Liberalism is the gardener that uses pesticides

...according to J.D. Vance

There’s this funny way in which nature and God have collapsed in our present moment. If you actually read what certain right-wing religious people write, you’ll find very few references to God and hundreds to Nature.

I’m reading a new book from the Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts called Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. He’s super Catholic, but the first chapter of the book isn’t like, “We need to be more godly,” but rather, “The Conspiracy Against Nature.”

The foreword to the book was written by J.D. Vance—a big get! How does Vance explain the kind of conservatism that Roberts’ book is about?

Here’s an analogy I sometimes use to articulate what the previous generation of conservatives got right and wrong. Imagine a well-maintained garden in a patch of sunlight. It has some imperfections, of course, and many weeds. The very thing that makes it attractive for the things we try to cultivate makes it attractive for the things we don’t. In an effort to eliminate the bad, a well meaning gardener treats the garden with a chemical solution. This kills many of the weeds, but it also kills many of the good things. Undeterred, the gardener keeps adding the solution. Eventually, the soil is inhospitable.

In this analogy, modern liberalism is the gardener, the garden is our country, and the voices discouraging the gardener were conservatives. We were right, of course: in an effort to correct problems—some real, some imagined—we made a lot of mistakes as a country in the 1960s and 1970s.

But to bring the garden back to health, it is not enough to undo the mistakes of the past. The garden needs not just to stop adding a terrible solution, though it does need that. It needs to be recultivated. The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems—we are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach. As Kevin Roberts writes, “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.