An execution by guillotine during the Reign of Terror, depicted in Une Exécution capitale, place de la Révolution, oil on paper mounted on canvas by Pierre-Antoine Demachy, c. 1793; in the Carnavalet Museum, Paris.
Conservatism is not an ideology. There is no singular manifesto, figurative or literal, that unifies all conservatives. Many differ regarding what principles ought to be most emphasized.
Above the near-constant squabbling between conservatives themselves—whether it be the mundanity of trade policy debates, or the more emotionally rousing culture war tirades—is the desire to conserve traditional elements of society.
With my thoughts on this matter being heavily derived from Russell Kirk’s Ten Conservative Principles, I believe a conservative is one who sees the history of the world as an incredibly complex and interconnected sequence of events that spell out the political, cultural, and social experiences of the human race. These experiences are therefore, according to the conservative, a far more effective guide to policy than what Kirk called “the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers.”
To effectively conserve America is to acknowledge her historical fabric. It is to acknowledge her English roots and the importance of the Common Law passed down to us by our cousins across the Atlantic. It is to acknowledge the Judeo-Christian framework that undergirds her Constitution. He must understand that the American conception of liberty is a presupposition of rights: the individual is sovereign, but so is the community; and an individual untethered to a community is a recipe for civilizational decadence. Indeed, for an American conservative to effectively conserve anything, he must be uncompromising in acknowledging these baseline maxims.
I consider myself a conservative because I believe these things. Like Kirk, I care not for the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. Radical social experimentation may be faddish and desirable, but always extremely dangerous.
Those who use words like “Abolish,” “Uproot,” or “Burn it to the ground,” seek to destroy more than they know, or desire, under the illusion of “social justice,” a catchphrase that has come to mean a similar oppression from which it proclaims to fight. In today’s political climate, a conservative is often derogatorily referred to as a “reactionary.” For every time the conservative yells, “Hey, slow down!”, those on the opposite end whine and moan about how the chosen existential crisis of the week renders prudence an outdated virtue.
They claim that the only way out of this crisis is to give the government more power, while simultaneously insisting that conservatives are “fascist,” a term hardly defined but frequently used in bouts of self-inflicted rage. But if fascism is characterized by demands for more political power due to some sort of “crisis” that will not go away until such demands are met, then conservatives don’t fit that description.
They tell us that climate change is an ‘existential crisis,’ so that is why we are focusing on ‘green energy,’ by buying Russian (possibly Iranian or Venezuelan) oil instead of producing our own, conveniently funding Russia’s incursion into Ukraine. So they squander domestic natural gas production, which causes gasoline prices to skyrocket, and the rationale seems to be that, if the price of gasoline becomes unbearable, everyone will magically go to Elon Musk and buy a tesla, problem solved.
They say that systemic racism permeates everything, so they cast every police officer as a mindless drone carrying out the directives of merciless power structures designed to oppress. The human being is no longer a sovereign agent, but merely a helpless conduit for the white male patriarchs who scheme in dimly lit rooms filled with cigar smoke, planning their next move to oppress non-whites.
Conservatism is more than just about loving the Second Amendment, or being pro-life, or ranting about big tech on social media. Conservatism, at a basic philosophical level, calls for a healthy skepticism of sweeping societal change, especially in times of sweeping societal change. As with Kirk’s Fourth Principle, a conservative understands that sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.
In the context of today’s Western world, conservatism exists in direct opposition to the paranoia mentioned above—the radicals’ notion that everything that is old is inherently bigoted, outdated, derogatory, or oppressive.
This is not to say that to be a conservative is to be opposed to all change. As with Edmund Burke, a wise conservative knows that prudent change is the means for our preservation. Such changes are made through convention, in a manner prescribed by law. They are not made via the angry mob, pseudo-French revolutionary antics that the political left was allowed to display without criticism or consequences from the powers that be during the summer of 2020.
A conservative never seems to be vindicated when he first warns of the implications of this behavior. Vindication comes only after the cities have been burned, the neighborhoods destroyed, the locals displaced, and the livelihoods ruined. It is only then, when the suburban white girls who were so gung-ho to overthrow our systemically racist status quo finally begin to slowly and quietly concede that what they were advocating for was not “social justice,” but the unraveling of their civilization.
And so, being a conservative in these times is naturally accompanied with an inherent sense of frustration: no one listens to you in the moment, because your ideas are seen as outdated and bigoted. But the warnings you issue are nevertheless often grounded in truth, and the young radicals carry out their revolution and learn the hard way, every single time, at everyone else's expense.