Five Lessons from Ken Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution for the Present Moment

by James E. Fleming and Linda C. McClain

Abstract

Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, a New York Times bestseller, has the subtitle, “Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” Ken Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism (2019) provides at least twenty lessons from the second half of the Twentieth Century about the development of conservative constitutional thought and activism. Although conservatism has changed in many ways since the 1954-1980 period on which Kersch’s book focuses, these lessons are relevant for understanding the present political moment, filled with concerns that the U.S., during the second Trump Administration, is lurching toward tyranny, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. Kersch’s book highlights that a recurring refrain by conservative thought-makers and politicians during their “wilderness years,” or “postwar liberalism’s heyday between 1954 and 1980,” was that conservatism’s enemies—including not only “godless communism,” moral relativism, and secularism, but also liberalism, liberal “living” constitutionalism, and a Supreme Court not guided by natural law or Christianity—were leading the U.S. toward tyranny, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. As his subtitle indicates, conservatives envisioned constitutional restoration, to be ushered in when Republicans returned to political power and control of the judiciary. This essay sketches five lessons from Kersch’s book.