The following remarks were delivered by 2024 Encounter Prize winner Dr. Kevin D. Roberts at Encounter Books’ Annual Gala in Washington, DC on November 13, 2024.
To receive the Encounter Prize for Advancing American Ideals is truly an honor. The work of my friend Roger Kimball and all his Encounter Books colleagues is vital to the health and future of the American Republic. In their fight against the “toxic imperatives” of political correctness and identity politics, they inoculate us all against the cultural poisons afflicting our nation.
To be introduced by my friend and mentor Dr. Larry Arnn is beyond humbling and, I must say, rather unbelievable. I’d even call him a “hero” were he not from Arkansas. For those of you who think that I’m being impertinent and boorish, you’re probably right. As Larry will tell you, I’m from Louisiana, and that’s how we are. There are but a few states we can pick on.
But thank God for the people of Louisiana, Arkansas, and so many overlooked, derided places filled with millions of deplorable voters like Larry and me! Our people have spoken, and we demand our country back. We love Donald Trump’s Manhattan swagger, but JD Vance’s slight Appalachian twang is the clearest sign to us that God is not yet done blessing America.
It’s that topic—reclaiming this land—that I’ve come to say a few words about. In fact, I have so many words, I even wrote a book about it, Dawn’s Early Light. I’ll give you a preview, but I’ll also talk about the dawn itself: the night of Tuesday, November 5th.
I believe the 2024 presidential election will prove to be the most consequential in at least a generation, and maybe in a century. I say this for two reasons: first, because of the breadth of President Trump’s victory; and second, because of the clarity of his agenda.
In 2016, Trump was a new phenomenon in our politics. To many Americans, he was a protest candidate. He fell short in the popular vote. Other than border security and the Supreme Court, his agenda was still a work in progress. People didn’t really know what to expect from a Trump presidency.
That was not the case this time. The American people knew what a vote for Trump meant—and they cast it, decisively. This time, Trump won the popular vote, the first Republican to do so in twenty years and only the second since the end of the Cold War. He won all seven swing states, where this election was really contested—and by margins larger than polls projected. He did better than in 2020 in almost every single state, making stunning gains in deep-blue strongholds like New York and California.
The work of my friend Roger Kimball and all his Encounter Books colleagues is vital to the health and future of the American Republic. In their fight against the “toxic imperatives” of political correctness and identity politics, they inoculate us all against the cultural poisons afflicting our nation.
And less than a mile from here, Governor Glenn Youngkin’s heroic efforts have made Virginia “purple” again. We conservatives, who tend to entertain worst-case scenario thinking far too often, would do well to see Virginia as a major opportunity just eleven short months from today. Who knows? If Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are successful in cutting the federal bureaucracy, northern Virginia may have a lot fewer Deep State voters.
A key dynamic in this new dawn was that Donald Trump won historic support from the White working class and Black and Hispanic Americans, including an outright majority of Latino men. These numbers are unprecedented for a Republican presidential candidate. The only groups among which Trump did not perform better compared to four years ago are college-educated, wealthy, and non-religious Americans—the costal elites.
And President-elect Trump posted these numbers in the face of unprecedented adversity: not just attack ads and media bias, but also impeachments, criminal prosecutions, literal conspiracies hatched at the highest levels of our government, and rhetoric so inflammatory that it inspired actual violence, including at least two assassination attempts. Despite all that, President Trump won about 10 million more votes than he did in 2016.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his most successful campaign was also his most substantive. Trump ran on policy. He had a record and an agenda: to tear down the woke elite and the corrupt institutions they have weaponized against the American people.
The huge, multi-ethnic, working-class majority that stood up on November 5th didn’t just vote for Donald Trump. This time, they voted for Trump-ism: a 21st-century Jacksonian fusion of populism and conservatism that places ordinary Americans ahead of elites in Washington, New York, and Brussels.
