and authority, no transgender, classical curriculum, expansion of the Classic Learning Test (as alternative to the SAT), and the death of the public schools. For the economy, he works for fewer managers and more entrepreneurs, de-emphasis on college education, fewer large corporations, and more American made goods. For law and order, Roberts focuses almost exclusively on the expansion of gun ownership and greater protections for gun owners. Finally, Roberts proposes relaxing tensions with Russia and ramping up confrontations with our real enemy, China, and especially the Chinese Community Party.
Roberts is right about some things: the decline of the Middle Class, for instance. Yes, too many people cannot afford to buy homes, or raise children, or even go to college. But he fails to trace this modern tragedy to the Reagan era tax rules and anti-unionism that began our quarter century trend of moving money from the under class and middle class to the upper class. Of course, he seems unaware of the homeless problem in the United States, much of it connected to other Reagan policies, such as the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill.
Roberts needs to get out more: to a ball game, or a parade, or a barbeque on the black side of town. He needs to sit in a church pew next to a gay couple and sing “Amazing Grace” or listen to a person suffering from sexual dysphoria pour out her soul to a nurse. Roberts needs to go the Willie Nelson’s farm and rejoice in the grassroots music of a man who campaigned for the Democrat candidate for President. Roberts needs to open up his heart and mind to people all around him who don’t share his vision of utopia: which this book implies as straight, white men (mostly) congregating in conservative Catholic schools reading books written by white straight men raised in European Christendom and looking for Catholic women who will bear six to eight children.
This book is full of lies, distortions, and persistent mis-readings of what is happening in the world. Yes, it describes the way he and many of his cultural comrades experience the world. And yes, it prescribes a future they wish to see embraced. Sadly, it is a future eerily similar to a white-washed past driven more by nostalgia than truth. Reading this book left me shaking my head with disbelief and also folding my hands in prayer that what he works for may never come to pass. And it left me wishing Christian dreamers of a different stripe might write of a future that is more hopeful, more joyful, more welcoming, and more accessible. And still hospitable to those who dissent, including Roberts!
