The Old Guard Right vs. Dissidents

I'm your host, John Harris. This is a short podcast. I want to go over two clips from Glenn Beck and Eric Erickson, both conservative talk radio hosts who had something to say about a concerning trend they see within their own conservative circles.

This is an old guard versus new emerging guard and really answering a question that I think is on a lot of people's minds.

What's the future of conservatism politically look like in the United States? And I want to give you maybe a little hint of a little taste of what that might look like because these two radio hosts are very concerned about something that they're seeing.

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Let's play Glenn Beck first and then we'll do Eric Erickson. It's time to change, gang.

And it's not time to have a civil war. You should pray.

Pray. So clearly, he's upset. He said it's time to change. And some people have suggested,

I guess, or implied that maybe there's a civil war where we in the reality is we are balkanizing. We are like that's it's like being against the weather.

You can try to stand against it, but it seems like that's already happening and happened in some places.

There's a great sort happening. People are moving to red states who share those values and people are living.

They want to live around people that share their political views. That we don't have a civil war. Do you know what that's like?

Do you know what that's like? Do you know what that would happen? We balkanize. Do you know what your life is like?

You don't want any of that. And here's the thing. No one in their right mind does.

Civil wars traditionally are two factions trying to take over the government. Our war from 1861 to 1865 was not a civil war in that sense.

There was one side who was content to be left alone and leave. And then another side that says you can't leave.

And so neither side was trying to take over a commonly shared government or previously commonly shared government.

But that's perhaps the closest thing we have as a point of reference. And everyone in their right mind looks back at that and says, we do not want that.

Over 600 ,000 soldiers dying. People, you know, the estimates are that over a million people, and probably even over that because I think it's just slaves.

Over a million slaves supposedly died after the war by starvation and other things. And it's only in situations where you have a lot to lose that you engage in something like that, because there is a high human cost.

The question is, where are we at? That's really the question that should be asked.

Sometimes sometimes cures are worse than their diseases. And if you have a government who is who tyrannizes you, who trans is your kids, who imports people unvetted who harm your family, who makes it so you can't actually make a living and steals your dignity, who allows for the murder of children in the womb, who

I could go on. If you have a government like that, there does come a breaking point where the cost benefit analysis ends up with, we want to separate.

And that's how our country formed, is it not? The United States would not be here if it weren't for a separation with Great Britain.

And that separation eventually did just, just like the war from 1861 to 1865, it a war happened as a result of it.

And and so, you know, no one wants it where even the people who secede from states generally don't want a war.

They just want to be left alone. But sometimes those who are tyrannizing you before want to keep tyrannizing you.

And that's how wars sometimes emerge. Anybody who's like, oh, it's time we we split up.

First of all, I ain't going anywhere because I'm not leaving my country. I'm not leaving my well, my country left me.

No, you'd be leaving because they have Washington and all of the documents. I'm not leaving without the documents.

So hire Nicolas Cage and no, I'm just kidding. Take the Declaration of Independence. This is extremely short sighted.

What Glenn Beck is saying here, and it's actually a religious argument. And I want you to see that the sacred scrolls are in D .C.

So you somehow, as long as those sacred scrolls are there, that we're all in the same country and leaving the country.

I wonder if there's like a breaking point, like how bad does it have to be before leaving is acceptable or before there's an admission that maybe this isn't the same

United States that those documents governed? How bad does it have to be? I think we're past that point, perhaps.

But there's people like Glenn Beck, and this is the old guard in neoconservatism.

They're holding on. They still have this misplaced and frankly naive faith, in my opinion, that the

United States is still it's as it was and it can return to that.

And Glenn Beck being a Mormon, it wouldn't be a spiritual revival that would be accompanying it. It would be some kind of American renewal and.

I guess political thing and that this is possible, I mean, go to a place like. Portland, Oregon, go to New York City, even and go to, frankly, go to Atlanta, Georgia and try to consider how in the world you outvote the regimes that are there, if you're living in Chicago and you're experiencing crime constantly, if it's a if it's trash world, as Andrew Isker says,

I don't think some documents in a vault in D .C. that no one pays attention to anymore that are, frankly, archaic.

Unfortunately, they're they're so abused and so so violated that what difference does it make to even have them, it seems at times what what how is that supposed to magically keep you keep your allegiance to the entirety of the country and prevent you from leaving because, you know, they exist there.

