The Right, currently, is led by an ebonics-butchering “hip hop conservative,” a recovering OxyContin addict, and a fourteen-year-old. This is not a sitcom; instead, it is American Democracy, the best entertainment that $2.9 trillion can buy. Jane’s Law — “The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.” — holds just as true as it ever did.

By now, you ought to know the lonesome ballad of Steele and Limbaugh; suffice to say, the Phoenix is still writhing in its ashes, not quite emergent. But Mr. Krohn is something genuinely new — a fourteen year old pundit, a middle schooler fielding radio show interviews from the back of the car on his mom’s cellphone:

Why just that morning, his mother, Marla Krohn, marveled, a staff member for a potential candidate for Georgia governor asked for a meeting with Jonathan. In her gentle drawl, Mrs. Krohn said cautiously, “I’m not sure I’m a supporter of his.”

“Neither am I,” Jonathan piped in.

“But I’m a voter,” Mrs. Krohn reminded him firmly.

Jonathan retorted, “Now that I’m a political pundit, I have the ability to influence people. I have to think about it!”

But first, his mother reminded him, he had some homework to finish.

The first reaction might be “prodigy,” but it checks itself; prodigious at what? What talent has he demonstrated? Mr. Krohn’s meteoric rise to accolades reveals the world of punditry for what it is — an act. Who, after all, is to say that Sean Hannity knows more than Jonathan Krohn? Mr. Krohn happens to be the Shirley Temple of this strange world. Messrs. Hannity, Moore, Limbaugh, and Franken do not speak with the voice of experience; they yell with the fervor of the Initiate. And we have always had Child Gods in our midst, for yea, verily I speak unto you: “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of Heaven.”

He still has the zeal of a missionary. His voice rising to a wobbly squeak, he grabs any opening to press the cause. “Barack Obama is the most left-wing president in my lifetime,” he said.

Mr. Krohn buried his face in his hands. “Oh, Jonathan,” he sighed.

What do we say to the Krohns, the parents who are the true saints here? All we can do is hope that they have read their Fitzgerald:

Back at the hospital Mr. Button entered the nursery and almost threw the package at his son. “Here’s your clothes,” he snapped out.

The old man untied the package and viewed the contents with a quizzical eye.

“They look sort of funny to me,” he complained, “I don’t want to be made a monkey of——”

“You’ve made a monkey of me!” retorted Mr. Button fiercely. “Never you mind how funny you look. Put them on—or I’ll—or I’ll spank you.” He swallowed uneasily at the penultimate word, feeling nevertheless that it was the proper thing to say.

“All right, father”—this with a grotesque simulation of filial respect—”you’ve lived longer; you know best. Just as you say.”

In one of the more infamous (and, in all likelihood, forgotten) moments of the Republican primary campaign, three of the eight candidates in a May debate in 2007 raised their hands to assert that they did not believe in evolution. Critics derided the question as poorly formulated and defined, but the moment was widely pounced upon as vindication of the know-nothingism of the GOP, a belief further compounded by a Gallup poll finding that 68 percent of Republicans did not believe in evolution. For conservatives who aim for an intellectual high ground, this was not a promising scene.

Yet it was not always this way. After all, the public debate over the landmark “Scopes Monkey Trial” in 1925 pitted the furious rhetoric of creationist William Jennings Bryan (a populist Democrat, a la John Edwards) against evolution’s defender H.L. Mencken (a democracy-mocking member of the Old Right). In the modern day, some conservative defenders of evolution have become more bold — they argue that not only is evolution compatible with conservatism, but the principles of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species underlie many of the basic assumptions governing conservative thought.

This position has been asserted most vocally by Larry Anhart, who wrote a book entitled Darwinian Conservatism in 2005. “Conservatives need Charles Darwin,” he boldly asserts in the introduction. Citing the works of such luminaries as Hayek, Burke, and Russell Kirk, he backs his thesis that conservatives need Darwin “because a Darwinian science of human nature support conservatives in their realist view of human imperfectibility and their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in nature, custom, and prudence.”

