What remains of traditional conservatism? Should we concede defeat and see the great conservative figures of the past as women and men of beauty who had their say but who are now relegated to some obscure museum of lost humanist causes? No! To my mind, these voices have never been more needed and more relevant.
What remains of traditional conservatism, one might legitimately ask? After all, we have just experienced twelve extraordinary months—extraordinary by any measure—and we’re still in shock. We’re also not out of danger yet, of course, as many of the things that threatened civilization so directly in 2020 remain, even if not as blatantly as they once did. In politics, we witnessed a nearly overwhelming wave of populism—always with its authoritarian and cult of personality leanings—on the left and on the right. In the wider culture, we saw reckless bravado, the tearing down of sacred (and, often, quite innocent) monuments, and the torching of tradition. Unrest would be too tepid a word to describe the massive protest movements throughout the nation, and violence seemed to permeate the urban centers of the country (and still does in parts). In our communities, we viewed the arrival of a soft despotism—democratic, to be sure, but despotism nonetheless—enforced at every level of American society. Thanks to a virus—whether created by God or by man remains to be seen—governments, corporations, businesses, and schools reached into the minutiae of our lives in ways that had once been acceptable only during war, weaving an intricate web of control over us all.
As just noted, many of these horrors remain, and, even where they’ve partially dissipated, their effects linger and will continue to do so for some time. And whatever the motivations of those involved in all of these things—on whatever part of the political and cultural spectrum they might place themselves—traditional conservatism took a severe beating. Much of traditional conservatism had nothing to say, and some of it merely conceded defeat and withdrew from the conversation.
I don’t mean to suggest there were no conservative voices. There were (and are), and they were (and are) often quite good (e.g., Tom Woods, The Imaginative Conservative, The American Conservative, National Review, Hillsdale College, and others), but the forces of chaos attempted to drown them out. After all, trying to explain the virtues of Christopher Columbus, for example, to a mob that sees everything through the radical and ahistorical lens of race, class, and gender is going to be painful for all involved. Where is the nuance, the subtlety, and hard search for truth? Where is the conversation? Not surprisingly, we lost the street debates on Columbus as the statues came tumbling down.
So again one must ask, what remains of traditional conservatism? Should we concede defeat and let the voices of Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, Willa Cather, Christopher Dawson, Ray Bradbury, Russell Kirk, C.S. Lewis, and Robert Nisbet be merely voices from our past? Should we see them as women and men of beauty who had their say but are now relegated to some obscure museum of lost humanist causes? Were they merely authors of books that will never seem quite as wholesome in a digital era? Mossbacks, reactionaries, dreamers?
To my mind, these voices have never been more needed and more relevant. A humanist but certainly no conservative, George Orwell once famously remarked, “we have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
In this fine Orwellian tradition, it is worth remembering three things, each of which reminds us what it means to conserve our most cherished traditions—that is, to be a traditional conservative—even in a time of chaos.
First and foremost, we must remember that every single person is an unrepeatable center of dignity and freedom, each a moral and ethical agent, endowed with free will, and born in a certain time and certain place, never to be repeated. Life matters, and it is a precious gift every single time it appears. That is, each person is a unique reflection of the Infinite, a bearer of the Imago Dei, and a Temple of the Holy Spirit. No matter how much corruption a person puts on during this lifetime, he or she remains precious, at least at the heart of things. For even the most corrupt human being has within him the spark of divine grace, no matter how close to being smothered that spark is. “In Him, we move and live and have our being,” the Stoics and St. Paul assured us.
Second, as moral and ethical agents, we can always return (and we must and we should return) to the certainties of the seven virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope, and love. While prudence (the ability to discern good from evil) is the first of the virtues, love (the ability to give oneself to another) is the virtue which ties all things together, seeking and striving to create a worldly community of justice (the ability to give each person his/her due). Through temperance (the ability to use the created good for the Good), we are reminded of our duty to see things through, no matter the danger and the cost (fortitude). Finally, through faith (the ability to see things unseen), we have hope (the ability to know that we matter).