This is a mystical thing. This is a spiritual thing. This is these documents sometimes somehow contain a power in them,

I guess. And and that power is supposed to bind you to this place called the

United States, called America, when in reality so much of the character of that place has changed to the point that the founders would think that what's happening now is in great excess to anything

King George would have done. It is they would have been very much in favor of of if it were possible, forming a different country or forming a different region that has some separation from the evil emanating from D .C.

where those documents are held and seem to affect hardly anything. I didn't abandon everything that the monuments stand for.

I'm still for them. I'm not wearing a mask in public because I'm not shouting death to America.

You're not the revolutionary. You may have changed, but that's because you're waking up.

Here's the thing, though, the revolutionaries were OK. We call it the Revolutionary War.

I don't like that. I like the war for independence. You know, was George Washington a revolutionary? Some say yes. But, you know, that's who

Glenn Beck takes his cues from. He thinks it's people like Jefferson and Washington and Franklin and and Madison and John Dickinson and all the rest.

So they were they revolutionaries? I don't think not in the leftist understanding of what a revolutionary is, someone who tears down the social order, the fabric of society to remake it into a more egalitarian place that they believe in a hierarchy.

You know, they, you know, a lot much is made of them not having a king. Washington become a king.

That's true. They still, though, kept intact a sense of hierarchy. There is still especially in Virginia, there is still a aristocratic class.

Jefferson believed in a natural aristocracy and that the best would sort of rise to the top.

See how that's working out. But they were hierarchical thinkers. They were really the last of the medieval men, to be honest with you, in a way.

And they were not revolutionaries in the sense that we think of revolutionaries today. And conservatives really never have been.

Do you think those who in the South who separated from the North were revolutionaries? In fact, I think a better argument could be made that those who invaded them were more in line with revolutionary thinking, who suspended habeas corpus and violated the

Constitution in that sense, who who came up with the proposition nation as a justification for war measures that that wasn't those who separated, you know, who came up with a lot of the things that, you know, today,

I suppose the we're still dealing with to some extent regarding the deep state.

Some people trace it back to the Grant administration. Some people trace it back to the Lincoln administration. I mean, a lot of the origin of these things started then.

So I just I have a hard time with this idea that just because you want to get away from the evil that is emanating from the center that seeks to enslave your family to to evil, which is really what it is.

I mean, we read in scripture about being slaves to sin, and that's exactly what this does. It not only makes evil accessible, but it makes it celebrated so that in some circumstances you're not allowed to or at least there's consequences if you don't celebrate it just because you want to get away from that and set up some kind of a political barrier to that, seek maybe political autonomy in a way that doesn't make you revolutionary.

That actually makes you more of a traditionalist. The revolutionaries, if there is a war that happened, would be the ones invading you. And so Glenn Beck's got it all backwards.

When you wake up, you start seeing, wow, this doesn't work.

Well, what doesn't work? The Constitution or the people who are ignoring it.

All right. Well, the people who are ignoring it, of course, doesn't work. But this is actually silly if you think about it.

You know, the Constitution. What's the role? What's the purpose of a constitution? It by definition, a constitution is supposed to bind people.

In fact, Jefferson said to to bind man or to bind authority with the chains of the

Constitution. I believe it was Jefferson. That's the purpose of a constitution. So if people are ignoring it flagrantly, then the

Constitution is not working by definition. And so if the Constitution's it's implied in if you think that the people ignoring it are the problem and not the

Constitution, then you also have to realize that the fact that they're ignoring it means the

Constitution is not being applied and it no longer it's not worth the paper it's written on.

If that's the case, we have I think we have a new constitution. And I think that that's abundantly clear in the

Civil Rights Act and laws and policies since the Civil Rights Act.

And there's a good book on that. I can never remember the name of the book. I wish. And I read it not too long ago.

I'm going to look for it real quick. Well, it's not coming up with my my search,

I'll I will let people know as we get into the podcast what the name of that book is that makes the argument essentially that we have already we are already post -constitutional and the

Civil Rights Act were really the indicators of that and violating especially rights to property and association.

So let's look at the other video here, this is from Eric Erickson is what he had to say recently.

Is some weird movement happening within conservatism where a lot of people who were conservative suddenly aren't and they don't want to give up the name conservative.

They want to redefine what conservatism is. And I think that's a bad thing. All right, let's stop right there real quick.

It's the Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell, Age of Entitlement, Christopher Caldwell, a must read. Now, what

Eric Erickson just said is that there's a group of conservatives. So Glenn Beck was reacting to something that he's concerned with, people who want to separate people who want to have a national divorce.

