Trump's triumph should show the way.

• Author: Arn, Larry P.
• Position: American Thought

"... The government has grown so large that it is a major factor in everything, including elections, and is in the position of taking on a will of its own. It is on the verge of being too big for private people to manage. This is the political crisis of our time.... [Pres. Donald] Trump has addressed this problem more directly than anyone since Ronald Reagan--in some ways, more than anyone including Reagan."

THE ASTONISHING political campaign of 2016 involved much debate about whether Donald Trump is a conservative. He was not always facile with the lingo of conservatism, and he pointed out once that he was seeking the nomination of the Republican, not the conservative, party. Yet, there is a lot we can learn from him about conservatism.

What is conservatism? It is a derivative term: it refers to something outside itself. We cannot conserve the present or the future, and the past, being full of contradiction, cannot be conserved entirely. In the past, one finds heroism and villainy; justice and injustice; freedom and slavery. Things in the past are like things in the present: they must be judged. Conservative people know this if they have any sense.

What then makes them conservative? It is the additional knowledge that things that have had a good reputation for a long time are more trustworthy than new things. This especially is true of original things. The very term principle refers to something that comes first; to change the principle of a thing is to change it into something else. Without the principle, the thing is lost.

If American conservatism means anything, then, it means the things found at the beginning of America, when it became a nation. The classics teach us that forming political bonds is natural to people, written in their nature, stemming from the divine gift they have of speech and reason. This means, in turn, that the Declaration of Independence, where the final causes of our nation are stated, and the Constitution, where the form of government is established, are the original things.

These documents were written by people who were friends and who understood the documents to pursue the same ends. Taken together, they are the longest surviving things of their kind and, under their domain, our country spread across a continent and became the strongest nation on Earth, the bastion of freedom. These documents do not appeal to all conservatives, but I argue that they should, both for their age and for their worthiness.

It follows then that, if Pres. Trump helps to conserve these things, he is a conservative in the sense that matters most to the republic of Americans. Will he? He will have a hard road. Today, the authority of these two documents is in decline for obvious reasons. In the academy, they are rejected as obsolete or evil, and this opinion has spread throughout the talking classes, most everywhere in education, journalism, and entertainment. It has spread widely and deeply into the law.

As a result, our government has swollen beyond recognition, and it is centralized to a degree unimagined in the Constitution. Laws now are made chiefly by regulatory agencies that combine in themselves all three powers of government. The popular, or elected, branches may overturn these regulations only when they unite to do so, and this is increasingly rare. So, every institution in society is in principle subject to comprehensive regulation. Every employer, every school, many clubs, and family life itself now are the subject of rules too complex for the lay person to grasp. These rules are not always enforced, nor can they be, but Americans sense that they better be looking over their shoulders, careful of what they say and do.

This has changed the way we live. Compliance increasingly replaces law-abidingness as the public goal. Laws, the Founders held, must be simple, few, and constant. Then we all may know what they are, live under them, and help to enforce them. This makes us equal--ruler and ruled. It means that we do not quail before the forces of the law. We are the forces of the law.

Compliance, by contrast, means adapting constantly to changing and complex instructions from central authorities, and it means the employment of specialists to interpret the regulations and make...