Can We Rise to the Occasion?

Someone joked this past week that for the first time in 2,500 years, Persia and Greece are dominating world news. But now, as then, the questions raised by Persia and Greece go beyond Persia and Greece.

Every serious conservative of any stripe has the sense that big issues are on the table in 2016. For example: not just different interpretations of constitutional law but the future of constitutional government itself; not just disputes about foreign policy choices but fundamental decisions about America's role in the world; not just the merits and demerits of various government programs but the size and scope and debility of our current welfare-state big government in general; not just line-drawing questions about particular liberties but the question of religious liberty and even liberty itself; not just worries about creeping political correctness but alarm about the soft (or not-so-soft) despotism in which leftist elites use mob-like tactics to enforce their views; not just the case for strengthening our military but the urgent need for a wholesale rebuilding; not just questions at the margins of family law but fundamental issues about the meaning and status of the family.

And more.

Given all that, does the debate we're seeing on the Hill and among the presidential candidates capture the urgency and match the magnitude of the moment? Does it do justice to the scale of ongoing troubles and the import of impending difficulties? No.

Does it ever? Did it in 1928 or 1932 or 1940? In 1980 or 1988? In 2000 or 2008? Crises at home and abroad were present or looming. A hard look back at those campaigns would show, we suspect, an awful lot of avoidance, distraction, silliness, even blindness.

Maybe that's the way it was, the way it is, the way it will always be. There are limits to democratic deliberation and campaign discourse. So perhaps one should temper one's expectations of congressional leaders and presidential candidates. Perhaps one resigns oneself to choosing a person judged capable of dealing with the big events, even if no candidate in the field is adequately addressing the current and looming challenges.

To be fair, the challenges are complicated. And it's not as if we conservatives outside the electoral process have entirely done our duty. No one thinker or set of thinkers, no one magazine or journal, has melded together the elements of truth in the libertarian critique of big government, the originalist critique of constitutional law, the Tocquevillean critique of the nanny state, the Churchillian critique of our foreign policy weakness, the manly critique of our cultural decadence, the Burkean critique of "progressivism," and the Millian critique of political correctness. We lack a fully coherent and comprehensive critique of the moment—to say nothing of a comprehensively charted path forward.

So the conservative movement is entitled to complain about the candidates among whom we'll choose. But the candidates may also be entitled to complain that the idea-mongering community is failing them. What about our responsibility and obligation? It would be great if at least one of our candidates could rise to the level of Ronald Reagan. But it would also be great if we could rise to the level of Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol and Bob Bartley, of Jeane Kirkpatrick and Midge Decter and Phyllis Schlafly, of Milton Friedman and James Q. Wilson and Walter Berns.

The good news is their work is accessible to us. So is the work of the thinkers on whom they in turn depended—of Leo Strauss and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, of C.?S. Lewis and Friedrich Hayek, and so many more.

The candidates need to rise to the moment. So do we.

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William Kristol is editor of The Weekly Standard, which, together with Fred Barnes and John Podhoretz, he founded in 1995. Kristol regularly appears on Fox News Sunday and on the Fox News Channel.