We Need True Conservatives

When the label says "conservative." chaos is often inside the box .

One critical form of heroism is less celebrated these days, less appreciated, less recognized.  It was called “Conservatism” and has played a central role in American history. 

In a society that found so many avenues for progress--westward lands to conquer and develop, new inventions to employ and market, new ideas to master and improve—it has been easy to overlook how at every moment of advance, our ancestors built strong bulwarks against reaction and backward drift.   Those who manned the forts were also pioneers. 

I don’t think we can understand our American “experiment” (for such it was called for over 200 years) without realizing the dynamic relationship between change and stability. 

To be sure, conservative forces have always played dual roles in our society.  They have resisted change, when they believed that further change in particular directions was too great a risk.  Reckless, headlong “breakthroughs” were seen as too much, too fast and “before their time.”  This was a judgment call.  And at critical times in our story, historians have identified it as “good” judgment. 

But it is their other role, the other face of conservatism, that merits our gratitude even more.  They not only resisted too much (in their judgment) change, but they also fought to hold the gains that had been made. 

I have heard it described as the need in a “liberal” society to “conserve” the gains that are made.  Conservatives have accepted, not without some painful reevaluation and perhaps generational change, the new normalities of an incredibly dynamic social, technological, religious, economic and judicial system.

What mainline American Conservatives have not been, though, is reactionary.  We have learned, and I think the jury is largely in, that “we can’t step into the same river twice.”  Return, whether nostalgic or self-interested, invites disaster.  It crumbles, safeguards and unravels the interwoven fabric of society itself.  It is a form of “disorder.”

Today, true conservatives, it seems to me, find themselves defending the present order against forces that would initiate changes that are either blind stumbling toward an imagined past or, what may be worse, an ideological dream of a society foreign to the foundations of our own.  They deserve our support. They are the adult voices, the expert analysis, within our political, non-profit and for-profit institutions. They are not “a swamp,” or “woke,” or “socialist,” as radicals would call them.

This is not to say that further progress is not desirable or to say that further progress is not possible.  I will never claim that “we have gone as far as we can.”  I believe that comparisons with the past that attempt to show how far we have gone play loosely with numbers and ignore present realities.  You cannot convince me that the present reality, globally and in our backyards, is our final “good.” 

And if we may need a step back before we make two steps forward, I would not instantly disagree.  This is another, lesser, face of conservatism, correcting in place changes that encompass flaws, editing if you wish the lines of change.  That too is valuable work. 

But do not call reactionary, chaos approving, movements “conservative.”   This our history has taught, this we need to learn: trust action and the fruits of action, and not labels carelessly, even maliciously, applied.

As always,