Dawn's Early Light:
Taking Back Washington to Save America
by kevin d. roberts
broadside, 304 pages, $32
When Kevin Roberts became president of the Heritage Foundation in 2021, he set out to harmonize one of American conservatism’s flagship institutions with the electoral consequences of 2016. He steadily moved the think tank away from the old conservative fusionism and toward the conservative populism that voters wanted.
Roberts also had the experience to tap into that populism’s deeper insights. A native Cajun, he had in his youth organized a campaign event for Patrick Buchanan’s insurgent run against George H. W. Bush. Back in 1992, Buchanan raised the alarm about how American elites, in both major parties, were drawing from progressive politics to destroy America’s culture, people, and way of life. Cajuns understood the danger well. Throughout the twentieth century, their French language and Catholic religion had been targeted for destruction by elites demanding deracinated homogeneity. The end of the Cold War, Buchanan argued, gave elites the opportunity to make the strategy a national one. “No region in the country delivered a higher percentage of votes for Buchanan in the 1992 election than did Acadiana,” writes Roberts. “We knew exactly what he was talking about. It just took the rest of the country thirty years to catch up.”
Though Roberts sounds several populist-Buchananite notes—taking aim at elites, “the uniparty,” and the “wax-museum conservatives” who cling to moribund institutions—his argument is original and forward-looking. Like other populists, he wants to wield political power in support of a healthy civil society and thriving families. At the same time, he outlines a new conservative fusionism that celebrates not just the power of the state, but the power of technology.
Conservatives are often skeptical of technological enthusiasms. So Roberts draws his readers in with high metaphysical drama. Urging us to look beyond contemporary ideological conflicts, he argues that we are locked in a much more fundamental battle over how we relate to nature. On one side stands “the party of Creation,” the defenders of “the God-given natural order.” On the other side stands “the party of Destruction,” the revolutionaries engaged in a “conspiracy against nature.” For the former, the existing order is good. Human flourishing means working with, not against, our essential nature. For the latter, the existing order is a prison. Our physical bodies, our families, our religion, and our culture are limits from which we need to be liberated. The battle is a spiritual one, requiring us to wrestle with our deepest temptations. We have allowed the destructive, emancipatory way of thinking to corrupt us; thus, “the first enemy we must face in our crusade to take back our country is within ourselves.” Such arguments have long been the fare of intellectual conservatism. But Roberts’s framing is curious. Why describe the party of tradition as the party of Creation? Why do we need to create, and who are the creators that Roberts has in mind?
In Roberts’s telling, we need this new vocabulary because of how bad things really are. Exhortations to preserve tradition work only where there is a healthy tradition to preserve. This is no longer the case. Appeals to defend tradition and society—the existing order—end up defending the very social sicknesses conservatives should oppose. Today’s conservatives enforce the standards set by yesterday’s revolutionaries. Introducing a combative metaphor worthy of post-2016 politics, Roberts argues that we need to fight “fire with fire,” vowing to roll back the revolutionary left, defeat the “woke mind virus,” and comprehensively renew America in a way the old conservatism cannot.
What’s important here is not the combative rhetoric but how Roberts portrays the new political divide. On one side stand the uniparty elites, “wax museum conservatives,” and leftists. They are allies of stagnation, sterility, and decadence, allies of the forces of destruction. “Mired in nostalgia,” they prefer to expend their energies on old ideas, reveries, and grievances rather than look ahead. Against them stand those who believe that real change, renewal, and progress—creation—are possible.
On the basis of that demarcation, Roberts redefines the conservative mind. It must be future-oriented, improving material contingencies to its advantage. When progress solidifies the permanent things, it is not the enemy. The real enemy is those who encourage and defend decadence. Roberts’s discussion of the classical and Christian education movement illustrates this dynamic. One of the movement’s most celebrated figures, the Catholic traditionalist John Senior, once argued that progressives were not actually in favor of progress. “The strongest reactionary force impeding progress is the cult of progress itself,” said Senior, “which, cutting us off from our roots, makes growth impossible and choice unnecessary.” For the classical education movement to succeed, Christians had to shake off the dust of corrupt institutions, then choose where and how to build new ones, effecting the progress in education that the old institutions and habits prevented.
While urging conservatives to cultivate a more futurist mindset, Roberts also recasts conservatism to appeal to futurists. Conservatives and futurists are now on the same side, trying to rekindle growth and innovation against elites opposed to it. This partnership is not just a temporary tactical alliance against woke excesses. Pundits keep railing against wokeism, but Roberts probes deeper, adopting a different characterization of America’s sickness. “Wokeness isn’t the real problem,” he declares. A “total loss of corporate vision and innovation, a turn to decadence and corporate bloat—that is the real threat to our way of life.” The whole shape of centralized corporate life has paralyzed American vitality. (Drawing from the economist Joseph Schumpeter, Roberts argues that this is what the “socialism” dreaded by conservatives really is: centralized managerialism.) In managerial America, the innovators are blocked by calls for “sustainability,” which express fear of innovation as too disruptive and too risky, and are effectively calls for stagnation. Technological progress has stalled. Consequently, the technologically creative classes, once content to side with the uniparty in politics, have been stifled. The techno-futurists are restless and ready to give conservatism a second look.
