https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/01/if-you-dont-know-what-time-it-is-get-out-of-politics-now/
The defining political question of our time is this: “Do you know what time it is?”
The line, popularized by the Claremont Institute’s David Reaboi, succinctly captures the most essential of points: If you don’t understand the stakes, and how fraught the situation is — that the ruling class seeks total power, is closing in on it, and will stop at nothing to achieve it — you are unfit to lead. You ought to exit the playing field.
Knowing what time it is leads one to prioritize different ends and to pursue them using different means. Among those on the right, although more so in the chattering class than among activists, there appears to be a divide over the stakes inadvertently elucidated in some of the recent debates over national conservatism.
In the Wall Street Journal, Chris DeMuth and Matthew Continetti jousted over it. Continetti took issue with DeMuth’s argument endorsing national conservatism in part by claiming essentially that the movement captured so many schools of thought as to be incoherent, and that he favored his “conservatism without modification — constitutionalist, market-oriented and unapologetically American.”
I laid out what it is that unites national conservatives in a recent piece here at The Federalist — noting that a shared understanding of the stakes is inherent to the movement.
The idea that conservatism needs no modifier becomes questionable if conservatism — which has in many quarters focused on economic liberalism while ceding most everything else — is not conserving or doing everything it can to restore what it ought to in the face of a ruling class onslaught.