And unlike in 2016, Trump now has a team of tough, proven, America First professionals ready to execute his plans starting on day one. We’ve already observed this in his appointments so far. Trump will enter office in January with a transformational agenda, a broad national mandate, and the personnel to carry it out. America hasn’t seen anything like this in more than a generation.
A Generation Coming
The reason America hasn’t seen anything like this in so long is that it is the last generation of elite failure—Republican and Democrat—that Trump has been hired to clean up: their bad trade deals, their cozying up to China, and their disastrous foreign policy hubris; their woke-ifying of our schools and military, their censorship of dissent, and their oppression of religious Americans; their open borders and coddling of criminals; their contempt for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and democracy itself; and most of all, their smug condemnation of anyone who disagrees as bitter, deplorable, fascist garbage.
The last four years have been the culmination of the elite’s generation-long reign of error. As emergencies exploded at home and abroad, their top priority was lying to us about Joe Biden’s mental decline and the state of the conflict in Ukraine.
Properly understood, our ruling elite is not a social class. It’s a criminal conspiracy—against the Constitution, against the American people, and against the principle of self-government itself.
Properly understood, our ruling elite is not a social class. It’s a criminal conspiracy—against the Constitution, against the American people, and against the principle of self-government itself.
Trump’s Task
That conspiracy is what the American people put an end to last Tuesday. In putting together such a broad coalition, Donald Trump did what no other Republican leader could do. And now he’s going to do what no other Republican leader would do: usher in a new golden age of self-governance by putting the everyday American back in charge of this nation. This will be a much harder task than winning an election. It’s also one he is much better prepared to take on than he was in 2017.
This time, President Trump is not just coming to Washington with good instincts and a list of judges. He’s bringing the most successful entrepreneur in the world to streamline the Administrative State. He’s going to expose our compromised public-health and food-safety agencies to real scientific scrutiny and democratic accountability. He’s going to work with Congress to finally expose the Washington establishment’s culture of corruption.
And when he does, President Trump is also going to show Americans how much liberal elites have been holding us back. More, we’ll see how much our nation can accomplish together if the people are put back in the driver’s seat of our government, our economy, and our culture.
The Agenda: How we MAGA
Dawn’s Early Light is about how the new movement President Trump leads can accomplish that task. It is also about how this movement differs from the Bush-Romney-McConnell Republican Party that failed conservatives for the last two decades. Last, it’s about what a family-first, worker-first, America First conservatism can do for our future.
The book focuses on five main policy areas that I believe are essential to restoring American self-government, and necessary to cement conservatives’ hard-won victory among working families.
First, we must secure the border, end the illegal invasion, and deport the criminal immigrants already here. Moreover, we need to prosecute corporations who knowingly hire illegals and to defund the taxpayer-supported NGOs who financed the migrant crisis.
What will this mean for everyday Americans? Higher wages, because of less competition from foreign workers, smaller budget deficits, less-crowded schools and hospitals, and of course, safer streets.
Second, our education system must be rebuilt by correcting the top-heavy, federalized education system and, in turn, by handing power back to the states and to parents themselves. In the target-rich environment that is the DC bureaucracy, there is no better place to start our pruning than by tearing out, root and branch, the US Department of Education.
Americans deserve schools that reinforce capital-T Truth and teach virtue, that honor our country and her heroes, and that acknowledge parents’ authority as their kids’ primary educators. Delivering on those goals will mean more learning, higher test scores, and happier and healthier children.
Third, the Deep State must go. This malignant fourth branch of government—ruled by Marxist activists we do not elect and have heretofore not fired—is un-American. These tenured elites are not experts “serving the public interest.” They have accrued power unconstitutionally, abetted by a complacent Congress, at the expense of the ordinary Americans who have now told us that the gig is up.
When it’s a matter of the Department of Education forcing girls to shower with boys, or illegally making blue-collar workers pay off PhDs’ student loans; or the Federal Emergency Management Agency denying disaster-relief aid to families with Trump-Vance signs in their yard; or the FBI targeting daily churchgoers and parents as domestic terrorists—then reform that merely tinkers or tweaks is simply not enough.