When Roberts introduces Ronald Reagan, he refashions the Gipper to meet the aspirations of this techno-futurist counter-elite. Reagan is not the anti-government Cold War hero of fusionist fame. Nor is he the “Great Communicator” shifting public opinion in culturally conservative directions. Instead, he appears as an enthusiast for space exploration. Roberts outlines at length Reagan’s efforts to revive the U.S. space program and popularize the return to space as part of a shared national project.
We see the same kind of refashioning when Roberts discusses conservative family policy. This is one of the book’s most eloquent sections, and its most personal one, as Roberts endured family breakdown as a child. Roberts’s goal is unabashedly paleoconservative: He wants to make “a middle-class lifestyle available to every hardworking American family on a single-breadwinner income,” thus making it easier for mothers to spend more time at home with their children. Yet here, too, Roberts intertwines his traditionalism with his goal of rebooting technological progress. Making this material life possible requires achieving the “abundance agenda,” with which we “pull every plausible lever” in order to achieve pro-family material conditions.
This agenda covers everything from promoting cheaper energy to expanding affordable housing, working for faster internet to enable parents to work at home, and relearning how to build basic infrastructure across the United States. (Since 1970, construction productivity has declined by 40 percent.) If conservatives want to help normal people raise a family on one income, they need to reconcile with techno-futurists and support the innovation that will make all these goals attainable.
Conversely, the techno-futurists need to grasp that innovation requires this comprehensive pro-family orientation. It’s young people who innovate, not old people. America’s rapidly falling fertility rate indicates a demographic pyramid that will soon be in desperate need of younger people—more children—to make abundance possible. Harnessing technological power to the cause of the family is key, Roberts argues. With this goal in view, there will be a reason to restart innovation, as large, healthy families require material abundance. Large families will in turn drive further innovation and produce further abundance. The creative classes will preside over a generation or more of innovation and progress. The paradox Roberts ably outlines is that only paleoconservatism—support for the family, for other permanent things, and for the creation of life itself—delivers the innovation that the uniparty blocks.
Yet the most spiritual appeal Roberts makes to the technologically creative classes is his adoption of their vision of America. It is in California that the future of America stands or falls. Roberts invokes the legend of the West: In that legend, California represented the American spirit because it captured the frontier mindset of risk-taking for sake of ever more ambitious visions. Even after the West was settled, California represented a spirit of daring, a determination to will and achieve more. A desire for further technological innovation manifested itself throughout California’s history. “Deeper, farther, higher: that’s California.” As both conservatives and frustrated technological entrepreneurs know, however, this California has disappeared. It’s not just the crippling regulatory environment; it’s a corporate and political form that punishes creativity, turning Californians—and all Americans—into fearful people who prefer convenience, safetyism, and the “siren song of immaturity.” Here Roberts alights on some more traditional conservative themes concerning the abuse of state power.
But he also celebrates the glimmers of hope—such as the achievements of Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, who created a successful national defense company in a sector notorious for its bureaucratic sclerosis. Again, Roberts weaves together the projects of paleoconservatives and techno-futurists, intertwining their interests and ambitions in order to sketch their common cause in establishing a better political order and more energetic future.
Dawn’s Early Light was written before the techno-futurist counter-elite began endorsing Donald Trump, so Roberts deserves credit for spotting the decisive electoral dynamic of 2024. He correctly anticipated the contours and energy of the new paleofuturist fusionism. That’s a tremendous accomplishment.
But any fusionist movement has its internal conflicts, and on the evidence of this book, paleofuturism has a big one. The conviction that abundance will return to America allows exponents to overlook the tension between paleoconservatism and techno-futurism. Everyone will thrive and get along—as long as progress gets going again.
But the darker sections of the book suggest that not all the visions of abundance in play are good. In rendering visible the importance of technological power to family formation, Roberts includes an incisive argument against contraceptive technologies, which “shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family.” IVF, as Roberts argues, is a false promise of fertility, and the contraceptive pill is a sheer social calamity. Roberts argues that the technological reinforcement of fertility is a material and spiritual dead end. It’s a tactful but powerful argument, made in ecumenical language that goes beyond the traditional pro-life framing. Whether it can convince enough of the techno-futurists is an open question. In this new fusionism, there is, dare one say, a Faustian bargain. The Californian spirit of “deeper, farther, higher”—no limits—enhances the allure of contraceptive technologies. It promises control over nature so that one can have it all—profession and pram—exactly when and how one wants. Motherhood can be delayed and then divided among the genetic mother, “caretaker,” and even surrogate. Because the promise of control is so alluring, some Republican pro-life stalwarts are now pushing for expanded provision of IVF. They don’t want to tell their voters that they can’t have it all.