You know what Marjorie Taylor Greene said? And then you have Eric Erickson saying that there's this group that he's very concerned with, that they're not really conservatives, they're they're they're fake conservatives.

You know, he's the real thing, apparently. But there's these fake conservatives that are rising up. And, you know, why aren't they conservative?

Well, he'll explain. Limited government and free markets are a good thing, and yet we have a number of people at conservative think tanks in Washington, D .C.

now who want government control. They want their government to control. Now, I need you to understand the problem here.

If you limit the size and scope of the federal government, it makes it harder for big government to do things.

If instead you decide that you want to be in charge of the government and use the government for your purposes, you're going to set precedents that the other side will use when they come to power.

And ultimately, there's no such thing as a permanent political majority in the United States of America.

Let's just stop right there real quick and talk about what he already just said. So he mentioned free markets and limited government is that these are conservative trademarks and these are good things.

And I could go with him on that to say that, you know, government, the best government is the government that's the smallest and the most local because there's accountability there.

That's the reason. Now, if you had people with good character at the top, you could have governments that are bigger.

That would be OK. It's just the problem is when they make a mistake, everyone suffers and they're not as accountable.

And so, you know, what's the famous statement? Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. And so very few people are capable of wielding that kind of power with the character that goes along with it.

Of course, when Jesus comes, he's going to be able to do that. And we've seen leaders in history that have been able to do that kind of thing.

George Washington actually was they wanted to make him king and he refused to do it, which showed tremendous character.

But he could have really had whatever he wanted. He has so much respect. And so you want people like that. You want leaders like that now.

What he's talking about here, I think, has literal bearing in reality just because conservatives talk this way.

But what's inevitably what happens? The conservatives get into power and then they maintain generally the government still expands under them, but just not as fast.

And they with the intent of they want to slow it down and that kind of thing. But generally speaking, the government still tends to grow.

Why is that? Well, it's complicated. But the managerial revolution, the deep state have a lot to do with that. So so you have all these managers that run around and their best interest is to secure their job for themselves and to take money from the government trough.

And that's what they do. And conservatives for a long time have been reluctant to use their power, to wield their power, to punish their enemies and to reward their friends.

They don't want to do that because that's what the left does. And when the left gets into power, they could care less about what the rule of law actually says.

They're just going to do what they're going to do as much as they can get away with. They're going to get away with. And so the executive grows, even the power of the legislature, and they've all grown to a certain extent.

I say the legislature has lost, I guess, certain powers. They seem to be incapable of fire or of impeaching a judge.

There are certain things that make the legislature weaker and the executive stronger and the courts stronger. But, you know, all that to say, there's very little of what

Eric Erickson is describing here in actual, in the wild. You know, in theory, it sounds good. But how much of this have you actually seen in reality where conservatives get in there and they shrink the government and they shrink and they, you know, make it so that the government is less likely to be used as a weapon against them when the next administration comes into office?

It just doesn't happen. The government is used by the next leftist, more administration, and it's wielded to, again, reward friends and punish enemies and the full strength of the power of the government as much as possible is used.

Even Biden this year or last year, hiring all these IRS agents and harassing, we saw this with Obama, you know, years after his presidency, we found out how he was using the

IRS to harass his political enemies. This is what they do. So this is an unfounded fear that Eric Erickson has.

It's like, well, if you put, you know, big if you actually use your power to do conservative things to you wield it, then you're going to put a tool in the hands of the left.

Well, the left already has a tool. The left started using it against you. You're under attack. This is the reality on the ground. This is how most

Americans feel. This is what they see when they're filling up their gas tanks and they see what how far their dollars go.

This is what they see when their kids come home from school and tell them all the horrible things that they learn. This is what unfortunately some are experiencing when they live in high crime areas and areas that are becoming high crime because of the importation of people from other places in the world.

I mean, this is what's going on in the wild and they want someone to stop it. They want it to end.

They don't they don't the means is not a secondary. They want it to end. If the local government is not going to do that, they just want to get away.

They want to put an end to the things that are afflicting their families. So Eric Erickson sees this as I think this is what he's reacting to.

He sees this as a problem. These and is it the same group Glenn Beck is talking about? It might be there or there may be some overlap there.

There certainly, I think, would be some overlap. You know, these are people who want to.

He said he mentioned think tanks in D .C. who want to use the power of the government. That's called being in the government.

