Excerpts

Foreword by William Bennett

Critics say conservatism is for stodgy and cranky old people—how about happy and enthusiastic lads? I give you Jonathan Krohn.

Jonathan is a force of nature. I first got to know him some years back, when Jonathan was ten years old and he became a regular caller to my radio show. He would call in to make a keen observation about the political issue of the day, and usually, he would tie his point to something in The Federalist Papers or the U.S. Constitution. Sometimes, I give extra-insightful callers a giveaway item, but was stumped as to what to give this young man. I figured I’d push the envelope a little and really challenge him and help educate him even further, so I gave him a subscription to the intellectual conservative quarterly The Claremont Review of Books. Jonathan did not slow down, and as he grew (and grew older), his comments became ever more incisive. He digests everything—and turns it over in his head, and then makes a whopper of a point, every time I’ve heard him.

Now Jonathan is fourteen. He is a full-time student, but that’s not quite enough. He is also a sought-after speaker at town halls, rallies, and Tea Parties. He has been on CNN and Fox News, he’s been written about in the New York Times, and he’s been profiled in the foreign press, in newspapers from London to Budapest. When he’s not speaking in public or sitting for interviews, he studies Latin and Arabic. And as if that were not enough, he captivated the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last year in a three-minute speech that received more media attention than any other nonpolitician speaker I recall in 2008. Indeed, I’m always learning, too, and I began my CPAC speech last year (the day after Jonathan delivered his) in this way: “I’m Bill Bennett: I used to work for Ronald Reagan, and now I’m a colleague of Jonathan Krohn’s!” It was an applause line. In a conservative audience, Jonathan is a good kid, a good man, to have on your side.

Now, Jonathan delivers to more than just a conservative audience with this book. It is a book good for both conservatives and nonconservatives. By his very being, Jonathan proves that we are a youth movement, that we are not about yesterday, and that just as Ronald Reagan would continually promise, tomorrow it is still Morning in America. With Jonathan’s tome added to this year’s book list, tomorrow is also a Morning in Conservatism. A fourteen-year-old writes this book that you now hold in your hands, and others think it appropriate, never mind accurate, to declare conservatism dead? Nonsense. The movement is alive, and its future strong. Here, among other things, is that proof.

There are any number of well-established stars in the conservative constellation who have defined various parts of the conservative movement and who have tried to answer the questions “What is a conservative?” and “What do conservatives believe?” Truth is, those are hard questions to answer—and no single book by a single conservative author has really tackled them specifically. Not William Buckley. Not Irving Kristol. Not George Will. Not anyone else who comes to mind. This is, in large part, because we conservatives come in different kinds, and none of us fits a single mold or can even—very often—stick to the mold we say we are in. There are libertarians, there are Straussians, there are various branches of Straussians, there are neo-conservatives, there are paleo-conservatives, there are compassionate conservatives, there are family-values conservatives, there are economic conservatives, there are social conservatives, there are even admixtures of economic liberals among the social conservatives, and social liberals among economic conservatives. The order to define this movement is tall. And yet, Jonathan Krohn, all fourteen years of him, has undertaken this tall order and done it well—weaving together, as he does, so many of the core concepts that unite so many divergent aspects and brands of this movement.