Elon Musk has it right. Agencies must be closed. Departments must be gutted. And bureaucrats must be fired. We shouldn’t be looking to cut billions, but trillions, of dollars from the federal footprint. In Dawn’s Early Light, I compare this work to a “controlled burn” in one of our great Western forests. This metaphor—applied figuratively, of course, to our agencies and institutions—is instructive. A controlled burn destroys the dangerous deadwood so that the whole forest can flourish. In Washington terms, that means dismantling a few of the most corrupt agencies so that our government works for the American people again, instead of the other way around.
Fundamentally, this work is not anti-government but pro-America. Just as a controlled burn in the forest brings new growth, a controlled burn inside the Deep State will spur a long-overdue economic renaissance: new jobs and business startups, new investment in domestic supply chains, new homes and infrastructure, and rising wages and falling inflation. It will, in short, create the conditions for the economy that finally rebuilds the middle class.
...this work is not anti-government but pro-America. Just as a controlled burn in the forest brings new growth, a controlled burn inside the Deep State will spur a long-overdue economic renaissance...
Fourth, reviving American self-government means restoring strategic self-interest and realism to our foreign policy. Washington’s messianic hubris of recent decades has destabilized the world, endangered our people, and bankrupted our nation. As we fix our military, we also need to recalibrate it to defend our homeland, our people, and our vital interests. Doing so will save money and lives while promoting international responsibility, peace, and prosperity.
Fifth and finally, we need to pursue all of the above and more with a single goal in mind: improving the lives of America’s working families. Bad, left-wing policy—on immigration, education, regulation, welfare, and much else—is the reason young couples across the country can’t afford to get married, can’t buy homes, and can’t start families in safe neighborhoods with good schools. Many can’t put dinner on the table.
This cost-disease socialism, as I explain the book, discourages work and marriage. It penalizes parents, children, and stay-at-home moms, and it encourages unsustainable debt. It’s one of main reasons too many Americans are addicted to screens, porn, opioids, and gambling. Washington seems to be at war with all the sources of human flourishing: family, community, religion, and work. And we wonder why we’re in the middle of a national mental-health crisis.
We need to fix all of that—and we can. We can put the federal government back on the side of the hardworking families and patriotic values that the Uniparty elite has been abusing for a generation.
Popular Populism
As we gather today, Washington is still trying to process the magnitude of President Trump’s victory. Everyone is parsing the data, trying to decipher what the numbers mean. K Street is scrambling wildly, which is a sign we’re winning.
But I think the story of November 5th is simple, if we have the eyes to see. The American people actually like America. They want to make her great again. And they want a government that also likes the American people: one that serves, rather than bullies, their communities; that honors, rather than condemns, their values; and that obeys, rather than circumvents, their Constitution.
What we need to accomplish this is nothing more or less than the kind of government “We the people” have been promised, as our birthright, since 1789. Starting on January 20th, 2025, the new conservative movement has the chance to deliver on that—and change Washington and America forever.
What we need to accomplish this is nothing more or less than the kind of government “We the people” have been promised, as our birthright, since 1789. Starting on January 20th, 2025, the new conservative movement has the chance to deliver on that...
In closing, I want to reiterate that November 5th was the dawn of a new era. And by that dawn’s still-early light, we can already see the prosperous, happier future it portends—a future the American people deserve.
Our host this evening, Roger Kimball, said it well a few years ago, in a speech for Hillsdale College: “In the great battle between the partisans of freedom and the inebriates of virtue, freedom is ultimately negotiable—until it rouses itself to fight back. At stake is nothing less than the survival of our common history.”
From his lips to God’s ears. Once again, the American people have spoken. Whether the Washington establishment can be made to listen is an open question that we, the people, will get to answer in the months and years ahead.
Should we be up to the task, then the American future is ours.
Thank you, and God bless America.
Kevin D. Roberts, PhD is the president of The Heritage Foundation, the nation’s premier conservative think tank. In 2013, he became President of Wyoming Catholic College.