That's called working in the government. By definition, that is what the government does. The government is an institution of power.

If you are elected into a government position, you wield power. That's that's what you do by definition.

OK, there's this naive sense that some of these classic liberal types like Eric Erickson have.

It seems that that we are apolitical, that you can get into office and not wield power.

There's a lot of Christians have bought into this. How often do you hear that it's wrong to try to seek the good according to Christianity or to seek the good for Christians?

Why using power because power is bad. Power is evil. We're allergic to it.

And that's frankly what being in authority is. It is to wield power. You don't escape that by you can't be in a position and not wield power.

And perhaps this is part of the problem with feckless dads and husbands, as well as pastors who can't seem to control the wolves in their own congregation because or the sheep, for that matter, because they're they have such a bedside manner and they're so therapeutic they given up the staff that they should have in their hands for punishing.

It's because there's no authority there. And the same thing in political office. The conservatives are just there.

So many of them are meek and mild and they don't want to do anything. Not meek, not even the word. They're weak and mild. So, yes,

Eric Erickson, we need more people who pursue power in government offices, more people who seek the good and are willing to sacrifice to implement it, more people who are willing to punish evil and to reward good.

That's kind of the basic job description that God gives to governing officials to punish evil, promote good.

And that requires what power requires power. So if you grow the government for your purposes and set the precedents of that growth, when you're out of power and the people you don't like are in power, they're going to use your precedents and the government you grew and they're going to use it against you.

Sadly, some conservative groups in Washington, D .C., have to say this is this is a scare tactic.

So if you use power against the opposing side, then they're going to just use that power back.

Do you think they're going to honor this gentleman's agreement that the Democrats somehow will not use their power? They will exercise great self -restraint and not use power because they we have a gentleman's agreement.

No, those days are over. Those days are over. Good luck to elections that aren't contested.

Good luck to, you know, so long to the candidates that I remember when

I was a kid who tried to appeal to all Americans by saying that they were going to be bipartisan.

That doesn't exist anymore. And it's not because it's people think it can go back into existence if we just will it into existence.

It's not that simple. There's differences that we have as Americans that are, frankly, unable to be rectified in the by political compromises.

To be in politics in a democratic process is to compromise. But we're to the point where we have so mutually exclusive views, there's no way to compromise.

So on some things, on very fundamental, important things. So with that being said, what option is there?

I mean, he's not being specific, but, you know, you talk about think tanks, but is he talking about, you know, President Trump gets in there, he's going to use the executive power to crush,

I don't know, universities or to crush the media or to crush his political opponents in some way.

Well, this is what Biden's doing. This is what the left does. Should you know, if these are we going to be hamstrung by the

Constitution, we're going to put our hands behind our backs when the Democrats violate it all the time.

But we're going to be honorable and we're going to fight with that disadvantage. This is an honest question. This gets into Glenn Beck's question as well, to some extent, is, you know, to what extent do we recognize that this document is not the actual

Constitution that's governing us now? There's a new unwritten maybe it's written in moral laws and the legal code, but we have a somewhat of an unwritten

Constitution that's governing us. And the Constitution that we have written down is more like the King of England.

You know, it's there's not a lot of authority. It has there's some heritage there.

It's important in that sense. But it's we've left it. I think coming to terms with that is what make is the difference between Eric Erickson, Glenn Beck and the people that they're they're so concerned about.

They want to they have this naive understanding that the Constitution is still in effect. We just if we just get back to it, that's the solution.

It's always the solution. Doesn't matter how bad things get. We always go back to the Constitution. And it's like that train left a long time ago.

You just you didn't notice it leaving. Apparently, you still think it's sitting there in the station and it's not.

It's been gone for quite some time. And if you ever wanted to get back to a point where many of those things that you treasure in that document are prized again, you would have to wield a considerable amount of power to make that happen.

That's the reality. The Democrats aren't just going to wake up and say, oh, yeah, yeah, we'll we'll play by the rules if you'll play by the rules that that doesn't exist.

You're dealing with, you know, two Americas. People react against that and say, how can there be two

Americas? There just are. It's not an option. It's not I'm not saying I'm in favor of it. I don't want it.

I'm not saying I want to be there to be more balkanization. I'm just saying that's that's what that's what is. That's the reality.

You just have to deal with the reality on the ground. Decided that the federal government can set about some sort of justly ordered society.

Your view of a justly ordered society, I assure you, is completely different from the view of pro transgender progressives who want a justly ordered society that is going to come after you for not supporting transgenderism.