The risk is that the technologists will frame the future—and their framing is enticing. As couples push child-rearing later in order to pursue professional success, dividing motherhood up into parts seems like the perfect way to boost the birthrate while also boosting innovation. Just as we’re tempted to rely on younger, high-skilled immigrants to fortify the demographic pyramid, so too we are tempted to take technological shortcuts to natalism. Yet the fundamental demarcation here cannot be ignored. As is the case with mass immigration, the IVF question shows that the paleoconservative imagination is not the same as the technologist’s vision. When paleoconservatives look at persons and nations, they see different kinds of substantial unities, undivided wholes. When technologists look at persons and nations, they see parts to analyze, break apart, and replace. As Roberts himself puts it in a slightly different context, both assisted reproductive technologies and mass immigration treat “immigrants and natives as interchangeable replacement parts.”
Nor are all visions of abundance tenable. Roberts acknowledges that the American empire is overstretched: All the brilliance of Anduril cannot make up for America’s military and commercial shipbuilding deficit. Faustian strength of will cannot overcome these material limitations. Over the coming years, America will draw back its overseas commitments or enter more conflicts it cannot win. This state of affairs will require brutal negotiations with America’s rivals, its allies, and the domestic boosters of its military–industrial complex and security state. So even as a new fusionist elite imagines a golden techno-industrial age, it must also haul down flags around the world and abandon unfeasible ambitions.
Doing both at once will be a delicate balancing act, given how much the obstinate old elite, as well as the techno-futurist counter-elite, associate America’s greatness with its superpower status. This counter-elite may want more overseas adventures than the paleoconservatives are prepared to endure. The danger is that the technologically creative classes will return to the old elite, opting for a purer progressive “enlargement” than Roberts’s paleoconservatism can offer. This seems to be in large part what happened to conservatives in the 1990s, when they spurned Buchanan and accepted the shift from “containment” to “enlargement,” turning America from an empire of necessity to an empire of choice.
Another, darker possibility, which Roberts doesn’t discuss, is that we may be entering a world of scarcity, in which innovation will advance at two speeds. In such a world, actual innovation happens only among the few. For the rest of the nation, progress stalls. Living standards erode, and the population falls back into a more primitive way of life. The most disturbing thing here isn’t the inequality—it’s that inequality might be necessary if we want innovation. A servant class gives the aristocrats time to innovate. There are historical precedents. In the eighteenth century, the French monarchy and aristocracy were not reactionary traditionalists but were obsessed with progress, using the leisure and resources they had gleaned off the peasantry and bourgeoisie to sponsor scientific developments. In the nineteenth century, Western industrialization went hand-in-hand with the deindustrialization of the rest of the world. This is what seems to be happening around the globe right now. The World Bank has described the “middle-income trap,” wherein many of the countries that contain the material resources that keep the digital age going (coltan and tin, for instance) can advance no further up the developmental ladder, while rich countries continue prospering.
Here, too, the negotiations might be more brutal than Roberts’s fusionism acknowledges. If one wants to scratch the surface, try bringing up the moral significance of IQ differences to the traditional base of the Republican Party—evangelical Christians—and then to Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs. Then compare the answers. Paleofusionism could give way to a Nietzschean-inflected archeofuturism.
One final possibility is the gloomiest of all. What if the American frontier has forever closed? Roberts’s own argument might imply as much. His analysis of America’s turn to corporate managerialism draws from Schumpeter. Yet for Schumpeter, managerial centralization and the subsequent abolition of the entrepreneurial spirit is inevitable. The will to innovate leads to centralized, big businesses. They are often more efficient, mastering complex global supply chains. But they intensify the management practices that poison society and block creativity, making entrepreneurs rare. From this perspective, modern California looks like Schumpeter’s predictions were correct. Those who tie the frontier spirit to California, then, give American history a tragic rather than a hopeful arc. The 1962 film How the West Was Won, one of the last great aesthetic exertions of American postwar optimism, concludes with a magnificent panorama of San Francisco. At the time, that conclusion seemed ennobling: After all the struggles and sacrifices the film portrays, this is the final fruit of America! But that scene has not aged well. If contemporary San Francisco really is the culmination of America, then America ends with a whimper, in a city of stagnation, mediocre elites, and widespread destitution.
Of course, that idea outrages many Americans. In that respect, Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris, a product of San Francisco, is perhaps more spiritually significant than his victory over Clinton. But empirically, the idea that San Francisco represents the end of America is a tougher conclusion to resist. We’d have to show that decay is reversible. No one has risen yet to that challenge.
Nor does Roberts, who is wary of promising too much. Returning to his roots as an educator and teacher, he emphasizes that a new counter-elite will stand or fall not by its capacity to imagine abundance, but by its capacity to transmit an ethic of grateful piety. Roberts may write eloquently of cowboys, entrepreneurs, and the American innovative spirit, but his ultimate model is not an American one at all. Following the example of Aeneas, the conservative counter-elite will have to learn to temper its desires through love of family and nation, and to recognize its debts to those who came before. Then perhaps, like Aeneas, these new elites can find their way out of our burning institutions and lay the groundwork for the city of tomorrow—whether or not they live to see it.
Nathan Pinkoski is research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Politics.