The similarities between Darwin’s biological thought and conservatism’s political thought are uncanny. Changes in the system arise slowly, and through an unregulated process of trial and error. Creatures and humans adapt to fit niches. Tried and true methods — be they genetic adaptations or institutions — are generally to be trusted until they no longer fit the environment — at which point they slow erode, rather than being systematically removed from the top-down. Just as conservatism defies utopianism and any sort of teleological End, so biological evolution denies any sort of End to which man evolves. For biologists, evolution is simply a means of survival– not a bad way to describe a conservative’s defense of the state.

Here, it is important to distinguish between Arnhart’s conception of Darwin’s thought and the widely, if unfairly, loathed “Social Darwinism” of Herbert Spencer. Where Spencer emphasizes the “survival of the fittest” aspect as it applies to individuals, Arnhart and other Darwinian conservatives emphasize “spontaneous order,” a Hayekian terms that could aptly be used to describe the niching process amongst species. Arnhart points out that is not just humans, but human institutions and creations, that are subject to evolutionary processes. In contrast, “intelligent design” sounds less like an insidious euphemism for backwards pseudoscience, and more like a catch phrase for President-elect Obama’s plan for new regulation of the financial markets.

Arnhart cites and responds to five objections in his work, but these readily boil down to two fundamental concerns. The first is the religious critique, holding that Darwin is merely the St. Paul for atheists and that one cannot adhere to his word and His word at the same time. However, none but the strictest readings of Genesis rule out evolution entirely. Accepting that the “days” of Creation are not to be read as 24 hour periods, there is no reason that evolution and religion cannot exist together. God created the fish and birds, indeed — but the Bible fails to specify the means. Is there any reason that God would not have chosen evolution as his method, rather than a Sunday school finger-pointing festival?

The other concern is that of consequences: now that ‘spontaneous order’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ reign supreme, what is to prevent us from implementing eugenics? From eschewing our traditional principles for crass materialism? Yet in such fears, these critics ignore the second part of Darwinian conservatism. Conservatism, after all, is a bit of a misnomer, as conservatives oppose ideologies — “isms” — of all stripes. Rather, conservative thought represents a temperament, a temperament that stands for prudence against radicalism, for bottom-up development against top-down diktats. Such a temperament cannot allow for eugenic policies, as they must be opposed on the sole basis of the destabilizing effect they will have on society.

Granted, the ideas of a conservatism based in evolutionary thought still lurks as an academic issue on the conservative fringe. Yet even those conservatives concerned with the day-to-day affairs of opposing the new Obama order would be wise to reconsider their antimony towards Darwin and his thoughts. Ironically, to save the religious roots of American society that conservatives have bravely defended, they must embrace an approach to governance and society that draws many of its formulations from Darwin’s theories.

This list, from Michael Cannon at the Cato Institute, is posted without comment:

The president said that he had no choice because he was “concerned
that the credit freeze would cause us to be headed toward a depression greater than the Great Depression.” Even if one accepts that rather contestable premise, one is tempted to ask what caused him to chuck aside conservative and free market principles when he:

• Increased federal domestic discretionary spending (even before the bailout) faster than any president since Lyndon Johnson.
• Enacted the largest new entitlement program since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, an unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit that could add as much as $11.2 trillion to the program’s unfunded liabilities;
• Dramatically increased federal control over local schools while increasing federal education spending by nearly 61 percent;
• Signed a campaign finance bill that greatly restricts freedom of speech, despite saying he believed it was unconstitutional;
• Authorized warrantless wiretapping and given vast new powers to law enforcement;
• Federalized airport security and created a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security;
• Added roughly 7,000 pages of new federal regulations, bringing the cost of federal regulations to the economy to more than $1.1 trillion;
• Enacted a $1.5 billion program to promote marriage;
• Proposed a $1.7 billion initiative to develop a hydrogen-powered car;
• Abandoned traditional conservative support for free trade by imposing tariffs and other import restrictions on steel and lumber;
• Expanded President Clinton’s national service program;
• Increased farm subsidies;
• Launched an array of new regulations on corporate governance and accounting; and
• Generally did more to centralize government power in the executive branch than any administration since Richard Nixon.