Third, armed with the belief that every person matters and that each person is a moral and ethical agent, here to pursue a life of virtue, we recognize that the individual is only a true person within community. It is in relationships that we practice our charity and our justice, and it is in community that we attenuate our faults and cultivate our excellences. It is, for the true conservative, always better to strive for more communities—communities that overlap, communities that compete, communities that work together in harmony—rather than fewer communities. Indeed, fewer things could be more dangerous to the concerns of the traditional conservative than the populist desire (left and right) for a single, national community in which all persons and all ideas and all social norms are subordinate to the whole.
What remains of conservatism? In terms of hopes and aspirations, everything. In terms of the will to make it happen? That remains to be seen.
Regardless, conservatism is far from being dead.
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George Orwell is the great exemplar of the Conservative Mind
A conservative might well ask, is social media even worth it anymore? The outrage mobs on Twitter and FB make nuanced argument from a conservative standpoint null and void. The only other alternative seems to be the echo chamber of other platforms which merely preach to the choir. The pace of the cultural decay online through social media platforms is accelerating at a phenomenal rate. Sites such as this offer a peaceful reprieve, but would those on the cultural left even consider reading?
It was candidate Trump who, after being criticized by true conservatives, e.g. the writers at National Review, responded “it’s the Republican Party not the Conservative Party.” A POTUS who brags about being the self-proclaimed “King of Debt” and who asserts “trade wars are good. We can win them” is no conservative. Trump’s legacy includes leaving us with a Dem-controlled Congress and President Biden. His failure is a dagger in the hearts of the Republican Party and conservatives.
I am not so sure. I think Trump saved the Republican Party and conservatism . No other republican candidate was going to beat HRC. By doing so , he singlehandedly kept the left at bay. He was great for the Republic.
My thinking is that without Trump, Hillary Clinton and her postmodern Marxists would rule the country today. Without Trump, Globalist would still be destroying the American middle class and draining American wealth. Without Trump, the Republican Party would be run by Mitt Romney. Without Trump, several million Third World aliens would have entered the country and attached to the welfare system and guaranteed a one-party nation for a century. Without Trump, the Supreme Court would be filled with radical, far-left anti-Constitutional Justices. Without Trump, hundreds of far left anti-constitutional District Court judges, all hostile to Anglo-American jurisprudence, would be on the federal bench. Based on this evidence, without Trump, conservatism would be dead and would not have the small glimmer of hope of resurrection it has today. Donald Trump’s sometime sophomoric rhetoric notwithstanding, he gave all conservatives a fighting chance and kept traditional America alive for a few more breaths.
I’m afraid your brand of apocalyptic and hypothetical thinking is used by Republicans to justify Trump, but there’s no way to prove what you’re saying. It’s the Flight 93 mentality which is non-falsifiable and therefore antithetical to rational and practical thinking.
One sad fact of American Society is that it has taught Black people, former slaves and their descendants, that the only important fact about them as individuals and as a class is the color of their skin. “Identity Politics” began in America with the idea of white supremacy. Hence many people see society and its problems and struggles in the terms that we white Americans have successfully taught them – in terms of color and race. To complain that too many people see society in terms of “Identity Politics” is to complain that the students have learned the lesson we taught them.
“Sacred” to my eye implies the divine, and in thst sense non of the monuments under attack are sacred. Even if we imply by the word a kind of metaphorical reference to the symbols of our national identity, it is hard to defend the Confederate monuments which presumably is what author is pointing towards.
It certainly is the case that Americans have in recent yesrs engaged in a conversation about what we choose to memorialize in the past, and about which historical figures we choose to valorize. But these are questions conservatives ought to welcome, because they speak directly to how we think of ourselves as a people. If we care about our organic unity as an exceptional people, then we can’t afford to cede this conversation to progressives who wish to reject the enlightenment liberal foundation of our constitutional identity.
If we get hung up on a reactionary defense of lost cause mythologies—mythologies that incontrovertibly originated in an anti-liberal and frankly un-American defense of Jim Crow racism, then we abandon the defense of the liberal foundations of our political order. That would even further reinforce the retreat of conservatism, which is the point of departure for this essay.
Yes, every human being is made in the image of God but not every person has the indwelling Holy Spirit as a temple in their person. Where is your scriptural reference for this claim? It is those who follow Christ and are regenerated in Him who have this “helper.”
I love your articles and ideas. I will send you a check through the mail.