Younger conservatives are now thinking and speaking in different ways about politics, religion, economics, and education because they are racing to figure out how to operate in the world that is coming rather than in the post-war world that is fast disappearing.

Generational differences are often exaggerated, but I’ve always thought them useful. Are younger liberals and conservatives different from their elders? I think it’s obvious that the young Wokesters differ from the older ones in significant ways that are often terrifying to the oldsters. When many of our proto-woke Silent Generation and Boomer Liberals said to stick it to the man, they seem never to have seriously considered that they would ever be “the Man” to whom it was being stuck—or that the younger generation would not even be able to say what a “man” is. Yet that is what has come to pass.

Similarly, many conservatives who had found the perfect three-legged stool in Reaganite fusionism never dreamed that there would be challenges to a view of the world that was liberal but aware of the illiberal foundations necessary for a liberal polity and a kind of modified liberal philosophy to survive. I think sometimes that my slightly older friends and colleagues are mystified as to why younger people are turning away from the more “traditional” conservativism that characterized so much of the Republican party and the world of think tanks over the last few decades. That devotion to keeping the institutions going while trimming back excesses that characterizes the conservatism of the last few decades is now derided by many younger conservatives who refer to “Conservative Inc.” Older conservatives are often mystified by the turn among the religious conservatives toward more “radical” views of liturgy, moral theology, and sometimes ecclesiology and church-state relations. In a recent discussion, a stalwart older scholar claimed, to my surprise, that one of the Catholic academic guilds to which we both belong ought to reject the Traditional Latin Mass.

“Old men forget,” Henry V says in Shakespeare’s famous speech. Yet I’ve come to think that the problem with old men is not that they forget, but that they cannot forget. Specifically, they cannot forget the battles that raged when they were in their twenties and thirties.

Many conservatives of Silent Generation and Boomer vintage found that in Reagan, John Paul II, and Billy Graham a political and religio-cultural modus vivendi had been reached. No longer would conservatives be “reactionary.” They would make a kind of peace in politics with the New Deal and the Administrative State and even, to a certain extent, the Great Society. They would make peace with what is good in the Enlightenment, feminism, liberalism, ever-expanding human rights, and all the rest—making sense of the modern world even though it could not do so itself.

I don’t mock the desire. The conservative impulse is not to reject anything good, even if it comes from Ted Kennedy or RBG or Bernie. Conservatives avoid the temptation of the ad hominem fallacy. And yet, the way in which this impulse was worked out bespoke a certain cultural confidence. Conservatives even of the hated Sixties often assumed that we shared the same general mental and spiritual world as those who were on the other side of issues. We assumed that the classical liberalism that we wanted to preserve in practice, if not entirely in theory, was still operative. It provided a kind of Marquis of Queensbury rules that would prevent the other side from low blows—or at least from ultimate victory via those low blows. That made a kind of sense in a world of anti-communist figures such as Dan Moynihan and Scoop Jackson.

Younger conservatives do not have that confidence. This is why they are increasingly open to ideas that go beyond simply using the liberal processes available within government and law while working to influence the culture around them. It’s not that these are wrong means; younger conservatives just see them as utterly insufficient. They are much more open to rethinking things in a very large-scale way because they see that much of the institutional and procedural life we have now is either collapsing or has collapsed already. It is significant that one of the major conservative initiatives of the last year, one that is working to connect conservative businesses to other businesses, workers, and customers, is called New Founding.[i]

Younger conservatives are now thinking and speaking in different ways about politics, religion, economics, and education because they are racing to figure out how to operate in the world that is coming rather than the post-war world that is fast disappearing.

I was reminded of this reality when an older academic friend whom I admire sent me a note about a piece that appeared in The Public Discourse by Nathanael Blake of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.[ii] Blake was questioning the way in which academic freedom has operated, asking why conservative Constitutional scholar Robert George would defend his fellow Princeton professor Peter Singer’s place at the academic table when Singer’s philosophical talents are being used to defend the culture of death that Professor George is himself fighting against. Mr. Blake was suggesting that conservatives might reflect on and reconfigure what the boundaries on academic freedom should be in the modern university—even in non-Christian and non-Catholic universities. The goal of simply allowing any “academically rigorous” work is one, he noted, that generally is interpreted “flexibly” to allow in those with favored views and to keep out or push out those with disfavored views. Better then, on Mr. Blake’s view, to ask out in the open what the limits are.

My friend thought this naïve since it is Catholic, Christian, and conservative voices that are in most danger in our current situation. Openly allowing that academic freedom can be infringed would allow even more marginalization to take place. Better to fight for the freest speech possible on campuses. Besides, he reflected, it can be very difficult to figure out where to draw the boundaries in the first place.

I’m all for academic freedom and I will certainly sign any document supporting it, but the reality is that we are beyond the point where such protest has much power. Blake is correct that the kind of appeals to freedom based on academic rigor don’t really deal with the fact that current standards of scholarship generally get reduced to whether we get the politically or academically correct answers. Most modern universities, even those that sign the Chicago Statement on free speech, end up drawing lines in a way that puts the same people on the defensive. And most of the rest of the institutions are quickly purging the remaining non-woke figures or making sure that none will ever be hired again.

My colleague is probably right that Blake could be seen as naïve, especially if we read him as talking about present institutions. But I tend to read Blake as thinking about what to do with new and future institutions. He is writing not for the moment but for the next decades when higher education in America will undergo an incredible transformation from its bloated, contradictory, and destructive current landscape. What will our goals for education and discourse be if we are able to transform institutions or, as another young conservative, James Patterson, has recently argued we should do right now, start them?[iii]

There is no doubt that not every trend among younger conservatives is healthy or wise. Some young Catholics yearn for integralism, the doctrine that the Catholic Church as the only truly “perfect society” should be directly or indirectly controlling our country. It’s as bad an idea as it is unlikely. As a Catholic myself, I dream of the Catholic hierarchy controlling… the Church. And yet, I understand the frustrations even these thinkers have with our current state of affairs and the desire to think boldly about something new. They are right that the center is not holding in so many ways. Rather than accepting the demand that they stay on the paths of the last four decades, they are thinking in the kind of revolutionary conservative terminology that is familiar to those who know their Chesterton. They are in their twenties and thirties now—today’s battles are the battles of their youth. They don’t desire that the old men forget everything they learned. They only wish that the old men remember how new and shocking were some of the things that people like Reagan and John Paul II did to establish the current tradition.

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[i] See my article, “Startup Will Provide Conservative Alternatives to Woke Corporations,” AMAC Newsline, September 13, 2021.

[ii] Nathanael Blake, “The Contradictions of Absolute Academic Freedom,” Public Discourse, October 13, 2021.

[iii] James Patterson, “The Time to Fund New Universities is Now,” Law & Liberty, September 27, 2021.

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