And yet some of these conservative groups have decided they're going to grow government to justly order society.

And you do need to understand you're not going to hold on to power in this country forever. Short of abandoning this country, short of abandoning the

American Republic as it currently exists, which I think is the subtle undercurrent of some of these guys.

They're not really fans of the American Republican, would like to seize power and hold power. The American Republic, which

American Republic, 1776, 1787, 1860.

1912. 1945, what are we talking about here?

Post -civil rights America before that. It's been incremental, but we've long left hard.

There's hardly a semblance. There's we have we have heritage. We can we have things we can look back on.

We have things that we can trace that we see, OK, you know what the founders did affects us as far as living under the rules and in the kind of society that they set up their constitution for.

We're not there. It was a constitution. If you could keep it, we couldn't keep it.

That's where we are. I'm not saying that because I want again. I'm saying that because that's reality. That's that's just where we are.

With all the unfunded mandates, with all the the deep state mechanisms that violate the Constitution are not in accordance with the 10th

Amendment and federalism and separation of powers, but the way that the executive has expanded, the executive orders have expanded with the way the

Supreme Court essentially makes law when it suits them. There's just so much there's just so much, and it's it's beyond,

I think, I mean, even in a local town, if you if you became the mayor of a local town, you're required by federal law to make sure if you have a project, it's funded by a union or you outsource, you hire a union, pay prevailing union wage.

You know, there's all these regulations. It's crazy. The federal government is has its hands in everything, the national general government.

So what is Eric Erickson talking about? If he's dispending the status quo, then maybe he's the one that doesn't like the

Republic. You know, I think it's the motivation of people who want to change the paradigm because they realize it's not working and they want to take a look at some alternative political options.

They are the kind of people who actually do value the Republic as founded, many of them.

And they realize we're not there and there's no way to bring it back under the current mechanisms. And this is what

I think Eric Erickson is totally missing. So hypothetically, if Donald Trump, let's say, wants to expand the executive in some way,

I know that was a fear people have, but I've never seen any policy move policy decision there. I don't know what the policy would be then.

You know, I could see in some ways this would be like the Protestant Franco thing.

Right. Even though Trump's not he's not an Orthodox Christian, but, you know, wielding power to stop a revolution, to stop the stage for cancer, to realize that that's the thing that's going to kill you.

What's the big threat here? Is it conservatives ever so lightly in their cowardice, expanding the government so the left can somehow come and use those tools?

Or is the left here and now violating all the norms and rules anyway to make war on the people that they deem as enemies?

And how bad of a problem is it? Is it is it stage four cancer? Is this the thing that's killing us or going to kill us?

Or is this something we can work out? I think Eric Erickson and Glenn Beck are the ones living in a pipe dream.

And most Gen Z people and some millennials seem to know this more because they're the ones that are starting out life with an extreme disadvantage compared to their parents.

They can't afford homes. They can't get good jobs. They the things that they want in life are already out of reach for them.

And and that's just the economic stuff. Forget about, you know, where their kids are going to be going to school and that kind of thing.

So I think they realize that in order to live for the sake of the good, the common good for everyone, including themselves, there needs to be some kind of a different approach here than the same old, same old, which is the pendulum swings.

But the swing is seems to only be in one direction and it keeps pushing in that one direction left.

My left, I guess you're right, but my left. And that's that's what Eric Erickson and Glenn Beck, I think, in a sense, are defending when they don't want to look at unconventional ideas.

You have to look at them. Our founding fathers looked at them and that's how we got the United States in the first place. So from Glenn Beck, you have a religious argument that you can't abandon the sacred scrolls.

You can't abandon the sacred land. It must be 50 states altogether. It must look this certain way.

And if you do, you're some kind of like a heretic against America. And from Eric Erickson's view that you're just you're apparently hopelessly naive and you're not a conservative.

That's the heretic part. You're abandoning conservatism if you want to wield, use power and wield power in the government.

I think that probably what they're reacting to is the rise of maybe some more genuine conservatives, to be quite honest with you, or people who are more resemble the paleo conservatives, the old right, the pre

New Deal conservatives. And they they have a value system that's not it's not a

Cold War relic, which I think Glenn Beck and Eric Erickson's value system is more a product of the

Cold War. And it's an old paradigm. It's not going to not going to cut the mustard anymore. So that's my opinion.

And this was really just a podcast to give you my opinion on that particular subject. I hope that is helpful for you just to think through things.